And here I thought I was out of ideas…but this was sitting in my Drafts all along. First, admire the title. And yes, it's a nod to Wallace & Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which is a truly awesome movie. And please recall this is the fifth in a series of posts in which I wax nostalgic about growing up as a boy of the male gender in Anchorage. If you like, you can go back and enjoy Parts One, Two, Three and Four.
Do you ever have one of those moments, when you're driving home from work or at the end of a long road trip, where you suddenly wonder how you drove the last five miles without noticing it? "Oh, right, I'm driving." It's a kind of autopilot, but different than the one that has you leave home and head to work on a Sunday when you're supposed to be heading for church, just out of habit. It's like your brain is in sleep mode and the hard drive hasn't spun back up yet (this line is going to look so cute when my grandkids read it and wonder what I'm talking about…drives don't spin!). But sometimes the brain seems to go all "I'll handle the basic functions and nothing else" for a while.
It reminds me of a scene in Burn After Reading, which is mildly hilarious and fairly inappropriate if I recall correctly, in which the protagonists hatch a harebrained plot to pull one over on the CIA or FBI or KGB or something. At one point, after the plan fails, Frances McDormand's character says, "I can't believe they didn't go for it."
Where am I going with this? Well, every boy has a few events in his life that, well, just get away from him. Call it lack of forethought or what you will, but it happens. A lot. And afterwards, the boys are left wondering where it all went wrong. The answer is often, "When it started." And the chances of this occurring go all exponential as you add boys to the equation. Which means that with basically any number greater than or equal to one, you've got a serious chance of "How did that happen?" happening. Go ahead and check the math. It's solid.
Before the days of being permitted to feed the cats for BF1 when his family selfishly vacationed, torpedoing my summer of fun with BF1, Big Sis #1 was called upon to watch BF1 while his parents worked. During the school year, BF1 would just come home with me and since we were in the same class from 2nd grade on, we'd do our homework and then get into some mischief. But during the summer, he needed supervision and his parents didn't think we'd be up for watching him all day. So BS1 (hmm…maybe I should've gotten this approved before going with it) was on the hook for babysitting over at BF1's house. And I generally tagged along.
So, just as there's a time in every boy's life when he's obsessed with video games, or fishing, or dinosaurs, there's an inborn fascination for fire. It starts with passing your finger through a candle flame, or letting a match burn down so far it burns your hand. But it eventually ends in "Dude, check out what happens when I shoot Lysol through the cigarette lighter flame!" BTW, WD-40 is the best product to use waste on this kind of mischief, though it makes a grand mess. Oh, wait. We're boys. Anyhow, it ignites with enough energy that it'll sustain a flame even after the match/lighter goes out. And you know where I'm going with this, right?
We once set a can up, hoping (seriously, hoping!) to make the flame walk back to the nozzle and blow it up. (And now the Mythbusters get paid to do this stuff, darn it!) We made sure to take cover several feet away behind some air, if I recall correctly. That thing burned for like twenty minutes before we pulled the plug, meaning ripped the tape off the nozzle so it'd stop shooting.Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
I can't remember who approached the thing-we-were-expecting-to-blow-up-at-any-minute. Probably poor SF.
But playing around with erstwhile flamethrowers is one thing. Learning how to actually build a fire is another.
BF1 had this great spot behind his house where we used to play cars. It wasn't a sandbox, exactly, but it was a sandy area, and we could sculpt whatever kind of track we wanted. And it was twenty feet or so from his famous raspberry patch. By the way, BF1 had this hilarious car-revving sound that involved that very Germanic back-of-the-throat-rolled-R sound, vocalizing "Gooooo-roooo-roooooo." My son did the same thing when he was four or so. We gave him all kinds of crap about it. My fake car sound was, of course, beyond reproach.
So anyway, it may seem like I'm digressing, but I'm not. I'm setting the scene. Our fascination with fire. And sand, which all boys know is one great thing you can use to put out fires. So it's only natural to think that if you build a fire on sand, it can't get out of control, right?
BF1 and I proceeded to build a nice little fire on that sand, starting it, as anyone would, with an entire pack of matches. On like the twentieth attempt. I think we went through an entire brick of them. (BF1's folks are smokers, so they had plenty of them.)
The thing is that once you've got a fire, you generally want…MOAR FIYER!!!
We added a stick here, a plank there until we had a nice blaze going. WE HAD CREATED FIRE!!!
So by now you're probably thinking, "Okay, you made a fire. Big whup. Did you dump kerosene on it or something?" Well, no, not that time anyway. But I left out an important detail about that sandy patch of Hot Wheels track potential.
It was right outside the back door of BF1's garage.
Right outside.
And I mean on the very doorstep. So our fire, which might have been good and contained as an open pit kind of fire, was not so contained as it climbed the siding. Fortunately for us and our not getting thrown into jail for actual arson, it was aluminum siding and not particularly flammable. And my ever vigilant sister, evidently sensing a disturbance in the Force, or more likely the air quality around the house, caught us.
I don't actually remember putting the fire out. I just remember that rapt, glazed look we probably had on our faces as we watched our creation do its very best to consume a house which contained video games. And Diet Pepsi. And Skippy peanut butter. What were we thinking?
How's a guy go so wrong? Eating people alive? Where's that get fun? Sorry…random Serenity quote popped out. Just for the record, though, Jayne'll kill a man in a fair fight, or if he thinks he's gonna start a fair fight. Or if he bothers him, or if there's a woman. But mostly if he's getting paid. Aaaaanyway.
I was actually thinking about this issue today while attending a vomit-inducing class on fostering Innovation at work, made somewhat hilarious by the fact that everyone on our team now uses the word Innovation as a euphemism for moving our bowels. "Heading for a pre-meeting innovation, guys."
Getting off track here, but there's a tendency for young'uns to be attracted to creating things. Innovating, you might say. Even when their creations might, well, burn down a house or so. It's kind of a tendency to leap without looking, as I previously discussed in my tale of scummy ponds and divinely provided floatation. Am I off track here? Any recovering pyros out there? Why did you light that thing? Why on God's Green Earth did you think that wrapping fresh chives in paper and burning them would get you high? Oh, wait, that's another story…
And now I'm officially out of ideas for future posts, except for the little matter of my history of somnambulance. So I'm going to have to tell a few of the best bits. But I should probably have The Fair Elaine tell some of the more recent tales. Actually, she blogged about one a few years ago, so that'll give you a taste.
Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to having Big Sis #1 around next week for my birthday. I believe it's been since 1993 or so since we've been in the same state for that occasion. Wow.