As a young boy, I formed a distinct fascination with fire - particularly in the act of burning random shit with it. New things that I discovered always made my mind drift to flames. I'd wake up early and spend half a Saturday scouring the house for items of interest - Dr. Scholl's® foot pads, the television remote control, jars of old kitchen grease - and then I'd drag them all into my secret sanctuary: The closet. Strange as it may seem, I found a sort of peace in the darkened claustrophobia that came with shutting myself up in my bedroom closet. It was sort of like being back in the womb, except I didn't feel my mother punching her uterine wall so frequently and it smelled a whole lot more like tweed. I'd sit on the floor Indigenous Peoples of the Americas-style, bust out my trusty matchbook and burn random shit for hours. Cathartic doesn’t do the act justice. If I had to describe it in a word, I’d choose two words, tie them together with a hyphen and call it “super-cathartic.”
Yeah. "Super-cathartic" sounds about right.
you sound like my brother... maybe it's a 'guy thing' to want to burn things. My brother's favorite was burning plastic spoons (which smells disgusting by the way). No, Wait... his favorite was to soak cotton balls in alcohol and lighting them on fire. It was actually quite cool when he would turn out the lights and juggle with them.
ReplyDeleteI burnt whatever i could get my hands on...that has now evolved into a love of burning certain herbs and occassionally burning myself...no matter how many times I do it i never get that smell of burning flesh the spoke so highly of during the holocaust
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