I should never be left alone for extended periods of time. Not because I get lonely, or scared. I don’t. I should never be left alone because I have entirely too much fun.

You know the child on the crime drama shows, whos parents have locked themselves in the master bedroom for a nice quiet game of “who can take the most tainted heroin”, and who have subsequently overdosed and died in bed together, wearing only a sweat-stained negligee and an interesting face-mounted rhinoceros horn dildo? The child who after hours and hours of unsupervised contentment, when the police finally break down the door because neighbors have been complaining about the smell, is wandering around the trashed house in a pair of mismatched pajamas, with his face covered in chocolate syrup and finger paint?

Yeah, i’m that kid.

You give me 6 to 10 hours of time alone and unsupervised, and i’ll have grown a three foot long wizard beard, disassembled most of the furniture for raw materials to build a zombie-proof living room fort, somehow run out of food and taken to eating the basic components of food for sustenance (hmm, if I eat this dry flour, and wash it down with a raw egg and some of this only-slightly chunky milk, it will turn into bread in my belly! Brilliant!), and have completed some sort of hideous or poorly thought out side-project.

Case in point. My sophmore year in college I lived in a suite with two other dudes. They made the appalling mistake of both going away on the same weekend, leaving me behind without scheduling a babysitter. Most any other young male in my situation would have spent his roomate-free weekend doing unspeakable things on every level surface in the room with various ladies of ill-repute. I, on the other hand, had a vision, so I barricaded myself in the dorm for some light-to-moderate renovations. Basically, I converted the large walk-in closet into a master bedroom by removing all the shelves, rods, and barriers, and then with some minor-adjustments, triple bunking our college issued beds in the ensuing cavity. I was very pleased with my work, but my roomates, when they returned to find their new, slightly cramped, (submarine-like it was described as) sleeping arrangements, were slightly less thrilled, even when I explained that the main room now had even more space for “activities”. I like to think my creation grew on them, especially when it could be used as a conversation starter whenever a new girl stopped by for tea, but honestly they just took to sleeping on the futon and the sofa in the main room.

Recently my girlfriend took a business trip to Las Vegas for a long weekend, and when she returned the house had burnt down, and both the cat and I were lying in the front lawn, our fur disheveled and full of twigs. I was almost pathetically eager to show her all the sweet inventions I had made in her absence, to which she replied, with saint-like restraint “Don’t touch me until you’ve showered, and where the hell is our house?”

It serves her right for expecting me to take care of myself for 4 whole days. Some people are just so unreasonable.