Man Cave #1

1. My friend Kevin has a man cave. And when I say cave I mean door is blocked by man stuff so you have to climb over boxes of computer hardware and old programming textbooks, spilled boxes of CDs of various ilks, snake-cables in search of VGA connections. Musical instruments. Piles of books hunted and gathered from the local used bookstore. I mean a couch that hasn't been sat on for weeks because it is covered with man-ivy: tendrils of telephone wire and Ethernet connections and aforementioned cables woven into clothing and plastic bags of unknown provenance.

The story goes that a friend took a photo of Kevin's office in Washington and when people saw it they assumed that it was the after shot of the earthquake that had recently hit. Nope. Pre-earthquake. No one would have known that an earthquake had hit Kevin's office. Or if thieves had ransacked his place looking for those small thumb drives with information that could convict higher-ups in the FBI.

Kevin has a man cave. It has a moat (an anteroom you must maneuver, often filled with dangerously unstable piles of gear  and bicycles propped against walls like traps to snare the unwary). It is dark. It has a big desk that covers two walls and a big monitor that lets you watch film of the Grand Canyon at actual scale. It has a real turntable but also a digital thingy to take the turntable's weak original signal and turn it into a badass male signal worthy of the shielded speakers lurking darkly in the corner.

It is clear. A man had been here. Alone