My office is in the finished basement of our house. When you come down the stairs, the first thing you see are two bookshelves that almost reach the ceiling.
One of them holds a handful of special bottles of bourbon. Not rare. Not particularly valuable. Just meaningful. A bottle of Buffalo Trace from the first cruise my fiancée and I took together. Another with the Phillies logo on it, my favorite baseball team. They’re less about what’s inside and more about where they came from.
The other shelves are a mix of Stephen King paperbacks, McDonald’s collectibles, and a lot of other “stuff.” It probably looks a little chaotic to anyone else. To me, it all makes sense.
To the right is my desk. A Mac Mini. A 32-inch monitor. Nothing flashy. A few small LEGO builds sit nearby, and a gold Buddha dog statue that used to sit behind the bar at my local tap house. I loved it every time I saw it there, so eventually I tracked one down and bought it for myself. It sits on my desk now, watching over everything.
This is where I read. Where I play. Where I write.
Directly behind me, almost eighty Atari 2600 cartridges are stacked neatly on a floating shelf. That’s a story for another day.
On the wall nearby hangs the framed copy of Ghost Rider #15. The glow-in-the-dark cover still works. A Transformers poster hangs next to it. There’s also an 8×10 of the Incredible Hulk signed by Lou Ferrigno. None of it is museum-quality. None of it is curated for resale value. It’s just the stuff that stuck with me.
To my right is a small sofa. Above it are more floating shelves lined with comics, Transformers figures, NES games, and Ninja Turtles memorabilia. Across from me is the TV. On the stand below it sit a few older consoles. Above it, boxed copies of Super Mario Bros. 2, Animal Crossing, and Super Mario World rest on a shelf like quiet milestones. There’s also a dedicated Nintendo shelf… original NES, Super Nintendo, GameCube, Wii, along with a handful of Amiibos and other odds and ends.
And yes, there’s a Ms. Pac-Man arcade machine.
For a long time, a lot of this lived in boxes. Or closets. Or just didn’t quite have a place. Life has a way of shifting what feels appropriate to display and what feels easier to tuck away.
Now it all has a place.
There are a lot of stories tucked into these shelves.
My fiancée encourages it. She understands that none of this is about value or showing off. It’s about memory. About creativity. About keeping the parts of yourself that matter visible.
When I sit down here, the room feels nostalgic. Safe. Creative. Calm. It doesn’t feel like a museum. It doesn’t feel like I’m trying to recreate my childhood. It just feels like the natural evolution of it.
This is where I read Stephen King. Where I replay old Nintendo games. Where I think about horror movies and comic books and the early internet. Where I write all of this.
It took time to build this room… not just physically, but mentally.
Now it feels like mine.
And lately, it’s where SinisterRabbit lives.
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