Everyone needs a place to go. People need a place of solitude where they can relax, where they can do as they wish with the few ounces of free time life affords. The park, the beach, the mall, the craft room, the garden. Men usually find bars because in the bar they can typically find one person who’s a bigger loser than they are.

Then sometime in the new millennium, married men that got banned from the bars in their neighborhood decided to try to claim some real estate within their own home as a kind of refuge. Their wives of course already had ownership of most of the house, the kitchen, all of the closets, the living and dining rooms (where guests have more rights than the husband), the bedroom, sans one half of the bed. You get the idea. All that was really left to claim was the odd hallway or the backyard or maybe a corner of the garage. It was within this limited reality that the humiliating concept of the “man cave” was born.

Any gentleman that uses the term “man cave” in reference to the place where he communes with the ideas and artifacts that enrich life’s journey simply is not hip to the concept. That person is stuck in the past, stuck with an out-of-date perception. He imagines some dude in Dockers watching bowling on a black & white TV; he’s in a spare bedroom, one with that picture of dog’s playing poker on the wall. So lame. That’s not how it works. Of course, he’d call it a “man cave” because it’s prehistoric and only partially evolved.

You can keep your cave if you must, but if you wanna get with it and create your own Groovy Room of Enlightenment, here’s some guidance.

Groovy Room Of Enlightenment Guidelines

• It has nothing to do with being a man. Chicks can have one … get to it! A room of your own isn’t about your fuckin’ gender, it’s about your mind. It has everything to do with being with your stuff, doing what you want and not getting bossed around. It’s a brain-expansion zone and nobody else but you can expand your brain.
• It has to be outdoors. The garage is outdoors. If it’s indoors, you’ve never left the house. You need to get the fuck outta the house. The garage door is like a magic force field. When it’s open, nature and atmosphere and cosmic vibrations can leak in and groovy sounds and attitude can leak out.
• You have to be able to smoke cigars … and burn incense. People have been inhaling foreign substances since the beginning of time because they create the haze and altered state required to live in a mass human community. Soon, the only place you’ll be able to smoke on planet earth will be your Groovy Room of Enlightenment and that will make you the proud defender of American civil liberties.
• Your room should be totally organic and random. Gather everything cool that your spouse will not allow in the main house and put it on display using nails, staple guns, duct tape and glue sticks. Over time, fill every square inch with more stuff. Frame stuff, stack shit on top of other shit, form layers of stuff with old stuff getting covered up by new better stuff.
• Television or some other form of video stimulation is optional, but music is mandatory. There should always be music coming out of your groovy room. Quiet time is a buzz kill. Rock & roll is the most excellent musical form to enhance your trip and feed your head, as almost all other sounds tend to be trendy, politically-correct bullshit. Stage your own concerts, create playlists, invent music themes for your guests … something you all can argue about.
• You’ll want to have seating but every place to sit should look like a natural artifact like a loveseat carved into a mountain, and all chairs etc. should be portable. Put them in a different place every day and if someone asks, “Hey, didn’t that chair used to be over there?” tell them you don’t know what they’re talking about and see if you can make them think they’re losing their minds.
• Snacks and drinks should be in abundance and readily available. This isn’t a place for meals. In a Groovy Room of Enlightenment, you are in pursuit of the ideal form of existence, this means no formal meals, just non-stop snacking throughout the entire day and night. Salt and sugar content should be high.
• Maintenance is accomplished by just three tools: a hand vacuum, paper towels and an ostrich-feather duster. Use these on occasion, but don’t overdo it. Most mishaps can be masked by the smell of incense, candles and cigar smoke.
• The best GREs are the ones that display a commitment to two cornerstone principles, 1) life is a collection of knowledge and artifacts, 2) you should keep about you those things you are most passionate about. So you should take out that collection of spoons or thimbles or glass animals and give them a place of honor in your GRE. In every nook and cranny show off all those bottle caps you’ve been hoarding. Dedicate a special place for your national parks fountain pens. In short, wrap yourself in what you dig be it comic books, PEZ dispensers, backscratchers or birdhouses. Shit, if you’re still really into your kids, fill the room with pictures of them and their old report cards and school projects, make your space a shrine to them so that it will be really awkward when they come over.
• Your Groovy Room of Enlightenment should take on a life of its own, go way overboard, get blown fantastically out of proportion, have its own website. This way it will never be mistaken for some other dude’s sorry ass man cave.

Life can be groovy, but you’ll need to lose any notion of a cave.