Final Analysis: Notes on My Dream Home

Yes, it’s an overhaul, but I’m sure my vision for an abode should be manageable for a contractor with your experience and familiarity with Jungian archetypes.

For starters, the foyer needs to have a trapdoor plunging me into the final exam for the calculus class I haven't shown up for all semester, which will be a great conversation piece—and burden me with the terrible secret that I never graduated from high school and am a fraud in every aspect of my life. The trapdoor should have an alternate chute that drops me to the center of a stage where I'm starring in a play, the lines of which have escaped me.

The kitchen: Everyone goes for modern minimalism these days. How much more aesthetically original would it be to have one of those classic "Roman Colosseum" kitchens presided over by my resurrected grandfather as he whips up a batch of elliptical-cycle pancakes and weeps about my failure to become an ear, nose, and throat doctor?

My idea of a living room is a loftlike space where you can utterly relax, with the sensation that all your teeth are loose, as you kick back with a beer to watch episodes of The Honeymooners dubbed over in French or have a lively cocktail conversation in which your friends Mary and Chuck repeat the word "arthritis" and hysterically cackle at you in slow motion.

You're acting as if I'm the first person ever to ask for a home office that includes room for an L-shaped workstation and sunbathing space for respected character actor Stephen Tobolowsky. So add a skylight, and we'll work something out with the Screen Actors Guild.

I know the house was originally slated for four bedrooms, but I'd like five to accommodate 3 A.M. visits from my middle-school gym teacher. Coach Ferri's room will need to be outfitted with a self-replenishing honeycomb with attached nozzle and floor-to-ceiling mirrors that allow him to admire his flabby, hirsute, now 60-something physique drizzled in honey while he sings Madonna's "Vogue." If the mirrors pose structural problems, I'm flexible.

It's important to me that the attic and basement interchangeably be the same thing, thanks to a wormhole in the space-time fabric. I'd also like it/them to assume the general shape of my childhood tormentor Bryan Watkins's face—like, it doesn't exactly look like Bryan, but visitors somehow know it's his prepubescent visage. I don't have any old pictures of him, but I'll go on Facebook to grab an adult image, and you can extrapolate a layout by using a missing-children computer program in reverse.

In lieu of having an automatic garage door, I was thinking it might be stylish to install an intermittently opening dragon's mouth that spews fire. No, not like a fake dragon—a real one, from the heretofore-believed-to-be mythical land of Xitheron. Well, eBay, I assume.

While we've been en charrette these past months, I feel that you've become an indelible part of this house and the thanatotic component of my id, which is why I hope you'll do me the honor of embedding your toenails in the walls in hieroglyphs of coffins, tombstones, and my dead-again grandfather. I'll be patient during the regrowth phases.

The master bathroom should tie it all together as a functional yet luxurious oasis, featuring a Jacuzzi filled with Coach Ferri's honey, tiles inscribed with the answers to the calculus final via toenail clippings—but just illegibly enough that I can't quite read them—and an inspirational poster depicting Stephen Tobolowsky encouraging readers to go to med school and study under the tutelage of Dr. Bryan Watkins, ENT.

Oh! I almost forgot: The door is fringed by a fire-breathing dragon. I simply don’t know where my mind is today.