Fire

Letter to the future: My dad used to tell me of a time, a summer, where there was a different wildfire every week. I grew up in Arizona; not necessarily the wettest place in the U.S. People would always throw cigarettes out of the car or forget to put out a camp fire and then all hell would break loose. The grass would yield to the fire; maybe mistaking it for rain because it hadn’t seen rain for so long. My dad told me of a time where the largest fire in state history was up to the north and, another fire, was creeping through the canyons behind his childhood home. When my father saw the other fire on t.v. he really hadn’t thought anything of it; maybe a little sadness but it was a fire he couldn’t control so he thought nothing of it. When the fire made it up to his house, though, he felt like he had to have a say.

He felt like this fire, yes, he had control over somehow. Even though it was the same beast, the same flames that the grass had bowed too, he looked at it differently now that it was close to him. He had to evacuate; stand in the background of a town in chaos while he wondered if his house was still there. Even when the fire was gone and he was able to go back to his house the landscape had changed. The house was still there, ya, but the charred remains, the passing of the fire could be seen. My dad, though, felt fine when he got home back in his bed. The effects of the fire could still be seen; were still in the open but my dad still felt no remorse. Scars would stay for many years; the charred yard taking a long time to grow back but, my dad couldn’t figure out why he didn’t feel any of that initial hate toward the fire when he retold the story. It wasn’t until he had left high school and gone to college that he realized why; his family had made it through.

Everything that mattered had made it past the fire; his family, his house and his life had been thrown out intact from the chaos. Now that he had left for college; he realized what the fire had tried to take away from him when he wasn’t ready. The fire needed to come to make my father realize what was important to him at that point in his life. Through fire comes realization; even if the scars remain after many years. Some people will see the scars but, if the realization is great enough the scars will be worth it. 

Treadmill

Ca-chug...Ca-chug...Ca-chug went the repeating rubber to the backdrop of faint heavy music; set aside to the clanging and clacking of metal on metal. A billion thoughts swirled, blended, stewed, sat, festered, procrastinated  waited, wanted, in the mind of the 210 pounds of flash that ca-chuged...ca-chuged...on the repeating rubber. A billion non-qualitative thoughts that he only dreamed to be logical because you could assign a number to each one. It wasn't always that easy; in fact it was never that easy. All of these logical lists he was paid to do and found himself doing on the repeated rubber where anything but logical. You see, logic always has a clear end; something that people can all agree on. The only thing that kept coming up was an enigma; a circular problem brought about by circular reasoning because he kept coming back to the billion thoughts. The circular problem that his conclusion was that, in the end, there was no conclusion.

It was all how he kept chugging along, though, on the rubber. The thoughts of being patient; the thoughts of what was next; the thoughts of what he wanted; what they wanted; what society wanted. All of these open ended questions that everyone around him had seemed to shrug off or accept defeat on were the ones that he hadn't given up on yet. He told himself he had a higher purpose; more to this life then all of this that had appeared all around him. He didn't look at it all as opportunity but only as a box; a box that constricted who he was and made him want to get on the rubber to escape it all. Only he never really did for the questions changed to a sound like a ticking time bomb; ringing in his head telling him to do something before he was too old; before he had transformed into all of the people that he thought had stopped asking the billion questions. Was he crazy to think this way? Was he all just too worked up for his own middle class, voting, bbq, Sunday night football, bachelor's degree, fun loving, light beer drinking, white ass?

Ca-chug...ca-chug...ca-chug.