Angry like a fire

I've been thinking of adding drawings to my stories (I like to think of this as story telling) on here, but then a couple of things occurred to me. One, I'm a horrible artist, which works nicely sometimes (see my christmas story if you don't mind, or if you're really desperate for bad art to pass off as your children's, neices', nephews' etc. just ask and I'll email you a pdf version of it), but most of the time I'm not sure it does; there are somethings I can't draw, even crappily. So for the time being I won't. That doesn't mean I can't try to describe it so you paint your own morbid mental pictures, which do far more damage than my drawings (or Darwin) ever could.

You ever ascribe human feelings to inanimate objects? This world would be so much funkier if inanimate objects weren't inanimate. You slam a door out of anger, and the next thing you know you've been thrown against the wall, which is now throwing you into another wall which in turn will throw you into another wall which in turn...it'd be like human pinball, except you can't tilt the machine to get everything to freeze. Your only real hope would be that the walls would throw you out of a window while it wasn't paying attention and it would throw you so hard that you would be plummeted into outer space. There you could live out your last few seconds of life in peace not being beaten up on by your surrounds, which only days before had been very cold and inhabitable. Though, accord to Total Recall, your eyes pop out of your head when exposed to the vacuum of outer space. That was one of those wonderfully horrible movies from the late eighties, early nineties.

Or if you were out camping, and you decided that you wanted to go to sleep and you knew that you couldn't trust the fire-too mischievous for its own good. So you do the normal thing (we'll pretend you're either a woman or women are with you) and pour your canteen of water on it and then a shovel full of dirt, mixing it all up nicely. Then knowing that you are now safe, you go to sleep. Little do you know (this one is going to be full of strange movie references, hahahaha) there under the wet dirt, aka mud, and doused ashes smolders a small and seemingly insignificant coal of fire. At first it lazily tries to open its eyes, completely disoriented and unaware of what has really happened. It just know that it was blazing away like there was no tomorrow, when all of the sudden its world was turned upside down. As awareness begins to creep into its bones this little, almost nothing of a coal begins to burn brighter and brighter until it is a flaming red hot ball of fiery goodness with evil on its mind. You, meanwhile are snuggled in deep to your sleeping bag (the deeper you snuggle into your sleeping bag, the less bears can smell or detect you, even by sight; it's almost as if burrowing is like those magic elf-capes super-frodo and his sidekick chef-boy-sam wear while on their way to defeat the evil ways of McDonalds in the fires of Mt. Doom) dreaming of your nice queen sized bed at home. The fire, which has now scared off the pack of ravenous wolves that were coming to eat you (snuggling does nothing to protect you from wolves, badgers and high school math teachers) , is coming.

The trees and bushes, sensing danger, begin to whisper and shake, their warning wafting through the air like the scent of lemon meringue pie in the summertime. The first notes of it dance their way down your ear canal and tickle your eary bones. You stir once. But your unconscious defenses kick-in, not wanting to let a bear know you're here, and you lay slumbering in peaceful bliss as your utter annihilation stalks outside your tent. Suddenly you wake up to the fire dousing you with lighter fluid (the fire doesn't care if women are present), laughing maniacally like you would expect a clown to laugh at you if you were tied to a spinning wheel and the clown was throwing knives at you. I hate clowns. It then jumps on you much like the Undertaken would have, except this time its for real. You're now covered in fire, both from the lighter fluid and from the one that's attacking you like a ferocious starving hinayana would attack a poor defenseless baby gazelle, lost and alone in the not so cold summer sun of the outback (not the steak house, though I can imagine many of the men that eat there being about as friendly, but probably smell worse). Then as you run screaming from your tent with the fire doing its best to tear out your entrails-lucky for you fire doesn't have finger nails or thumbs, ha! let's see you eat nachos, stupid fire-the surrounding trees trying to help start slapping you as you run by, covering you in sap, leaves, bugs and other assorted forest goodies. Now you're on fire, sticky and if you were to be fossilized at this moment it would confuse archeologists for centuries to come.

Finally you spot the lake, and you go barreling headlong toward its life saving waters. Just as you reach the edge a blood curdling scream emanates from all around you and if you weren't on fire it might give you pause to wonder where it came from and what sort of depraved torture is someone else enduring this night in the forest. As it is, you just want the fire put out. As you leap from the shore into the air, doing your best to imitate Greg Louganis (as a diver) though it comes out looking like you're receiving shock therapy mid-dive. As you look down to the life saving waters you suddenly realize what made the scream. The lake, upon seeing a fiery monster of death charging at it, became terrified and as you leaped into the air, it safely retreated to the other side of the valley, drowning and entire family of koala bears on vacation and send a family of people careening down the mountain side in fear for their lives (they too ended up covered in sap, though for different reasons). You didn't come out so lucky. You belly flopped onto the hard ground that used to be the muddy lake bottom. The fire merely laughs at you and mock your pain as it burns off all your clothes and body hair. The last thing you remember is it stalking off saying something about how it has your wallet, knows where you live and plans to make this a yearly occurrence. You then wake up to girl scouts taking pictures of the albino bear, and poking you with a stick. You later are turned into a local legend as you are too shamed to return to normal society and live out your days in the mountains.

See, I told you it's a good thing inanimate objects are just that. "If hate were people, I'D BE CHINA!" I love everyone.