My readers know me well enough to know that I am a very well-organized person, particularly when it comes to photography. Part of that is my devotion to keeping things neat (not, as some charmingly unwelcome critics have suggested, “OCD”), and part of it is my fairly sharp memory.
I thought of this as I was scanning some film recently, some of it from as far back as college in the early 1980s. This is the frame of the hour, a self-portrait (not a “selfie” since they weren’t a thing for another 20 years or so) made in my room in a rooming house in Norman, Oklahoma…

I rented the house with five other college-age students, and a man who wore a lot of camo and had us convinced he was a CIA operative. We each had a room, and shared a living room, kitchen, two bathrooms, and a weirdly partially-finished indoor-outdoor courtyard.
I could walk to class and/or the journalism school in about 20 minutes, and did so all the time, since I was often “broke as a joke” (a term I only just heard yesterday from my friend Robert) and didn’t want to scrounge for gasoline money.
I have other images from this era, of course, since I was trying to become a photojournalist, but this one probably has the best story to tell about who I was then.
I lived in this room for two years, December 1983 to November 1985, but to narrow the time a bit, I stopped shaving July 5, 1985 and have been bearded ever since, so it had to be before that.
So what do we see in this masterpiece on Plus-X Pan Film?
- At the very top left, the box with the brass hinges is a folding chess set. I was my high school’s Chess Club President and 10th grade chess champion.
- On the shelf below that is a jug with a black roll of film sitting in front of it. The black film is probably Kodak Technical Pan Film, and the jug is probably with it because it contains Technidol, the developer specifically for that film. Also on that shelf are books such as Richard Bach’s Illusions, Joesph Heller’s Catch-22, a Bible, and Windmills 1982, the OU English Department’s literary magazine. I also know that Second Skin by John Hawkes is on that shelf too because you can hear my friend Scott mention it on an audio tape one night.
- Three shelves down, you can see a grey camera bag with black webbing. I used that bag when I walked to class and only wanted to carry one film camera and a couple of lenses. I later took it to New York City in March 1985. My bigger blue LowePro bag is out of sight below and to the left of it.
- Barely visible at the bottom left of this image is my Sony Walkman Cassette player.
- Back to the very top of the image, on the middle shelf, that curved thing is an incense holder.
- On the shelf below that are some full journal notebooks in various order. I believe the one I am writing in is from 1984. In this image, I am writing with that Paper Mate pen, “The Pen” (link if you didn’t get a chance to read it.)
- The next shelf full of record albums will probably evoke a lot of interest in the post-Napster milieu, though at the time, it was just my music collection.
- My stereo is next, and among the most interesting items in this image for me, simply because it was probably the best hi-fi I ever owned, but one that I later sold to “upgrade” to stuff that should have been better but wasn’t. It included a small MXR 10-band graphic equalizer. If you took the end caps off it, it was the perfect size for hiding a bag of weed. The Technics receiver next to it sounded great, but suffered from the 1980s linear aesthetic, and I didn’t love sliding that stupid volume control up and down. Note that it is tuned to 100.5 MHz “The Katt,” a radio station I pretended to like because of peer pressure. The tape deck below it was the best I ever owned. It has a 90-minute Maxell “Metaxial” tape in it.
- My turntable is hiding behind me.
- On my desk is the world’s largest dictionary, placed pretentiously to imply that as a writer, I would need it. Pencil holder, desk lamp, alarm clock, telephone.
- At the very top right you can see part of one of the three-way Marantz speakers my parents gave me as a graduation gift.
- Below that it the requisite Pink Floyd’s The Wall poster, which came with the album.
- The girl in the picture on the wall behind me is Melissa, playing the piano for me at her sorority house in Stillwater in 1984, which supports the timeline of this photo well.
So, that’s “The Room.”