An industrial seashell.

They’re hollowing out the upper floors of the Meier & Frank across the street from our office, “they” being NUPRECON, which probably stood for something at one point before it got all “Nu” on us. (I notice they also did for the Danmoore Hotel, on which more later.) —They’ve bolted a giant sheet-metal chute to the front of the building, braced by a webwork of scaffolding, with openings at every floor through which they lustily toss two-by-fours and chunks of drywall and metal brackets and pieces of concrete flooring and ripped-out electrical ducting and pipes and I don’t know what-all else to tumble booming down the chute and crash into the concrete bunkers at street level where backhoes scoop it up into battered containers and there’s the guy whose job it is to hose the whole thing down to keep the gypsum dust and other particulates from choking passers-by. Before today, it was an occasional event, whenever somebody on the sixth or the eighth floor got a load large enough to dump; we’d hear the intial boom and crash of a drop on its way down and apologize to whomever on the phone, hold up our meeting, look away from the computer screen, suspend all conversation for the half-minute or so it took the reverberations to die away. But today? Today they’re really into it. Load after load after load going down. Our only defense is to pretend we’re at the beach, and it’s the crashing surf we’re hearing—the crashing, clanging, thumping, banging surf.