If your mind were a room, what would it be like?

Sounds like a fun place to visit, dlowan!

Let's see, mine is kind of cluttered, but there's usually some sense of order that at least I can understand. Sometimes it's like treading between tottering piles of stuff all over the place, but there is a meandering path...

hmmm...

dreamed last night that the gf made a feeble attempt to disembowel one of the dogs, who was walking around with a flap of skin hanging off her belly.

the other night i was hiding in a mountain cabin waiting to be arrested for a hospital bombing, and i didn't know whether i'd done it or not.

before that it was my boss somehow taking away my college diploma in a crowded auditorium.


good q. will have to look around. spend most of the time in this (mind)room looking out the front windows and feeling around behind me for scraps of paper. i'll get back to you...

All the filing cabinets, computers, taxes, investment info, clocks, and other informational material would be on the right side of the room.

All the artistic and otherwise mind-altering stuff would be on the left.

The right side would be in perfect order. The left, a jumbled mass.

You'll find me sleeping in the middle.

There would be a lot of open space..

I have a comfortable corner with a reading light and a window, magnificent bookcases and a powerful telescope, but the most prominent feature of my well-furnished mind is an eroding doorway between my present and my past.

Seldom do I see a more appropriate phrase than "eroding doorway between my present and my past."

is it opening wider or caving in?

My room is stacked with books. All kinds of books. Some books are stuffed into bookcases, others are in boxes on the floor or in chairs. And...others are on my desks with all the magazines, which I would like to read, should there ever be enough time.

My books are covered with sunlight and for the most part dust.

But...so cares? Not me!

New Haven's room is stuffed with avatars stolen long ago.

Roger--

Thank you.

Patio Dog--

The bricks in the door jamb are cracking and shedding. The lintel seems to be a wooden beam covered with plaster--and the plaster has definitely seen better days.

Did I mention my collection of music boxes? Every morning I check to see what song (or poem) of my past is going to assail my ears and provide punctuation for the day. Yesterday the Saints Were Marching, today I'm afflicted with the thought that Love & Marriage go together like a Horse & Carriage.

All of the boxes seem to have to run down--and until they are finished the tunes tintabulate.

in that case it is better to be in a marriage than walking behind it.

So, you go out and buy a pooper-scooper, if you're walking behind it.

...or be sure to pick up your feet. and as to the matter at hand...

Wood
It's a broad room with low, rough-beamed ceilings. The ceiling boards are light pine, but the beams are big, dark, rough 12 by 12s, like railroad ties across an inverted and parched landscape. An old, weatherbeaten desk dominates the center of the room, but around the periphery, in that space near the walls where neither artificial nor natural light ever seem to illuminate fully, are a number of old wooden chairs -- some straight-backed, some bentwood, but all mismatched -- that serve mainly as semi-permanent resting places for miscellaneous pieces of paper recording this-or-that forgotten and unfinished notion.

*****
Glass
There are a lot of windows on three walls of the room (since there is little else to this house but this room), but the branches outside have grown down over them and they could stand to be cleaned and despidered. (But I like my spiders, so I let them be.) A comfortable, threadbare, overstuffed armchair and a floor lamp with a green shade are set a bit out from one corner. There are cat scratches on the wooden legs of this chair (though there is no cat), and the rug underneath is worn as thin as the chair's upholstery. Both are the color of spent malted barley, though the rug sports a fleur-de-lis pattern that is now barely discernable.

*****

Chiarascura
It is a trick of the light that there always seems to be movement around the legs of the chairs. What might be mice or cats or tiny gryphons scurrying about on the floor are just the shadows of windblown branches and the occasional bird who comes to see if the feeder has been filled.

*****

Cacophony
I need to fix the latch on the screen door. It keeps coming loose when the breeze kicks up (and it always does, around sunset, bringing with it that chaotic hurried thoughtfulness that announces the coming of darkness), and, though the screen door bangs, I am reluctant to close the big wooden door and shut myself in.

Some of the floorboards creak when you walk on them, complaining the unheard complaints of old friends. The worn boards are starting to get a bit splintery, too, and I need to oil them; I'm going to start picking up slivers, scuffing across between nightfall and noon on naked feet.

*****

The rest of everything...
Sometimes a quiet little towheaded boy comes in and plays with his blocks in the open doorway and asks simple and honest questions like a single country schoolhouse bell.

wow.

had to edit a bit as soon as i read it...

no no no no

seriously, you impress me.

I've always admired Kerouac's Desolation Angels -- and nothing else he wrote, really -- because of it's affectionate descriptions of the world's varied lonely rooms and their not-quite-broken inhabitants...

Did you see our New Yorker short story discussion about Louise Erdrich's "The Drum"? She has a line about old floorboards releasing the sound of the day's footfalls that reminds me of what you just wrote (did you just write that??) in its slightly eerie evocation.

hmmmm, strange things in people's heads. i do not have a room, thanks to my mother - psychologist and marriage counselor who practised her hypnosis and relaxation techniques on me as i was growing up - my inner space is an ocean with little islands in it. some are sunny, and close together, some dark and far away. she has left a neat little thing behind through those relaxations - there is a little lid in the sky that i can lift and make an opening in it - that's how i get rid of stress, i visualize all the junk cluttering up in my head to raise in a tornado and whooosh out it goes through that lid. helps a lot, i recommend it to everyone. when tired and/or hungover the ocean is grey and endless, no island in sight, not a wrinkle on the ocean, it's deadly still, when happy, it is sunny, full of palm treas, beach balls and such. i usually venture there when i need to solve a problem, but is a generally happy place. though my dissertation island is so tiny and dark, completely out of sight. oh sigh.