Fire!

My friend reports that he valiantly fought back an electrical fire in his living room. Good thing he works at home, because it was some weird short behind the couch or something. If, like me, he was a slave at a fuck-you job for 10 hours a day, more with the commute, he’d probably be sleeping on my couch right now and crying about all of his burned up comic books. All while I perched in the rocking chair, drinking obsessively, and stared at him with increasing horror as it dawned on me that he wasn’t planning to leave anytime soon.

I’ve always feared a house fire. As long as I can remember, I’ve been consumed by the fear that all my stuff would burn up. As a kid, I used to look at my Lego town on the big 12X12 table in the basement and think, oh, my beautiful Legotown, you’re gonna melt away when the flames come to destroy everything I love.

In college, I was convinced that some stupid shitheel was going to burn the dorms down and my rare, collectible Nazi books would burn up along with my expensive scotch. A shot a day helps the doctor freak out! Heil Hitler!

When I moved into my first apartment, after college, it was a sure thing that now, with all my precious things in one place, I would wake up to roaring flames. After that apartment, I took rooms at the back of my grandparent’s sprawling ranch house. Even a rational person would fear fire in that tinderbox. Certainly, anybody who came in to service anything – electrician, plumber, exterminator – asked my grandfather if his valuables were fireproofed because, Jesus, old man.

Then I moved into an upscale apartment in Silver Spring, MD and, in between sparring with my idiot landlord and having brain surgery, I couldn’t help but notice all the fire suppressant stuff that had been included in the construction of the new building. After fearing fire for my whole life, I now knew the true face of fear – sprinklers. These fucking torture devices dipping out of the ceiling. All it takes is some weird little problem in the pipes and – bang – everything is soaked down and destroyed. Every night I dreamed of my computer – loaded with sacred porn and stolen movies – getting shorted out by misfiring sprinklers. When I left for work, I duct-taped garbage bags around the sprinklers in my bedroom in case there was a fire and they went off, or just malfunctioned.

That’s utterly useless, I know. But, still. I found myself fearing damage from the sprinklers more than a raging inferno. At least, with a fire, I could do the noble thing and die with all my stuff.

I love my stuff so much.

I’m now in a new apartment, which is ranked as “C-Level Housing” by the lovely people at A Major Apartment Shopper’s Guide. You can read about my adventures here in the retarded GS forums. Overall, I love the place. It’s huge, well-lit, and my neighbors are all dark and evil criminals or anti-social monsters. Perfect. Because, really, the answer to “Good morning” should always be “fuck off.” And what the fuck is with trying to engage me in conversation? At my upscale apartment in downtown Silver Spring, everyone was all, let’s talk, let’s bond, we’re all white people together, amen, George Bush. I feel dirty whenever people I don’t know try and talk to me. If you’re a girl – pretty or ugly – then shut up and just start blowing me. If you’re a guy, then get someone to bury you cheap and I’ll split the expense and visit your grave.

So now I’m in a place where people leave me the fuck alone, where I can pass out on the living room floor in peace, and where there are no wicked sprinklers set to short circuit and start spraying water over my favorite porn. There’s only one thing that should spray around my porn!

But, then, my friend has his little incident. He was working at his computer, probably playing some deeply depressing online game, when he says he smelled something burning. Of course, his reaction was to ignore it. Then it got too strong to ignore, and he ventured out to where his couch and an entire wall of his living room was engulfed in flames.

Unlike me, he remained calm and went for the fire extinguisher. All okay, just a lost couch and a bunch of smoke damage. Me? I would have gone to save my stuff, first. I would have been throwing everything of value into carpet bags and tossing them out the window. Screaming, and beating my chest, and crying out hysterically like a true damsel in distress. Then, if unable to backup everything to my external hard drive fast enough, I would have thrown myself atop my computer and waited for the sweet kiss of death. He posted pictures of his newly remodeled home in the forums.

This weekend, I plan to pick up a fire extinguisher. And, by that, I mean steal one from my day job. Then I’m going to take it all through the apartment with me. I’ll shower with it and sleep with it and, this summer, when the deck chairs start to heat up, I’ll be blasting them with the extinguisher every hour while screaming about the Fire God. That’s not acting on paranoia. I’m just going to do that because it’ll upset the neighbors and I really like letting off fire extinguishers. I’ve loved doing that since junior high. I did that once in a classroom during detention and, of course, the whole place filled with white mist. Then I tried to pretend like everything was absolutely normal when the teacher came in.

And how do you explain all the white stuff?

I don’t know what you’re talking about sir.