an asbestosy cave - Monday March 11 2002

Today the UPS guy brought me a box of network equipment, including a 50 foot stretch of ethernet cable, so I immediately hooked up my batcave to the global golly-wow internet. This involved routing the cable down the back wall of the brownstone and through a crack above a crumbling doorway into the basement. I also decided to run the cable from Ernie's fourth floor apartment into the basement as well. To accommodate all the cables I had to set up a four port hub in the batcave.

After a little confusion concerning the network topology, I managed to get everything working as expected. At about that time, though, I noticed the crumbling asbestos insulation on the waterpipes overhead (which kept shedding crumbs on my workstation as I shuffled the cables around). This was a particularly nasty breed of asbestos, fabricated into a sort corrugated cardboard and then bent into circular sleeves, with plenty of surface area to accumulate damage and release frayed-off fibers. The effect on my psychology was far more dramatic than the effect upon my physical health, though the symptoms were the same. I developed something of a cough and felt an unpleasant cottony feeling in my throat. It made me so concerned that I immediately did some research on asbestos to discover how many years from my life I'd just sacrificed to the batcave cause.

To ease my mind about conditions in the batcave, I painted over the more troublesome patches of insulation overhead. When I came up from the basement, Gretchen was watching a movie called Running on Empty. How can you not shed a tear in that last scene?

Today two groups of vertically-oriented spotlights were switched on to memorialize the erstwhile World Trade Center. I didn't see it outdoors but did have the teevee on. The air was clear and what was visible of the beams was weak and bluish. I want to see it when the fog rolls in (or from outer space).