When you play with fire, you usually don't get burned, but it does frequently end in property damage.

I recently dug up this little gem from a book project I was working on which shared the name of my blog. I plan to eventually publish many of these little posts and anecdotes into a humor book called “Letters From a Geek,” and this is one of the earlier entries into the project files. The rest were unfortunately lost to my hard drive crashes, but this one survived. I realize I have completely failed in my quest to post an update every day this week, but hey. Three posts in a week is better than I’ve done in months, so there’s that. I honestly think after this, the blog is going to become a once-or-twice weekly thing. But anyway! Here’s another fun tale from my childhood.

   

  It has become evident to me that in families containing at least two or more male children, at least one of them will be a pyromaniac. Even though I am a man, I cannot explain the kind of seductive power an open flame has on the psyche of a young boy. However, I do know it exists and that the only thing between that boy and arson is a clear plastic wall labeled “Common Sense.” It has also become evident to me that with any male children at all, common sense is anything but common. This observation is better displayed by my own immediate family than any other that I’ve met except maybe for my younger cousin, but we’ll get to him later.

    

 Even though common sense is something I’ve had a firm grasp on since early childhood, the same can’t be said for my younger brother Evan. From the beginning, he never seemed to grasp the concept that certain things were against the rules because we might actually get hurt or hurt something, and not just because our parents had some sort of rule-making quota to fill. This is probably the single aspect of life where the difference between us is most prevalent. If given a rule to follow, I will follow the rule. I may question the rule’s purpose, or the amount of sense it makes, or if we could be better off without it, but I follow it nonetheless. Evan, on the other hand, has always been of the mindset that if a rule didn’t make sense to him (or maybe just prohibited something he thought seemed fun) it really didn’t apply to him. And when you couple that mindset with his innate love of fire and the aforementioned male-child-pyromania syndrome, it’s a recipe for unfortunate experimentation. (Actually, unfortunate experimentation is a label which can be applied to the vast majority of a boy’s youth.)

   

  Fortunately for all of us, he didn’t take the douse-and-burn or the major criminal offense path. Unfortunately, I can’t count the number of times I walked into our bedroom to be greeted by the smell of the melting plastic remains of what was inevitably some small object which used to be mine (much to the dismay of his pet lizard whose heating lamp was being borrowed for other purposes). He did start with his own belongings, of course, but it wasn’t long before he melted through his own box of 24 crayons and realized he was out of his own stuff he was willing to experiment with. He swore up and down he never burned anything of mine, however. It was just a convenient coincidence that he happened to own a plastic army man exactly like the one that vanished from my drawer, or any number of rubber erasers which I’d obviously somehow misplaced from the plastic box on my desk. He eventually got over melting things on a heat lamp bulb which didn’t actually provide any visible open flame, but rather the somehow satisfactory feeling of destroying something, and thus moved on to the next best thing: aerosol combustibles.

  

   While requesting it under the deceptively innocent guise of keeping up their appearances at school, my brother and cousin spent many an hour spraying down their hands, feet, clothing, skateboards and in one particularly impulsive instance their heads with Axe body spray, and then lighting the respective areas on fire. Yes, folks, when one has run out of things to light on fire, the next logical step is to light oneself on fire. I quickly became accustomed to the smell of burning deodorant and justified my apathy and ignorance of the activity by assuring myself that at least they weren’t huffing it.

  

   I will never forget the day, however, when I walked out of my bedroom after a two hour-long session of Super Smash Brothers to find that the familiar burning smell from my brother’s room was a bit stronger than usual. Ignoring it at first, I proceeded to the kitchen where in the middle of fixing myself some lunch, I happened to look up and noticed a slight haze in the room. Upon further investigation, the haze was actually sweeping the entire house and seemed to be coming from the hall. As I entered the hallway on the way back to my bedroom (which for some reason provided a false sense that my brother’s activities would not affect me) I was greeted by my brother’s panicked face. He bolted from his bedroom and slammed the door shut as more of the haze poured from his doorway. We traded looks over a long moment, and in a decision which I both understand and regret, I chose not to ask why the house smelled like impending disaster and instead walked into my room and shut the door. That peace lasted all of fifteen minutes before without a word my brother opened my door, turned my ceiling fan to high and opened my window, then exited.

  

   With my last safe haven of blissful ignorance invaded, I decided to go and survey the damage to make sure that there was absolutely no way I was going to be blamed for anything in the coming storm when my parents got home. I found him running through the house with every can of air freshener he could find, spraying them liberally. It ultimately resulted in the house smelling as if someone had mistaken a potpourri arrangement for a fire pit. When I finally asked him exactly what was going on, his entire explanation consisted of “I burned something.” It was only when I decided to investigate his bedroom and found his entire bed flipped upside down that he decided to inform me that what he had burned was the entire underside of his bed. He had been using body spray to light little flash-fires on his skateboard when the flame followed the sinking aerosol fumes beneath his bed and ignited the fuzzy underside of the box. I said nothing, and returned to my room.

  

   Later, when my father arrived home and the house was still under a slight haze and still smelled like a Bath and Bodyworks warehouse fire, Evan explained the situation away by stating that he had “lit a piece of paper on fire with a candle”. Brilliant move there, explaining the smog, burned smell and the overlapping aroma of eight cans of air freshener. Either way though, even with knowledge of the obvious lie, my father decided he didn’t really want to know exactly what had happened and didn’t press the matter further.

   

  I learned two lessons that day: The first was that our smoke detector needed new batteries, and the second was that the instant he learned that the glass-bottle variety of body sprays could be turned into Molotov cocktails, I was moving out.

                                                                                                                                   -The Sarcastic Soul-