Crazy Stable

Courage doesn't seem a strong enough word for the blogger who called himself Brainhell. Diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) in early 2004, he documented his descent into near-total disability with ruthless detail, sardonic wit, keen intelligence and enormous heart.  (The tagline for his blog was, "What if they discovered a disease and nobody wanted it?" One of his sidebars was cheerfully titled, "So, You're Going to Die!")

BH leaves behind an adored wife and two young children, a devoted sister (nom de blog of Ratty), a bunch of good old friends, and a bereft cloud of blogosphere buddies.  Some left almost daily comments, especially as his posts became more labored and fragmentary; others, like me, mostly lurked, rooted, and prayed for a mystery man who shared with us his longest journey. None of us who knew him only through the blog had ever seen his face until after his death. He looks exactly as I pictured him--a soulful smart-ass with more guts than I can even imagine. His blog is possibly the greatest testament to the human spirit that the Internet has yet produced, a real-time defiant joy ride to the edge of life's cliff. BH died on February 2; my own courage having lapsed, I couldn't face the worsening news in recent weeks and didn't find out until I checked in tonight.

A friend of mine who doesn't share my passion for the Internet once asked, of blogging and message boards and the like, "Is that the thing where you talk to strangers?"

No. No, it's not.

I wish I'd done this, but credit must go to Gothamist, which reports that raccoons are overrunning our nearby historic Green-Wood Cemetery, "digging up the grass over graves, eating the flowers left by mourners, and even invading crypts to scavenge for food." (Are the mourners of Brooklyn going totally Egyptian and leaving snack offerings for their dead, or are these raccoons flesh-eating zombies?) The caretakers can trap them but the Center for Animal Care and Control here in Brooklyn won't take them, because they are not rabid, so the critters wind up just being re-released elsewhere in the cemetery. (It seems to me that if you fed a raccoon a peanut-butter-covered bar of soap and slipped it a Xanax, you could make a convincing case for rabies at the CACC intake desk, but I digress.)

I feel a bit jealous; we've only had one masked furry marauder in recent years, doing a tightrope walk along the telephone wires on our back property line. Despite being a few blocks from Prospect Park, we get infrequent visits, perhaps because the critters must traverse two truck routes to get here from the park. (I've seen stripey-tailed roadkill once or twice on Caton Avenue, our corner thoroughfare.)

Or maybe the raccoons are no match for our Tiny Terrors, who are not so tiny after gorging themselves on the contents of our garbage cans. Bagel and his clan are simply out of control. The day I photographed this glutton and his carbohydrate feast, I insisted to Spouse that lids go back on the garbage cans. I also wondered aloud about a possible connection between Tree-Rat Proliferation (up to six at a time sashaying across the garage roof!) and a curious absence of roaming cats on our property this winter. Several of our stalwarts, like Hercules the Squirrel-Slayer, have disappeared, and no new feral felines had appeared to take over the turf.

 Well, how about this: Speak it and they will come.  Some feline Curtis Sliwa must have put out the call for the Guardian Angelcats. The very next day, a dark tabby Tom appeared from nowhere, hollering for ladies with a lean and hungry look. Then a handsome polydactyl guy with a studded collar showed up to roll in the dead catmint. Then two more Toms slipped down the alley.  I haven't found any dismembered tail trophies lying around, but I haven't seen any gangs bigger than two, either.

Be afraid, Bagel. Be very afraid.  

The snowdrops are up in the back yard!

And so are a bunch of other guys, just barely! 

(I even got my hands dirty in the garden today; I discovered a bag of four pale-yellow "Gipsy Princess" hyacinths that I'd never planted, bravely sprouting in the dark, and stuck them in the ground. Global warming indeed, the ground wasn't remotely frozen even 8 inches down. I also filled the bird feeders, added to the compost heap for the first time in months, and tossed the Christmas wreath in the trash--exhilarating!)

 But the goodness doesn't end there. How often does the news of the day bring tidings of a monster fossilized toad called Beelzebufo? (Here he is shown with a very large contemporary toad and a pencil for comparison; the effect, to me, is an inadvertent allegory of a freelance writer facing her editor at deadline.)

 And speaking of fossilized toads, we learn that Fidel will be passing the torch of liberation to a new generation (or maybe just to his Beelzebuffish brother).   Out with the devil toads, in with the snowdrops!

 Last night, we tried to fall asleep listening to the following instruments in the CrazyStable Winter Symphony:

* Bitter winds howling outside.

* Steam hissing inside.

* Downstairs Evil Radiator clanking and whamming, loudly.

* Loose piece of vinyl window cladding on third floor thwack-thwack-thwacking against frame.

* "Jumper" cable strung across street from lamppost scritch-scritching against shingles of house as it sways amid the turbulent branches of the Ent. No lights flickered, thank God, and we never had to break out the whale blubber lamps.

(Did I mention how much we love winter?)

Coming up next: We get estimates from asbestos abatement guys on exorcising the basement. Nice stuff, asbestos; not only good insulation, but damned quiet on a windy night. 

Image: The Endurance 

In the course of dealing with the explosion and blackout, we  have learned far more about our century-old electrical service than we ever wanted to know. And today, we got more bad news.

Every watt and volt we consume passes through
this ancient service box tucked in a dark corner of our dismal basement. Last week, the Con Ed guy explained that our pseudo-electricians, who rewired the CrazyStable when we first moved in 21 years ago, had hooked the new wiring up to the old "service"--the wires that come in from the street. Furthermore, they ran the wires in "the gap"--the space between this box and the new circuit-breaker box--through an almost-as-ancient fuse box, for reasons unexplainable. Once we had the new service, he advised, we should get a real electrician to close this gap of stupidity.

[Yes, I know: Why did we use pseudo-electricians to begin with? Because they were cheap and we were broke after buying our 3,000-square-foot piece of paradise, which was sizzling with wires so old that they were insulated with fabric, and ran alongside gas lines. In the very early 1900s, no one was certain that this new-fangled electricity was going to work out. ]

Right now, the temporary cable from the lamp-post, our "jumper service," is joined to these scary stubs with black electrical tape.  Today, more Con Ed guys showed up, to replace the wires under the street. (Every time we hear a high wind, we marvel at the genius of buried electrical cable; you just don't appreciate it until you're the only one on the block whose juice is swinging in the breeze overhead.) But when they inspected the scary basement, something unfortunate happened: They noticed our basement monster.

He's been there since the beginning, and mostly he slumbers. He would never harm anyone unless some damn fool goes and disturbs him, and even then he's unlikely to kill anyone. There are, in fact, only a few scattered bits of him left; the rest has disappeared mysteriously. But even those poor rotten, tattered remnants strike such unreasoning fear in the hearts of men that they flee from our basement, wild-eyed and calling for their supervisor.

I speak, of course, of our asbestos pipe insulation.  I suppose it was pretty dumb of us to leave a few chunks of it hanging down like a beaded curtain in front of the closet-like enclosure that holds the circuit breakers. If we had sensibly wet it and eased it off and hidden it deep in a black plastic bag on its way to the landfill, perhaps our monster might slumber still. But noooo. Medical writer that I am, I've always insisted on leaving it undisturbed until the distant glorious day when we can afford a proper abatement or encapsulation job. (Meanwhile, we simply stay out of the basement, as any sane person would.) That day, until this week, was estimated to occur in about the year 2015. Now it has to happen within two months, which is how long Con Ed will leave the Extension-Cord-on-Steroids hanging over our house. We have to produce an air testing certificate attesting to the monster's banishment, and that means banishing him. Early estimates suggest that this will require the sale of only one of our kidneys, not all of them (we have a total of six, so some will be left for the roof).

Old house owners are fond of referring to "the mushroom effect" when one repair starts a sort of chain reaction of decrepititude and collapse. We've got a basement full of mushrooms, real expensive ones, Shiitaki or oyster ones, and they are not done proliferating.

Juliet: O now be gone; more light and light it grows.

Romeo: More light and light; more dark and dark our woes! 

                           --Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene V