And now for something completely different.

The little red car, and freshly shoveled front walk.

It's actually a very pretty house, with the tree and bricks and yellow trim. Especially in the winter, when the dead lawn is nicely covered with snow.

Our backyard. It looks kind of chaotic, because of all the snow, but it's normally quite sculpted-looking and nice. we have a little fenced-in backyard. the slats in the fence are covered with chicken-wire that prevented katy from escaping through the cracks, which she was quite able and eager to do. When katy was alive, this backyard was her little playground -- it was the perfect size, had many dark and shadowy groves of plants she could explore and sniff about in. The backyard was Katy's.

The front door. Both the outside lamp and the doorbell are broken.

When you first walk in the door, this is what you see. Often, my bike lives here, but since it's been unridden for so long it's currently living in the basement, down the stairs to the left.

The finished basement used to be my room. I moved down here when I was 18 or so, as young men are wont to do. You can see that guitar note/fret/interval chart that I made next to my old pillow. Someone once asked me, in that mannish, derisive-yet-facetious way that guys have perfected as a way to undermine their peers through the filter of jocularity, "where did you copy it from?" I didn't quite know how to respond. My fingerboard? Eastern music theory? That's not actually my comforter, nor my lamp. But I did install those Venetian blinds.

Up until very recently, this room was filled with a combination of old empty boxes and my aunt's stored belongings. I once set this room on fire. Well, at least the carpet. I tossed the butt of a clove cigarette into a box of books (rather than put it out on the carpet), and went upstairs. I was compelled by the smoke alarm and some smoke seeping up onto the living room to go back downstairs, where I found a bonfire that reached the ceiling where the box of books had been. I called 9-1-1, filled a 1-gallon pot with water, and put the fire out myself. The complete assemblage of fire-trucks then arrived, and the men grumpily sucked the smoke out of the basement with a fan, chopped up the burnt-up carpet and dumped the scraps on my front lawn. Later, an angry insurance inspector paid me a visit and tried to draw psychodynamic conclusions about my motives (was I angry at my parents because of the divorce? Was I feeling the need to get back at anyone? Etc).

The workroom. I drew "The Beatles” back in high school. The work table you see there is made out of two saw-horses and an old bookshelf, but it suffices quite well. That's my bike in the foreground -- it's been down there for a week or two because of the snow and it's bent rear axle, which I still need to get fixed ($25 or so). The license plate you see was from my mother's first car, the one I learned to drive on. It was a Volkswagen fox, and was a really nice little car. Because of the "YJZ" on the plate, my mom named the car “aegis” (the way one might pronounce “YJZ”).

Also the workroom. This is where the fake Christmas tree is stored for 50 weeks out of the year. Note the crawl-space next to it -- it's empty. One of my greatest accomplishments to date was cleaning out the “stored” items from there, including an old tire, a fan dating from before the house was air conditioned, and other heavy, dusty, creepy relics from this house's first owners back in the 70's. Actually, the house now has no more secret enclaves of filth, no more forgotten junk repositories, their being gutted and scraped clean over the past year or so. My townhouse development has a “bulk pick up day” that I capitalized on to the fullest extent one month. The result was a row of gigantic unwieldy trash stretching almost the length of the row of townhouses, and generated almost exclusively by my house.

You guessed it, the washer and dryer (we're still in the workroom). Most of the appliances in this house have been replaced within the past 5 years by this appliance insurance program. Some money is paid monthly, and then men come and replace broken appliances with cheap new ones. I'm not sure if it's cost effective (for us) or not. That weird thing you see hanging over the washing machine is ~*~*art*~*~, by the way, in case it wasn't clear.

Moving upstairs to the living room, we see the TV and incredibly ancient stereo system. My mom got it as a present when she went off to college, so it's almost 50 years old. It still works perfectly well, except that the tuning band no longer lights up. There's Buddha on top of the cabinet, and my mom's guitar on the left there.

A panoramic view of the living room, including the famous couches at right angles, which are often occupied in sloth.

Living room. There are a lot of books here. Between my Mom's, her Father's and my collections, most available corners in the house are used to store books. "The great children's book purge of 2000 or so" helped a little bit. my mom is thinking of doing a similar purge.

Living room. This is where it all happens: where i sit and listen to music, download music, surf the web (Wikipedia, news, stream-of-consciousness Google searches), blog, chat on AIM, read and write emails, post on the SDF bulletin board, chat in the SDF com room, play SDF Netris, and do other random useless things (Stratego, C&O Canal website, installing programs, registry tweaking, shell configuring, etc).

Not really a hallway per se, but I guess that's what I have to call it. The supernova light you see there is the flash from my camera reflected in the bathroom mirror. Nothing too remarkable about the hallway, except that picture hanging next to the bathroom door -- it's there to replace a chunk of drywall my elbow took out during a rage.

The kitchen table. That plant is the only plant that's ever made it past a few weeks in this house. Mrs. White brought it over one day when she was invited to dinner several months ago, and I’ve taken very good care of it ever since. It's the only real plant in the house -- all the rest are fake. However, some of the fake plants were placed in the pots of plants after the original inhabitants died, and so the result is a fake plant with real dirt, which I’m sure must be a metaphor for something. Those are French doors that lead nowhere, and that let in a lot of cold air during the winter.

The kitchen/breakfast-nook. The pictures on the left wall comprise the "Family Art Gallery." My Aunt, Mom, Grandfather and I all have drawings or paintings in it. Cheesy, no?

The fridge, which needless to say plays a large roll in my consciousness. It's covered in three different sets of magnetic poetry. I think there's another, unopened one on top of the fridge. The white floppy thing you see affixed to the refrigerator door is a printed paper sign that reads “remember the vegilator.” I put it up because I had bought a lot of fresh veggies, and didn't want to forget about them and leave them to rot in the vegetable drawer (the vegilator). But, it was dada, so I kept it around after I ate the vegetables (or they rotted away -- I don't remember which). That's the dining room you seen in shadow there, beyond the kitchen door-frame.

The dining room showcases three of my paintings from high school. I remember Helen and I hung them up when my dad moved out and took most of the furniture and wall-hangings with him. The crooked painting has since been fixed. Under this table, by the way, was where Katy peed for about a year, and later shat bloody stools. A vacuuming, a baking soda deodorizing, another vacuuming, several carpet shampoos, a vinegar treatment, and two "Pet-zyme" treatments later, the carpet is now only redolent of pee when you hold your nose closer than 2 feet from the floor.

Now we're upstairs. Nothing to say about the upstairs hallway, really, except that the overhead light (which is out of view) was detached for a long time. This carpet also got some pet-zyme treatment, but it didn't need it as badly as under the dining room table, which was truly something else.

Incidentally, our borders were: Ron & Linda, Naomi, Pamela, Wenchi, Kee-Yun, Franck and Amit. I think that's all of them in chronological order. Ron & Linda were troublesome because they didn't pay the rent, Naomi was troublesome because she ran up a $600 bill on "psychic friends," Pamela was troublesome because she was a spoiled anal-compulsive personality, and Amit was troublesome because he played an ongoing game of intellectual, cultural and social one-up-manship. Wenchi and Kee-Yun were nice, but Franck was the best -- he was a genuine family friend. I remember when he invited his friend from NIST to come over and watch the world cup, and France won -- it was explosive. My mom and I got to practice our French with him, too. I tried to visit him in Paris, but couldn't find him in the directory.

When my grandmother died, my mother took home all of her old photos, letters and various other 2-dimensional family heirlooms, many of which she framed and put up decoratively in her room.

This served as my mom's study and yoga/spirituality/poetry/etc room when my then unbroken-up family moved here in 1987. It's since served as a guest bedroom, dog-poop repository, and now it just sits there, missing one of its storm windows. This is a very cold house in the winter, even for Ymir the Frost Giant.

The little useless upstairs room contains many books, and an old boom box that I gave my mother for mother's day when I was 15 or so. There are also old dolls of my mother's in here, one of which you can see sitting on top of the right bookcase.

Another shot of my mom's study, turned now-unused room. The table there is a sewing table, and that white thing is a sewing machine that isn't usable because the bobbin has fallen into the mechanism somewhere. No one really cares.

My guitar, night-stand, amplifier, and tangle of wires. There is another tangle of wires near the computer, and sometimes these two tangles of wires have a social, usually when i am doing something sound-art-y with my Macintosh and guitar. That glowing spot is a some kind of warning sticker I stuck on my amp, that reflected the camera flash. I don't know why I have that music stand -- it doesn’t even have any clips on it, not to mention the fact that I read music or chord charts maybe once every three years, and even when i do, the material is usually lying on my bed next to me. I think this music stand might be a dreadful affectation. I should get rid of it.

This is where I sleep. When this picture was taken a week or so ago, I hadn't made my bed in literally years. This winter, it was so cold that I needed several blankets, and so my bed was always a tangle when I wanted to crawl in at night. So, I made my bed for a few days. Now, I just make it at night before entry, or sort of arrange the covers over myself once I’m in bed. But that's hard to do with three blankets.

There's my little iMac, that got me through 2.5 years of art school. It's largely abandoned, since routers and Ethernet cable are expensive. I still love it, though, and turn it on every once and a while to play "Maelstrom" or "Lemmings." That bookshelf was pilfered from the basement after the great childhood book purge of 2000 (or so). It leans to the side, and is probably pretty unstable.

Sort of an interesting picture. That mirror making the diamond-shaped reflection on the wall facing you was made by inmates at fulsome state prison (thus the “FS”). That black skinny thing is a microphone boom. My beard trimmer is what you see plugged into the wall. My bathroom lies dead ahead; note the starfish on the wall