AbsurdBeats

Underground living is probably the way to go—environmentally speaking, that is.

The earth is a great insulator, the joint will be cooler in summer and if you install a decent heating system, you’ll probably do all right in the winter.

Well, you will. Not me.

I was checking out the houses here, and my first thought was. . . No.

The Cooper Point House might be livable, but those other underground joints? Nuh-uh: I’d be buggers before the week ended.

It’s silly, actually, not least because I live in an apartment with windows only on one side (again, one of my few good memories of Somerville was my apartment, which took up the entire second floor of a house and oh, glory had windows on all sides), so, really, what’s the difference between my third floor apartment and the same thing, below grade?

Um, that it’s below grade!

No, really, I don’t know why that bothers me so much, but I have it on good authority—past freakout—that it would, in fact, freak me out. My first apartment in Albuquerque was a newly-redecorated basement apartment (windows on two sides, even!) and I had to move out, losing my deposit and the rest of that month’s rent, less than two weeks later.

I felt like I was in a tomb.

Okay, the gigantic flying cockroaches didn’t help, but, hey, it was Albuquerque, and (as I discovered just a wee too late), those suckers were everywhere. No, it was living underground, and going to bed every night in a room with no fucking windows at all. (Yes, I kept the bedroom door open and no, it didn’t make a difference.) I decompensated.

Now, I can hang out in basements and have tipped a few pints at below-grade bars, but, as with SmallTown, I can handle that because I don’t have to live there.

If the post-apocalyptic world requires us all to live in caves, I am well and truly fucked.

Give me a treehouse any time.