Relocation 2; Down to the Basement (from 6 Migrations; Relocations That Possibly Ruined My Life)

For most of my youth I had to share a bedroom with my older brother Jeff (name not changed), and in that time developed a powerful and ultimately destructive urge for a privacy denied me by the overpopulated conditions in our family. I would have been a much happier child, I'm convinced, if I'd not had any siblings, and my parents had confined theirselves to a single birth event in the late sixties and concentrated on the challenges and obscure rewards of raising a single creative genius.
But, like Finwe, the King of the Noldor who couldn't be content with the one genius child (Curufinwe), and had to remarry that Vanyar woman and spread his brood through half of Valinor, my parents chose the evolutionarily safer path of multiple offspring, thinning the family gene pool considerably.
In their defense, and unlike the foolish Finwe, they'd already had four other children when their genius came along, so it would have been somewhat difficult for them to make the one-child decision at that time (but not impossible, as I've pointed out to them on several occasions).

So I had the four older siblings, and there were only the four bedrooms in the house, and Jeff and I were the youngest and by the remorseless illogic of primogeniture forced to share the last bedroom. Trapped in cramped lodgings with a domineering and intrusive older brother, I sought privacy in the last refuge left to me; my own mind. Thus at the very beginning of my life's journey, I diverged into a disastrous path, and developed the habit of interior monologues and dialogues, and interior tribunals, and interior shouted debates that has rendered me unfit for most social intercourse and any meaningful employment.

Of course I exhibited few symptoms of the condition at the time; my nightly prayers tended to go on for a while, so much so that I often fell asleep in mid-prayer, especially after I'd begun giving the prayers on my bed, under the covers. Jeff would wait patiently while I prayed, until he could hear the sound of snoring. Then he would leap out of his bed and slug me in the arm until I came out of my religious stupor.
My only other symptom was a tendency to sleep under blankets tucked in around the entire perimeter of my recumbant body, from head to feet, after an indescribably difficult and time-consuming self-tucking procedure.

About the time I turned eleven, the twins went on missions and left us with a wealth of bedrooms, and Jeff moved downstairs and I was left with my own room, my own empire, a space of my own to mold as I saw fit. The exhilaration of my sudden accession to all that power went, I am ashamed to say, to my head. I forbade any other family members to enter the space, especially my mother, and remodeled the room along strange, fascist lines. The blue of the carpet was declared by my Ministry of Truth to be ocean, and nobody - including myself - could walk on it except by putting books and papers down as stepping stones. The closet was declared to be an evil area, the room's slum, where I was afraid to be at night but enjoyed the occasional tittillating excursion through by the safe light of day.
Sensing my peculiar dread of the closet with an older brother's uncanny instinct for the younger's weakness, Jeff would often hide in that closet and wait for me to return home from school. After I'd had time to retreat into the safe, privacy of my room and relax for a few minutes, he would leap out of the closet to enjoy my harrowed shrieks.

Eventually the twins returned and Jeff went on his own mission. The twins took no interest in acts of terror against my room-state, and I enjoyed a long spell of peaceful detachment from the rest of the family and the world in general - except for school. I molded an army of clay soldiers out of the insulating clay my father sometimes took home from work, and equipped them with screws and razors and sent them out on murderous errands throughout the room, looking for a fight. Usually they ended up hacking each other to pieces. I had an old nerf mini-basketball that I sometimes played with that the soldiers worshipped as a god. I would speak through the nerf mini-basketball to give them their orders.
I also instituted sports leagues for the room, with sports pages full of stats and scores that I would generate by rolling dice and writing down the results. Sometimes my mother would knock on my door and ask if she could come in and I treated her like a foreign reporter that could topple my regime by seeing my secret sports-score generating technique or seeing that the god my soldiers worshipped was a nerf mini-basketball and telling everyone, so when she knocked I would shout and plead with her not to come in and would try to hid the dice and the notebooks full of numbers and the nerf and the soldiers and walk around the room nervously while she came in with my laundry and occasionally pointed at some strange appurtenance in the room.
"Why are your books all over the floor?" she would ask, and I would sullenly answer some lie and try to get her to leave and assure her that there were no human rights violations going on and everyone could vote whenever they pleased.
"I'm reading them."
"Are those little clay men?"
"Yes."
"What are you doing with them? You need to clean those sheets. Help me take them off"
"No! Wait! I'll tell you everything! Let me get the sheets! I'll talk, damn you!"

Like Hitler in the bunker, I took to spending longer and longer periods of my days and weekends in my room, brooding over the wrongs done to me at school during the day, plotting some kind of dark overthrow, imagining secret weapons to turn the tide, postulating the existence of extraterrestrial intelligences that might possibly be induced to invade earth and destroy Washington DC and take my school and my brothers away in flying saucers.
The room, denied competent cleaning for long periods of time, became dingy and subterranean in appearance, despite being on the second floor, with grimy walls and dusty shelves and dark blue cowboy drapes always closed and, truth be told, a strong odor. I'd become an adolescent.

This dreamlike existence ended with a terrible onrush of events: My grandmother moved in with us, and I was moved kicking and screaming down into the basement with my older brothers, and forced to share a room again (albeit a more clean and spacious one). This cataclysmic event shaped and confirmed my world-view not unlike the expulsion of the Israelite tribes from Zion. And as the Israelites lamented at the rivers of Babylon, so I lamented in the shower my expulsion from the room - for as long as I could before my brothers would pound apishly on the bathroom door and howl for me to finish the shower.
And as the expulsion of the Jews from Zion confirmed the words of the doomsayer prophets and won the allegiance of the backsliders wholeheartedly to Yahwism, so my expulsion from the room won my wholehearted allegiance to the path of living inside my head and ensured that rednecks and troglodytes would persecute me for my views and flick spitwads at the back of my head in school.

My grandmother turned out to be a tower of ancient wisdom and taught me about life and coaxed me out of my shell and told long annoying stories over and over and kept doing the dishes all the time when she couldn't see the dirt on them and so my dad had to sneak into the kitchen at night and re-clean them all except when he was irritated at her and would clean the dishes during the day loudly so that she heard and he could tell her she hadn't cleaned them well enough. Once a balloon from my mother's birthday party drifted around the house on the heating vent currents and crept up behind her while she was doing the dishes and scared the bejesus out of her when it touched her shoulder.