October 20, 2001

• grandpaboy linked to an online museum of manhole covers. And since I have a minor fetish for manhole covers (think what you will…), I have to link to it, too.
  
  (Back in the mid-90s, I went through a phase where I picked up stuff off the street. It started with lugnuts. You’d be amazed how many lugnuts fall off of cars, bringing those cars’ passengers incrementally closer to doom. I’d find them and keep them. I still have a box full.)
  
  (Anyway, I had a housemate who also liked to pick stuff up out of the street. We had huge piles of crap we’d gotten from the street, from dumpster diving, from thrift stores… At one point we had at least a hundred continuous yards of 18 inch wide laminate from a laminating machine strung throughout our apartment like an immense post-industrial spider web.)
  
  (But the thing we most cherished was our collection of manhole covers. We had a rule: stealing covers from holes = bad. But if the cover was somewhere not near the hole it was to plug, it was fair game. We used them to make tables and as hot plates and to prop doors open, and once we dropped one out the window to see what kind of sound it would make (we were on the fourth floor) (and drunk). It cracked the sidewalk.)
  
  (So I was happy to see an obsessive collection of manhole cover photos on the web, and remember the days of yore, when I was happy to live with Darek, before he became an insane maniac. Really.)

  • 6:38 am
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