a hundred years ago, shipyard workers would have asbestos dust all over their clothes and they would then come home like this. shipyard workers' wives had a high rate of lung cancer because of the habit of shaking out dusty laundry.

the person to whom you get married ends up killing you more often than not, one way or another.

rock wool is what they called it in the sixties. fluffy and innocuous. rock wool resembles its shorn counterpart but comes from evil poisonous reconstituted pulverized stone and not the hairy ballsack of an oversexed farm animal. rock wool showed up on this planet in the fifties; a decade in which i would swear that it was humanity's mission to implode, or at least set the forces in motion which should have greatly shortened humankind's lifespan. greatest generation my fucking ass. if this is the standard to which we will be held, i'd rather exist outside this system of "achievement" thank you very little.

1962.

it was in this fateful year that some poor schmuck (who has, i'm sure, since undoubtedly suffered a horribly savage demise) was given the unenviable task of insulating the house upon which we were working. rock wool was neatly packaged in 'batts' otherwise known as 'rolls of choking death.' walls housing this feared and reviled substance are opened under only the most solemn and dire of circumstances... unless the afforementioned substance goes unnoticed until the wall is opened and it is too late. prayers are then said. you have officially been exposed. adi fucking os.

old houses have basements that were insulated when it became fashionable to do so.

1962.

and since then, horsehair plaster has weakened and lost its key. it begins to crumble under its own weight and give in to gravity's beckoning. the skin of the basement ceiling sags. a hole is poked to search for a stray conduit. the lathe beneath the crushed gypsum rock mixed with the hair of dead horses gives way under the prodding and spews forth copius amounts of hellclouds. the smell when someone in front of you on the highway cooks their brakes? that's asbestos. smells like an electrical fire.

but i didn't drop dead.

sometimes things aren't as bad as they originally appear to be. but things like that, when you think something is horribly awry and it turns out ok, will always catch up with you.