Homelessness is like homosexuality: it's not for everyone. But for that ten percent of us who are wired just a little bit differently, the freedom of living without a home can be just another lifestyle choice.

Much like gays know they are different from a very early age, I was well aware that I did not place shelter nearly as high on my own hierarchy of needs as Maslow did on his. I regularly ran away from home starting in grade school. I hated beds and roofs so I would find some stray dogs, give them a few doggy treats to win them over, then cuddle up next to them for warmth. Eventually rumors spread that there was a ferral child in the neighborhood.  A local TV station even did a piece on it and interviewed the locals who had seen me scurrying about.

As you might suspect, this habit of mine caused my upper-class parents a great deal of shame and embarrassment. To control me, father boarded over the windows in my room and installed a padlock on the outside of my bedroom door.

Vacations were a pain. My father wanted to see as many sites in as little time as possible. We once did a 5,000 mile round trip out west in a week.  It would have been six days except father had to waste a precious day of his vacation chasing me all over the Badlands of South Dakota.

The situation only grew more pronounced when I went off to college.  I quickly abandoned my dorm room for the freedom of the great wide open. I'd load up my backpack with books, sit through about 10 minutes worth of class, get bored, sneak out then spend the rest of the day exploring the campus, reading Doestoyevsky under shade trees and searching for bargains at the used CD shops on the Ave. 

Although I am introverted in every other facet of life,  for some reason I tend to be an extroverted sleeper.  Remember the kid who used to sprawl out on the sofa and take naps in the student union? That was me. Even though I had a computer, I preferred to hang out at the library computer lab. I enjoy having people near, just as long as I don't have to talk to them.

Eventually I fell in love, dropped out of college and moved away to be with her. After a year together and a cross-country move, friction developed in our relationship and she broke up with me. My dislike of the movie Chocolat proved to be the final straw. She offered to let me live with her until I found a place of my own. I told her I did not need any time; that I would live on the street.

Now I did not say this to be passive-agressive or to guilt trip her. I truly wanted to experience a life on the street. I did count "A Walk on the Wild Side" as my favorite Lou Reed song, after all. To calm her, I relented then snuck out in the middle of the night. 

I had quite a bit of money saved up. A normal person would buy a car and live in it but I considered automobiles bourgeoisie and refused to own one.   Besides my mother always told me if you're going to do something, give it your all.  So I went hardcore, full monty street homeless.

At first I lost a lot of weight.  I slept during the day and rode my bike all night under the city lights to avoid being gang-raped by a band of homeless men at 3am. Plus I was a fifth level vegan and did not eat anything that cast a shadow so finding edible street food proved a challenge as well. Now I could have cheated and bought some raw vegetables at Whole Foods but I considered that unsporting.  After losing ten pounds, I gave up on the vegan route and started eating the leftover pizzas the local parlor threw in the dumpster.

I sent off query letters to the local alternative weeklies as well, in the hopes that I could become their literal "man on the street".  The same day that one paper e-mailed me back, my ex-girlfriend found me at the library and pressured me into moving back in with her, forever putting a damper on my column and Orwellian book proposal "Down and Out in Seattle and Portland".

Eventually I agreed to live under a roof like a normal person.  I rented out the cheapest room I could find: a 10x10 rat hole in a house with eight other guys and an actual rat. While I enjoyed my week on the street, I hated every minute I spent in that ramshackle old dive. Like a prisoner making chalk marks on the wall for each day he has served, I could not wait for my lease to expire so I could ditch this whole respectable facade.

For an entire year, I worked for the man then I forked over another $400 bucks a month in rent to the man, not to mention utilities.  I lived in the Pacific Northwest at the time and April is a bad time to move out, since the mountains are snowed in until July. Yet that did not stop me from selling off everything I owned, buying a car and spending the next several months bumming around the beaches and rain forests of the Olympic Penisula, waiting impatiently for the mountain snow to melt.

I can honestly say I had the time of my life that sumer. I bagged every major peak in the Northwest solo, hiked the Wonderland Trail and biked the Oregon Coast along Highway 101. By the time September rolled around, I headed east to Wyoming to see the larches of Grand Teton in all their golden glory.

Bad idea. While Washington cops are fairly laid back, there's nothing the Wyoming fuzz love more than harassing a flamboyant vagrant. First a little background: being homeless is like being pregnant. You start craving weird food combinations you never considered eating before. For me, it was two scoops of ice cream inside the hollowed out half of a cantaloupe. I would buy the half-cantaloupe and Haagen Daaz at the grocery store, then sit in my car, listen to XM sports talk radio and pig out. Apparently this is illegal in Wyoming. The cops booked me for vagrancy and I had to pay a $250 fine to get out of my 30 day jail sentence.  The cops told me to leave the state if I knew what was good for me and I obliged.

This brush with the law caused me to reconsider the life I had chosen. In your 20s, you could be irresponsible, backpack through Europe and call it finding yourself, but if you continue that life into your 30s, you're just a bum who needs to get a real job. So I chose to move back home, get educated and find that real job.

For the next several years, I balanced summers on the road with college to appease my parents. Truth be told, I never took my studies, my future or my life very seriously. My personal motto was those who are afraid to die are afraid to live so I always leaped before I looked, safety be damned. I fully expected either a crevasse, a wave or a poison leaf to do me in quickly. Instead I caught this slow, mind-numbing disease in which a little part of me dies everyday known as respectability. Like a rock star who expected to die young, I would have taken better care of myself if I would have known I was going to live this long.

Unfortunately with a wife, a mortgage and a 401K, it's a little late in the game to do the right thing now.