I Live In My Fraternity House’s Basement And It’s Not As Bad As You’d Expect

Buzzy Robinson7 years ago

Every chapter house has its distinguishing characteristics, whether it’s an especially pungent odor, a unique architectural feature, an impressively painted beer pong table, or one of its members. A house’s quirks are what make it truly special. One noteworthy aspect of my chapter house just so happens to be my bedroom. More specifically, its location. Which is the basement.

I live in one of the two bedrooms situated in the big beautiful biohazard that is my off-campus fraternity house’s basement. And to be completely honest, I love it. That being said, I totally understand why most people are equal parts surprised and appalled by the fact that we even have bedrooms in our basement. I mean shit, most brothers would rather live in a closet upstairs like Sammy from Blue Mountain State than even consider living in the basement. But that’s because they see the rooms for what they are now, and not what they have the capacity to become. My room is like a young Michael Oher, and I’m Sandy Bullock poised and ready to cash in on its overlooked potential. To quote Jonah Hill, “It’s like getting in on sunlight before there was fucking sunlight!”

For starters, my room is the biggest single in the house. It may even be the biggest single on campus. I’m barely joking when I say that even with all of my furniture liberally dispersed throughout the room, there’s still enough space for a modest game of Spikeball. So much room for activities! Secondly, it’s roughly ten feet away from the dance floor, the bar room, and the game room. This means that if I want to go back to my bedroom for a second during parties, I don’t have to fuck with stairs and barely even have to deal with doors. Thirdly, if a nice young gal should happen to ask me where I live, I can literally turn around and point to my room. Who knows, maybe she wants to see it? Maybe she wants to get romantically physical? The basement is a perfect place to find a future spouse.

As I’m sure you can tell, I see people’s disgust with my choice of living environment as patently short-sighted and narrow-minded. However, it’s not entirely unfounded. For a while, the school actually deemed the basement bedrooms “unlivable.” Last spring — I shit you not — one of our brothers purchased two goats from a local Mennonite community and had them living in one of the basement rooms until the school found out and demanded that they be returned to their fucking farm. Hands down the funniest administrative email I’ve ever seen. There’s probably still goat shit somewhere down there.

Also, the house is over a hundred years old, so it’s not exactly a “finished” basement. It honestly smells like stale beer mixed with a yeast infection most of the time. It’s basically a larger version of the basement in Mitch’s house from the movie Old School, just with fewer WWII veterans and bathrobe-clad divorcees.

So yes, From the outside looking in, I can understand why sleeping less than ten yards away from where we host the majority of our parties and make the entirety of our worst decisions would seem like an absurd lifestyle choice. The one other guy who lives down here with me is downright rattled about the whole situation. He’s convinced that he has contracted some brand new drug-resistant lung disease from his room. That’s not how you get that shit, Tyler (it honestly might be though, dude, so don’t quote me on that).

Possible black lung notwithstanding, life is short and college is awesome. You can’t let sticky floors and goat shit stop you from having a fun. It’s all about attitude!.