Catching Fire

Eons ago I found myself spending the night as any 15 year old of the mid-2000's might: stalking various profiles of scene girls on myspace, getting hammered off Mountain Dew, and playing odd little internet games involving penguins jumping through hoops. As the sun became moon this rough and tumble night life began losing it's appeal. As testosterone fueled young lads might be expected to do, my good friend Matthew and I hatched a new plan. We sought something more adventurous, and hindsight assures that primal male nature was the pilot for that evening's decisions. See, we have to ponder: what's the great advantage of mankind, the spark that sets us apart from beast? One may argue intelligence, but I think any given presidential election disproves that notion pretty quickly. No, our gift is the mastery of the great and powerful being known as fire. As the average teenage boy is only a few notches above the reasoning power of a neanderthal, our plans were the evening were very fitting: We were going to make torches.

They always made it look so easy on Lost

The formula was about what you'd expect from two teen engineers: a single fire poker, a large wad of paper towels taped to the tip, and the end lightly soaked in gasoline. My parents had turned in for the night, which was all the better as we could create our monster without interruption. Our work site was a porch that overlooked my Shire of a front yard, and despite the fact it was made entirely of aging wood, the undeveloped parts of our brains allowed for a certain degree of fearlessness. My younger brother soon joined us, naturally intrigued by the idea. He was the Igor to our Frankenstein and cheered us on all the while. What exactly was going through our heads at the time is now lost from memory, although I can only imagine how my mind raced. The ingenuity, the brilliance, the sheer power. We were man! We would strike fear in the heart of beasts, brighten our village, warm our offspring! That, or maybe we'd just run around the front yard and bellow inadvertently racist indian chants.  Finally, the suspense having been built over an agonizing six minutes, it was time. Hands quivering, we raised the destined Bic and brought the thing into existence.

There must have been a point after creating our world that God stopped and was like "woah...bro. I am such a badass." At least I like to hope he sometimes spoke with such vanity and candor. At any rate, we certainly felt that way. What flickered before us was more than a simple flame--it was a child of our creation. This crimson spirit was the perfect size, moderate brightness, and the heat it gave off was nearly affectionate in nature. In my 6th grade science class my teacher lit a match and asked us if it were alive. Being absolutely illiterate at anything to do with chemistry I answered that it was. I like to think the torch before us would make that obese little 6th grader proud. Now yielding a power unlike any we'd ever known, we did what anyone with an unstable torch would do: laugh a lot, wave it around, laugh some more, run around the yard with it held above our heads, laugh some more. Apparently fire is really really funny. Thankfully nothing went awry, we put the torch out, and nothing eventful happened for the rest of the night. The End.

Just kidding. Matthew and I went back inside to get back to our rock-n-roll lifestyle; the allure of an evening on Myspace isn't something we could just resist forever. My younger brother ran back inside and excitedly ask if we wanted to make a second, even bigger torch. Without looking from the screen, we muttered some sort of apathetic approval and left the twelve year old child to go play with gasoline. Several minutes went by before we finally realized what was happening. I can only imagine we Shaggy and Scoobed it by looking at each other and yelling (in unison) "MAKE ANOTHER TORCH??" We rushed into action but it was far too late. My brother held something of a sun on the end of the metal rod and seemed frozen in fear. The flame was brightly lit up the front of my house, and the heat made the cool spring night feel like mid-day July. What we'd created earlier was something joyful, a small child's hymn at a sunday sermon; this was a goddamn metal concert at which every moshing audience member had apparently brought knives. The fire had gone rogue.

Our cries of "You shall not pass!" didn't seem to phase the creature

Matthew quickly grabbed the burning leviathan and rushed to put it out with a hose on the other side of the house. As he passed a chunk of flame broke free and fell down to the wooden porch below. Matthew assured he would bring the hose and rushed away. I, not comfortable with the idea of a healthy flame resting on my wood porch, noticed our dog's bowl was full of rain water and opted just put it out. It was time to end this fire business once and for all. Unfortunately, my brother had apparently been using the dog dish for his concoction, and what I thought was rain water was actually gasoline. The second I poured the contents of the bowl onto the flame it exploded towards my face. Pure adrenaline and instincts allowed me to move just swiftly enough to avoid permanently scarring my soon-to-be handsome face, yet a wall of flames was now spreading. A million thoughts raced through my mind: was this fire going to spread? would my house burn down? Are we human or are we dancer?  Thankfully Childers arrived and sprayed the flames to death. I was apparently in mild shock from the experience and, given the nearly catastrophic events, we decided to call it quits on torches. Back in the safe haven of pre-teen social media we sent out a bulletin about our experience and our merciless peers showered our pages with photos of burning houses and fires. I suppose we deserved it, and we were really just glad that nobody got engulfed in flames. The moral of the story to all you curious pyros out there: don't fuck with fire.