Human history is nothing if not a collection of milestones represented by monuments dedicated to the efforts and spirit of humanity. Without some kind of monument, we tend to forget what transpired at any particular point in time. Without monuments, we would forget the circumstances surrounding Mount Rushmore, the Great Wall of China, and Mount Everest. Actually, I don’t have a clue what the circumstances surrounded the first two, and I have reason to doubt mankind made much of a contribution to the creation of Mount Everest, save for decorating it with the occasional frozen carcass, transforming it into a morbid, stony Christmas tree.

The point is, if I had the spirit to make the effort to research the history of these monuments, I would probably have some stories to share with you, some of which might have actually happened. To this, I say do it yourself, because I have more important things to talk about than a pile of stones or creepy rock faces.

It started life as a grassy plain, maybe a forest, but I’m not reaching that far back, and eventually became a hole in the ground as developers tore into the earth in an effort to make money by digging holes and putting houses on top of them. One such hole found a house built upon it that housed some homeowners who gave up the house for reasons I haven’t been able to pry from the neighbors and eventually went to a family of yokels who, judging by the condition of the house when I found it, made a lazy effort to revert the house back into a grassy plain. They could have turned it back into a hole if they worked at it, especially with some matches and a gas appliance.

During their half-hearted efforts to destroy the house, the apparently neglected to pay a few key bills and lost it to foreclosure. It’s at this point a shrewd house-hunter swooped in on the dying rabbit of someone’s misfortunes and seize it in their merciless claws. You can check out this article for the story about how I became this pitiless hawk. And I did it all for what was hiding underneath the body: the basement.

I state to anyone I think I can get a laugh out of, which I judge as anyone, for I am either optimistic or naïve, that I bought a nice basement with some kind of house on top. When I first saw the basement of the house that I now call home, I knew this was the place for me. The house itself was pretty nice. That is, until I lived in it and noticed all the flaws a quick run through with the realtor fails to turn up. However, it had attached the thing I demanded in a house: a finished basement I would really be calling home.

I wanted a basement where I could go to separate myself from the rest of the world in a more definitive way. Merely closing my front door isn’t sufficient; there are many ways for the world to look in on me, or, if it was frisky, break in on me, and I’ve never been particularly fond of spending my nights wondering which door or window the social zombies will be crashing through next.

This desire to hermit myself from the world is based around my hobbies, specifically Japanese animation. Growing up a fat kid, I had plenty of opportunities for social acceptance, having my pick of clichés and girls, yet I threw it all away because I decided not to inhabit the dimension where overweight outcasts don’t get picked on. Having few friends, I spent a lot of time playing video games or going on adventures outside. Some might look at the lack of friends as a psychologically scarring trauma, but I wouldn’t change my care-free childhood for all of the sappy Stand By Me moments in the world.

In the winter of 1997, a nerd who worked at the local and long-lost Player’s Edge named (really) Ervin tried to introduce me to the world of anime. Like a Confused, Ignorant Guy from a Chick tract, I rejected Ervin’s gift of anime out of ignorance up until the point he promised me Chun Li’s infamous shower scene in Street Fighter 2: The Movie, at which point I was more than willing to listen to what he had to say. Maybe Chick should be taking notes.

Before he would let me be alone with my newly-begotten animated boobies, Ervin made me watch an episode of Tenchi Muyo!. I sat down to watch an episode just to humor him and avoid the risk of losing the cartoon cans, then something clicked. Suddenly, anime was the greatest gift God could ever bestow upon me, given to me by a glorious messiah. An overweight, balding messiah, but the greatest messiah I had personally known up to that point. I wouldn’t meet them, but the many talents behind the anime would also become near and dear to my heart.

From that point, anime became an identity for me, which was all the more important since I was being thrown into the big pond of high school the next year. Anime influenced and defined who I was, providing a shelter from society at large and affirming I could have my own identity, not one assigned to me by my peers (they would think what they would), but one of my own choosing. And that was a fat kid isolated from their idiocy, surrounded by foreign cartoons.

I met three of my closest friends because of anime, people who I still hang out with today, when we can hang up the hats of our careers (mine being one of those hats with fruit on it). Anime influenced many of my ideas in high school, and though it turns out they were lame when I look back on them, I wouldn’t change them for any decent plot in the world. Anime has had the biggest influence on my wallet, which spends most of its time whimpering in the corner, contemplating suicide.

Despite my best efforts to resist, I grew up to a degree and found myself shouldered with responsibilities. By the time the house came around, I was about to get married and had career going at a state college. Add a new car to the scale, and the nerd activities get catapulted into the stratosphere, seemingly never to return.

However, what goes up must come down.

During my house hunting adventure, I spent an inordinate amount of focus on the quality of basement, looking past superficial details like whether or not the house was on fire. The other houses I looked at didn’t have a basement worthy to be my shelter from society. They were unfinished and creepy or somewhat finished and pathetic, and always too small. Because I’m a connoisseur of physical goods, I have enough entertainment products to rival Best Buy, and I’m certain I have a better selection of anime. Lots of stuff requires lots of space, something my moderately-sized room at my mother’s house couldn’t provide.

The basement I chose was perfection in design, even if the condition was a little worse for wear, emulating the rest of the house. After coming down the stairs, you can turn right and walk through a doorway leading to the unfinished part of the basement with the typical basement utilities, plus a slab of concrete that rises four feet off the ground and makes up most of the unfinished part.

As I filled this slab up with my stuff, I realized what an absolute pain, both literally and mentally, it was crawling around on rough concrete surface to get something shoved way in back. I retracted this statement after one event, which I will share with you later. Whatever the case, raising a foot off the floor would have been enough, but it was that much less work for the builders this way, a design philosophy that was held firmly for the development of the rest of the house.

After leaving the unfinished dungeon and sealing it with a door slab I bought for a dollar at the local Menards, because the previous owners must have really liked that door and took it with them, you can now proceed to the left of the stairs, where you’re greeted by a small room which the far left corner connects to a larger room that runs the rest of the length of the house. This is where the beauty begins.

The small room now plays host to a variety of game tables I picked up over the previous summer from garage sales for about $50 for everything, a price I’m sure to get if I ever decide to sell these things because I never use them for their intended purpose, though they make a great junk table for the stuff I keep promising myself I’ll put away one day. Should I ever acquire a group of friends who enjoy semi-physical activities, air hockey, foos ball, and bumper pool await. The last one was actually an old game table belonging to the parents of my friend, Austin. They happened to be selling it at a garage sale they were hosting, and since it was a piece of Austinoria, I had to have it.

When the day comes that I wise up and get rid of these space wasters, I’ll fill this room with arcade cabinets that my housemate and future wife will no doubt appreciate me spending the money on. They will join the two Japanese slot machines propped up in my basement, one of which has been covered on the site already. The other was a miracle of a find at the local Value City, being not only the last one, but on sale and the one I wanted, minus the key (which the distributors provided later at no cost) but plus the set of obscured yet naked breasts of an anime-inspired girl featured on the machine, justifying my purchase of it.

If you look straight ahead from the naked girl slot machine, you’ll see my computer desk. This is the nerve center of the house, the place where advance communication and design happens. Once I slip into that corner and sit down in my chair, the magic really starts to happen.

Truthfully, since we got an internet connection, the main computer has been primarily used for activities involving naked people. The only other task it’s used for taking inventory of my anime collection, something that could be done with a sheet of paper, but technology waits for no practical alternative. Add on a small computer station packed with obsolete computers I can never part from and snuggle the area in with a parts bin and a cabinet filled with video game systems and accessories, and you have a crowded yet semi-functional nerd space.

From the desk, you can stare out at the rest of the basement and behold the greatest achievement the Earth has seen since its creation. The left wall is covered with media shelves purchased over the years for my constantly-expanding collections. Now their purpose is the archiving of my massive collection of video games, which I plan to get around to playing as soon as the End of Times occurs and I have a good excuse never to leave the basement. Beyond those are additional shelves with American animation, movies, and manga.

The right wall, however, presents the monument to my dedication or insanity, whichever side of the coin you’re on. Attached to nearly the entire wall is custom-designed track shelving that holds the entirety of my anime collection, which, as of this writing, consists of nearly two-thousand DVDs and tapes. This sight brings the dedicated to tears of joy and outsiders to tears of confusion and horror. To me, it brings hours of meticulous sorting and archiving, but most of all, a sense of joy and contentment my upcoming wedding will be hard-pressed to top.

Right in the middle of it all is the couch, and in front of that is a coffee table, and in front of that, a massive television. Not a flat screen, but a good ol’ fashion tube model which only qualifies as the kind you put on a stand because it’s aesthetically unpleasing to have it on the floor. This is where I attempt to whittle my life away when I can escape the demands of everyday life like family, work, and calls of nature.

I spent eight months moving and arranging my vast quantities of possessions down those steps, a toil that would be equal to Vietnam flashbacks if I had tackled it all at once. Seeing how I had plenty of time to move, though, since my mother was staying put and wanted me to as well, I didn’t rush things too much, though I put in far too much time moving massive groups of things that would only get in way, but I simply had to have at my new house to make it feel like a home.

Moving the heavy things like furniture, the TV, and the boxes of anime wasn’t terribly scarring. It was more like dislocating your shoulder and then popping it back into place; it hurts like hell when it happens, but once it’s over, the pain slowly fades away. The real pain was putting up the shelves that my anime rests on. While the design is fairly simple, the calculations that go into it were beyond my means, so, in a delicious twist on social standards that would have been more interesting if I hated him, I hired my boss to do some contracting work, the shelving being among the most important, even beyond some electricity issues that could have caused the house to catch ablaze. Actually, having working outlets that didn’t try to kill me were pretty important, since TVs and DVD players don’t power themselves.

The shelving project brought an interesting streak of impatience in me I don’t normally experience. While I’m not at Tibetan monk levels, I can hold off on a lot of things for a fair amount of time, like sex, but this wait is usually punctuated by an increasing proportional amount of whining as time goes on.

With the shelving, I insisted it get done as soon as possible, and I actually completed most of it myself using the marks my boss provided, resulting in an unlevel shelf. This did not deter me from putting my collection on there, even if I took it all down days later to repair the problem. Then I put it up again, and then realized I needed another section of shelving, so I had to take it down again. I’ve shelved my entire collection at least three times. And if I have to add a title and run out of space on that level, I’ll usually have to move enough DVDs to cover a wall’s length. Dedication or madness, your choice on that one.

Natural disasters also took their toll on the basement. You wouldn’t think something located indoors and underground would see much of a threat from Mother Nature, outside of fire or total house collapse, but the good Mother decided to take a whack at me with some annoyances and one near-disaster.

One thing people told me over and over was I needed to get a dehumidifier to keep mold from growing down there. In a fantastic display of denial, I put this off well through the humid, seething summer up until the point I noticed some green powdery stuff on some of my games, at which point I ripped the shelves off the floor and looked underneath only to discover the beginnings of evolution. I promptly purchased a dehumidifier, as well as an arsenal of disinfectants and anti-bacterial sprays. Sadly, the mold came back again despite my vigilance, though as of this date, it seems under control. Or it’s just hiding, waiting for me to fall asleep, and at which point it’ll convert me into a Moss Man cosplayer for the rest of my life.

After God created man and man got a mind of his own and started sinning all over the place, he wiped man out with a flood. I guess God didn’t like something down in my basement, because he sent a flood in the form of melting snow.

It was just after the annual Christmas party I force my friends to attend, during an unseasonably warm day. Austin was staying over on leave, we had just finished watching anime and were still pumped, so much so he decided to catch up on the jogging he had been neglecting for the last week, even though it was past two in the morning. It was raining all night, though it let up enough, so I decided to go out for a walk myself and enjoy the temperatures while I could.

I had a great time and decided I was too pumped to go to bed, despite it nearing four in the morning by the time I got back, so I started down the stairs to get a game to play for a while when I noticed the carpet looked really dirty. After a moment of reflection, I noticed something didn’t feel right, so I marched down the steps and was greeted with a heart-dropping squish the moment I stepped foot on the carpet. There was water in my basement.

The sump pump had failed and allowed about half an inch of water into my basement. While most of the flooding was isolated in the finished part, it seeped through the walls and into some of the carpet. As I stared at my new underground swimming pool, a thought crossed my mind: it would be best if I stuck my head into the sump pump hole and left it there.

Instead, I smacked the sump pump until it started and proceeded with the cleanup. Austin came in from his run and despite the fact he left part of his dinner out on Starr Avenue due to his lack of exercise, he helped me clean up until five in the morning. The next day, it was off to Menards for a new sump pump and a water alarm, and the next couple of days involved fans and a dehumidifier running non-stop.

All this time, I felt a despair I had never felt since the shelves didn’t instantly put themselves up, only worse. I felt violated, like I was robbed or raped. In fact, I would have rather been raped, because after a few days of counseling and carefully sitting around, I’d be as good as new. Unless the rapist had a disease. Or got me pregnant.

After a few days, the basement was ready for restoration, and as the last shelf was put back in place, a cinder block was thrown off my chest and onto some other poor schmuck. I spent the next month in blissfully semi-seclusion, only interrupted for work and fiancée duty. The basement quickly became like a womb to me, except without the slimy stuff, because I had a dehumidifier.

Then one day, I was staying up late watching the end of Fullmetal Alchemist, an excellent series I had been putting off finishing because it was so good, I didn’t want it to end. As the credits rolled and the characters were establishing their parting thoughts, I heard an odd noise that didn’t seem to fit with the anime. I paused it, listened for a second, then flew off my couch and into the unfinished part of the basement, and beheld a tide rushing towards me.

The curses flowing like the water, I sloshed over to the pump to see what the hell went wrong this time. I quickly discovered the problem: the flexible hose Austin and I used when we replaced the old sump pump had gotten tangled in the mechanism that tells the sump pump to pump. I ripped the hose up and the sump pump, after a long, blissfully ignorant rest at the bottom of the hole, shot into action, probably wondering where all that water came from.

Fortunately, the water alarm warned me of the water before it got too bad, and the finished part was spared any more dips in the pool. It didn’t take long to get things back on track, though I spent a paranoid week arranging the hose so it wouldn’t get tangled in the mechanism again. This may sound a little obsessed, but after coming home to find the hose had forced the mechanism UP, making it think there was water rushing in when there wasn’t, I feel my paranoia was justified, especially with the smoke the pump was kicking out.

Yes, it was a long and trying battle, but on December 22^nd, things finally came full circle and it was time for the dedication. Austin had flown in for the holidays, so the missing sacrifice to my infernal altar was finally in the bowl. Also on hand for the ceremony were old friends Kevin, Joe, and Tommy.

The last one was a bit interesting. In 2002 at the Ohayocon anime convention, Austin insisted on driving Tommy and himself in his new MR2. When I say “new,” I mean “new to him, but basically a covered wagon to the rest of the world.” Kevin, Joe and I went together and made it early.

After opening ceremonies were completed, there was still no Austin or Tommy. We found a message on our hotel phone (this was before any of us had a cell phone) from Austin, so I called him back. It turns out he broke down a mere twenty minutes away, and he said he had a cab on the way. Figuring it was too late to cancel the cab, I told him “Good luck” and waited for him to show.

From that point on, Austin and Tommy began acting hostile towards me. I wasn’t too worried about Tommy, since he and I had been growing apart all through high school, though I did take out some of the hostilities on Joe because of Tommy’s meddling, which I still feel bad about. I found out later Austin was upset because he thought I refused to come get him, and Tommy pretty much did whatever Austin did. After that episode of Nerdrose’s Place, the three of us parted ways.

Years later, Austin came around again and we slowly reconciled things. Tommy, however, was still brooding in the corner, still holding the grudge. For over six years, we’d put on a superficial act when fate put us together at a social function, and then it was back to the status quo. I was prepared to hate him forever, and I’m sure he was planning on the same. We had been friends since fourth grade up until that point, and neither of us seemed interested in reconciliation.

As the ceremony drew closer, Austin and Joe insisted I invite Tommy, because he was part of the old anime group and it wouldn’t feel right without him. I resisted throughout the entire thing until the big day, which was as stressful as executing a military campaign because Austin went to see Tommy the night before, and he found himself stranded due to the effects of sub-zero temperatures on his Southern-raised car,

We dropped by Tommy’s place to fix the car up, and who should stroll out but (shock!) Tommy. He off-handily mentioned the big event tonight, something I wanted desperately to avoid addressing to him. Austin got his car fixed and we were ready to roll, and I said my goodbyes to Tommy before getting on with things. I watched him walk away, and a pang of remorse hit me, the same pang that hit me whenever I rebuked Austin and Joe for trying to get Tommy involved. Suddenly, I didn’t see a reason not to, so I called Austin and told him to invite him.

If I may jump ahead a little in the story (whose going to stop me? I’m writing it and you ain’t paying a cent), I’m glad I invited Tommy. In an unexpected twist, most of the animosity and awkwardness from our six-year feud didn’t come to the gathering. At the end of the night, I told him I was really glad he came, and he texted me later that night wanting to do something. Not that I plan on hanging out with him everyday to play Ryu and Snake Eyes again like the good old days, but it’s nice to know some of the harsh feelings have been smoothed over. I only realize as I’m writing these words that in a bit of irony that seems to underscore my life that Tommy and I turned our backs on each other and then turned around again because of Austin’s automotive problems.

At the appointed hour, the original group gathered at my place. For the first half hour, we conducted typical banter and random antics, including Austin mistaking Kevin, who had picked up the food, as a pizza delivery guy, and my haphazard re-wiring of my receiver when it failed to receive sound from the VCR. After everything was prepared, it was time to lead the group down the basement and to the ceremony.

But not before they all converged on me, held me down, and violated me by… this is a bit difficult to talk about, but you, the reader, deserve full disclosure, since you’ve come this far into the journey with me, and a telling of this experience wouldn’t be complete without the warts. I’ve since come to terms with what happened down in that basement, and I’ve forgiven those involved, as the moment simply got to them. I’m no less a man for this, and I’m ready to reveal to the world what those four men did to me down there:

They drew on my neck.

At some point in time, every one of the original group got themselves a tattoo of the Brand of Sacrifice on their necks (if you don’t understand this, look it up, as I would otherwise have to take the space I would normally use for mindless drivel to explain it), save for me, because I have better things to do with my money and flesh than get ink stuck in my skin that will eventually look like someone nudged me with the business end of an ink cartridge. Austin decided it would only be appropriate that I have one drawn on my neck to be One of Them. And I promptly went Berserk and attacked the lot of them (again, look it up. I even gave you a hint).

After someone slipped me a sedative, it was off to the ceremony grounds. I had installed in a corner a little shrine with various historical relics of great importance to our history, including a Ryo-Ohki plushy and tablets with a Ten Commandments parody etched in them. Above that is a glass self holding the first two copied anime tapes I ever owned, the two tapes that started it all. Also on this shelf were two lit candles, the only source of light in the room.

After everyone was gathered, we all sat on the ground around the coffee table and proceeded with the communion. I took out a plate with our sacrifice on it, which was quietly laying there without movement, for it could not shift or speak. I clenched a knife in my hand and plunged it into the victim, carving out pieces which we all shared. And then we drank a dark, dreaded liquid which only the sickest, most twisted individuals would ever think to consume. Judge us as you will, but that Hot Pocket and RC communion was damned tasty.

The joke here is I used to me known for eating Hot Pockets and drinking RC Cola. Actually, I would save my Cokes for Anime and Hot Pocket Night, which occurred whenever Mother was out of the house and I could have all night to do my dirty deeds. RC was my everyday cola until I realized I liked Coke a lot better anyway, and it was generally cheaper and easier to find. I did share my Hot Pockets with friends over anime, though, so that part is consistent with tradition.

As for the whole communion thing, yes, it was a tinge psychotic, and I think everyone there had the same thought. Had the Christian Community got wind of this, they would have probably burned the house down with us in it. But really, is it any weirder than what your minister makes you do at the altar? At least a Hot Pocket was a Hot Pocket and RC was RC, and we didn’t pretend it was someone’s body or blood. Not that I’m saying we shouldn’t be locked up, preferably in the basement.

The next part of the ceremony was far less creepy, at least in concept. Unless you count the fact that in addition to the five of us, Ervin was there as well. In spirit, as represented by a You’re Under Arrest soundtrack he loaned me and later let me keep, because he was ridding himself of anime and moving on to a life of normality. While this offense should have marked him for execution by stick, we couldn’t ignore the fact if it weren’t for him, none of us would have been there. So if it weren’t for Ervin, I could have focused my attention on becoming a millionaire and making the world a better place, so I have to respect him for pushing me out of the way of that bullet.

I grabbed the original tape Ervin gave me (containing episodes of Oh! My Goddess and Tenchi Muyo!) and propped it up as I told the story of how I got into anime. Austin then grabbed his first ever tape and did likewise, and we went around the table, telling out stories. To some, it would have been creepy, pathetic, gushy, or a combination of the three, but I left the table with a better understanding of how one compulsive gesture affected the lives of those around us. I also left with a feeling of camaraderie as I had not felt before.

Even though I’ve known these guys to past the fifteen year mark, there were stories told that day that I could only vaguely imagine. It had never dawned on me before how defining anime was to everyone, as it gave all of us a new identity, a chance to associate ourselves with something we cared about, sort of how jocks would associate themselves  with their respective sports or those with inflated self-perceptions of their intellectual worth associate with the school newspaper. We were anime fans, and we isolated ourselves on those merits.

I wouldn’t go out on a limb and say we were a Hollywood-style close-knit group, since we rarely hung out together as a whole, but we’re still in contact despite some falling outs and drastic moves, and I think that says something. That we were all there together for the ceremony says something completely different, and not necessarily flattering.

It was at this point that a fellow whom I met at work and spent that time on coaxing further into anime named TJ showed up with his almost as willing wife, interrupting the tail end of the ceremony and almost causing Austin to take a few heads as a souvenir. Yet all was calm when I put in the Original Tape and the muffled, distorted tune of the old Pioneer video line echoed off the basement walls, or at least what little the posters and shelves allowed exposed of them.

The idea was to watch the first episode of Tenchi Muyo! off of that tape, but this soon turned into just watching the intro, which I did not witness because Christy called me upstairs with computer issues. I returned to ridicule, for my friends had watched more anime in my basement than I had at that point.

I had made a vow at some point when I realized the significance of finally having a true place to call my own that I would not watch anime in that house until the basement was complete (I was allowed to cheat on my vow at work or friends’ houses). I figured I would have a little ceremony involving the first food I put in the refrigerator (Hot Pocket) and everything would be set. I mentioned it to Kevin, and he insisted on being involved. Then Joe got word, and I figured I would have to wait for Austin. Since it was becoming a party, I decided to let TJ in on it later in the evening, so he would be there for the anime viewing, but not the ceremony, because he wasn’t crucified by the high school fires. Then Tommy got stuck in there. So an entire semi-religious ceremony, a bonding of old friends, and a party to honor an underappreciated art all came about because I wanted my first time to be a special. Yaa.

And it was all video taped, though I won’t be releasing the footage because it was probably lamer than I remember it. Plus, I need to hold out until someone offers a million dollars for the tape. Hey, I have an anime collection to maintain.

It’s been over two months since the ceremony, marking two months of watching anime and playing video games in glorious nerdy seclusion, protected from the judgment of the world and direct sunlight. By living down there, I have neglected family, friends, and social obligations, alienating the world and failing to contribute anything meaningful to the pool of human accomplishments.

So basically, everything is going according to plan.