The Rooms That Mean the Most

The spaces where I've slept and lived and what they mean to me, even still

Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: a few of the rooms in my life and what they’ve meant to me.

Ingredient List

🎵 : “In My Room” by Medium Build, “In The Garage” by Weezer, “Mayonaise” by The Smashing Pumpkins, “Sweet Tides” by The Thievery Corporation, “Furr” by Blitzen Trapper, “The Wind” by Cat Stevens (and more)

Listen to the playlist on Spotify

📖 : Currently reading “The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Murder and Mutiny” by David Grann

Course 1

A Word of Gratitude: Kitchens & More

I’ve slept on the tile floor of kitchens, cigarette-stained living rooms, bunkbeds in kids’ rooms (they weren’t there, don’t worry), dorm room floors, walk-in closets, hot attics, cold basements, pristine bedrooms, sawdust-filled barrooms, and very rarely– hotel rooms. I’m probably the only human on earth that has worn over 500 different pairs of running shoes and slept in 250 different houses. Weird stat line, I know. 

Many of those times, it was on short notice, and for some reason, strangers opened their homes to four dirty dudes in a touring band. No questions asked. And trust me, there should have been questions asked. Some of them I remember, some of them I still talk to, some of them I miss, while others are just a faint wisp of a memory. All of them renewed my faith in humanity, time and time again.

And for that, I am grateful.

Course 2

Appetizer: Old Bay Bedroom

(Sorry, this one is long, consider it a seafood tower.)

Thirteen years ago, I moved to Baltimore on short notice. As in, I was on tour, somewhere in Mississippi, and called to get my hours for my job back home. They said I didn’t have one anymore. I desperately called my brother-in-law and asked him if I could clean boats for him that summer and I’d figure it out after that. He said he’d give me hours, and that meant I was moving to Baltimore the next week.

To Craiglist I went, searching for a home. I almost ended up in a horrible situation with some MICA kids, but luckily, I landed in a place called Canton. I had no idea where that was, just that there was a room there where I could sleep. Turns out I was in one of the best areas of Baltimore and I somehow landed a room that was only $450 a month, everything included. Heat! Hot showers! Cable TV! I had hit the housing lottery. 

The owner of the row home was a guy named John who captained a skipjack for Living Classrooms, a non-profit in Baltimore. He drank a lot, I think because his fiancee died a couple years before. I drank a lot, I think because I was lonely and missed my friends. The room I rented was somewhere between a closet and a small office, in the hallway between the other two bedrooms at the front and back of the house. In other words: it was a space that was slightly usable but with no real purpose, much like every item on the sale rack at TJ Maxx. 

It had space for a mattress on a box spring, a dresser beside it, and a small wardrobe/closet thing with a Thievery Corporation poster at the foot of the bed. The builders made an attempt at giving it a wall, but gave up three quarters of the way through– it was two feet short of meeting the ceiling. Translation: It did not block the sounds of sex from other rooms.

Still, it was a clean house with semi-normal people and there was also an Australian shepherd who couldn’t walk much so John had to carry him up and down the stairs which was kind of endearing. Until it started losing its bowels on a regular basis. But hey, we’ve all been there.

Again, I had been so used to sleeping on floors or houses without heat, that this was the life of luxury. A bed to sleep in and a fridge to store my Keystone Light.

My metabolism was still humming along in those days, and I was working hard manual labor in the summer and cranking out about 10,000 steps a night, up and down stairs at an Irish pub as a barback in the winter. No need for any more exercise than that. Especially running, which I hated more than words could describe. I mean, why run when you can just smoke cigarettes?

But John, he ran, at least every now and then. Again, while I didn’t run, that room I rented was on Linwood Street, just past halfway on the Baltimore Marathon course. It was a great spot for spectating. That October was the first time I ever spectated a running race, and it was a pretty fun experience all around, mainly because it was a great excuse to day drink. John told me he was going to run the race that morning, which I thought was cool. I didn’t realize he could run that far. So when he showed up at our house, 16 miles into the marathon, and quit– I was dumbfounded. “You’ve come so far, keep going!” I told him. He wasn’t even tired, he just saw our house and stopped. I didn’t understand. 

It wasn’t until years later, when I finally became a runner myself and thought back on that moment, that I realized why he quit. Because, checking the results for that year for the Baltimore Running Festival, he was nowhere to be found. Turns out, he bandited the race. Which is exactly what someone who rents a $450 room to a random guy on Craigslist would do. 

I was unbelievably lucky to find that exact room at the exact right time on Craigslist. From there, I rented a house nearby, which I now own and where I currently sit with my wife and kids sleeping upstairs. My kids attend a fantastic public school a block away from that room that settled me in Baltimore all those years ago. I love my neighborhood and my city, even with all its bumps and bruises.

At the time, a tiny room in a strange place with no friends felt a bit like a prison. Turns out, it was the door to one of the best lives I could have imagined.

Course 3

The Main: Instant Pot & Mountain Dew

One of my favorite artists of the past year, Medium Build, recently released a song called “In My Room,” which is essentially a tour of his bedroom as a child. It’s both nostalgic, hopeful, and sad all at the same time. It’s one of those songs where you can feel the pains of working through childhood and adolescence, being fully yourself in all your weirdness and being okay with it.

While it technically wasn’t his bedroom, Rivers Cuomo carried the same sentiment on Weezer’s “In My Garage.” No one hears him sing his songs, yet he’s surrounded by his best rock ‘n’ roll friends in the form of Kiss posters. Want to escape even further? Roll the twelve-sided die with a couple of friends and you’re on your way. It’s a place to be safe, yet completely free and wild.

For most of my childhood, grades 1 through 9, my bedroom was a 15 x 20 box with two windows that were always open on purpose in the summer, and sometimes on accident when I broke them while practicing baseball. The wood paneled walls were painted a baby blue and I covered them with the free posters that would come in Sports Illustrated for Kids each month. The quintessential Lamborghini poster from the Scholastic Book Fair also had its space. For three years, I shared it with my baby brother who is a decade younger than me. It was a good room, but it didn’t compare to the corner basement bedroom I acquired at the age of 16, when my parents finally finished the downstairs, freeing me from the top-floor confines of our tiny brick rancher.

I may as well have been living in another zip code.

I only lived in that room for five years, but it was where I kept all my secrets, wrote all my poetry, created all my art, listened to all my music, read my books, talked to all my friends, had my heart broken and maybe broke other hearts (trust me, I was on the receiving end of the former far more).

It’s hard to describe how much that room meant to me, especially after living in such a cramped space upstairs my whole life. It had no windows, so the sleep was unparalleled. Time disappeared.

Of course, as with any teenager I made the space fully mine. My Smashing Pumpkins Siamese Dream poster on one wall, Radiohead’s OK Computer on another, and ads from magazines in a meticulous grid covering the rest – Calvin Klein, Volkswagen, Bones Brigade, an amalgam of everything I found interesting and inspiring. A drop ceiling made for a perfect hiding space for anything that needed to be hidden. There were Christmas lights and incense and an Aiwa 3-disc CD changer (IYKYK) and Hugo Boss cologne – it was 1998, after all, certain standards needed to be met.

Doing my best Liam Gallagher impression

It was in close proximity to the ground-floor basement window which was in close proximity to the shed that stored my red Schwinn 10-speed bicycle, which was three miles from my girlfriend’s basement bedroom on many summer nights after midnight. No cell phones, no texts, no bike lights, just a plan and a prayer and a whole boat load of teen spirit.

As you probably know, nothing ever compares to the room you had as a teenager. It’s basically an Instant Pot for who you’re becoming and who you’ll eventually become. And while I always love that my parents gave me a ton of freedom growing up, nothing compared to the gift of my own room and my own space to be myself.

After my senior year of college, my parents sold the house to the pastor of their church. I saw him last year, where he officiated my grandfather’s funeral. He said they redid the basement, and in the process, found some stuff in the ceiling.

I quickly changed the subject.

But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t hopeful – I mean, worried – that there’s still a love letter hidden behind a wall plate of an electric socket, just waiting to catch fire and burn all evidence I was ever there.

Course 4

Dessert: Medium Rare

For some reasons, musicians and songwriters really love to call music venues “rooms.” Music industry types are the only people on earth who use this term. If you’re not familiar with the context, here’s a sample: “Yeah we played a 1,500-cap room last night and it was pretty much sold out.” It can be safely assumed that if an artists uses “cap” and “room” in the same sentence, they’re 100% humble-bragging or pretentious or a combination of both. No cap.

Since I was in a band and since I have used both those terms in a sentence, I will do it here and will humble brag with a certain pretentious Portlandia air about myself. The artist known as Medium Build, on the ingredients list in this week’s menu, is one of my favorite artists at the moment. He was my most listened to artist in 2023, and probably will be for 2024 as well. I certainly don’t see as many shows as I used to, but Kimi and I saw him at DC9 last March. If you’re not familiar, it’s a 250-cap room on U Street in Washington, D.C., right around the corner from the iconic 9:30 Club. The show was sold out and he put on an incredible performance. This June, he’s playing in D.C. again at a 450-cap room and it’s already sold out.

It’s been awhile since I’ve seen an artist on stage in that period where they’re still giving it all, clawing for every fan’s eyes and ears. Going all-in and all-out on every song, hoping they can collect enough merch sales over the next month of touring to do this whole thing again the month after that. I think the last person I saw that felt like that was Phoebe Bridgers at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hotel, and yeah… things seemed to work out pretty well for her.

What I’m trying to say is this: Seek out good music and make it a point to make it to a show every now and then, even with all the busyness of life. Especially if you love music and especially if you want to feel something.

Just don’t tell your friends how you saw them in a tiny room before they got big. Everyone hates that guy.

End of Menu

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Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.

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