I have a friend whom I’ll call Horace who lived in a storage locker. It was actually a room in an old Seattle hotel that had been condemned for earthquake danger and converted to storage space. Horace swears that the six months he lived there were the happiest of his life. He had no job, but that was okay because his friend paid the locker’s monthly rent of $50. It didn’t have a bathroom, but he did have a phone put in and he set up a hot plate and a microwave. Unfortunately there was no fridge, so he had to buy those eco-unfriendly half-pints of milk each morning for his cereal. This low-rent gem was right downtown, so when nature called he could walk across the street to use City Centre’s marble-countered bathrooms. He showered at the Y. I’ll confide to you that Horace doesn’t like to work, so getting up when he wanted and spending days as he pleased suited him just fine. He had his freedom, and even though the only entrance to his building was in an alley through which he had to step over a human latrine and at times people giving themselves dubious-looking vaccinations, he often prayed that this phase of his life would never end. It’s not an experience I’d recommend to everyone: The place smelled and Horace had some loud-mouthed neighbors in the building that he heard at night but never saw. So when a lady came into his life, he was forced to return to the world of clean, well-ventilated dwellings with toilets and high rents. And to the dog-eat-dog existence that goes with it.