I started a fire in the apartment today. It was a grease fire. I decided to make chocolate covered strawberries and figured it would be a nice way to spend my day off. I went to one of the strawberry stands by my house and picked out the juiciest looking crate I could find. Then I went to Trader Joes and bought two bars of their Swiss milk chocolate and a fresh bouquet of flowers. When I got home I put on some Billie Holiday, put the flowers in the vase on our kitchen table and took our new sauce pan, put it on top of a small pot filled with oil and turned up the heat. There was a cool breeze and the sun was shining through the kitchen window, I smelled the fresh roses and smiled to myself as I made a conscious decision to live in the moment and simply enjoy this beautiful day. I even kicked Hunter out so I could have the place to myself.
Anyways, I went back and forth about whether or not I should heat the chocolate with oil or water but I remember going to the Melting Pot and I recalled the way they heated each pot over hot oil and a small flame. So I put the chocolate in the sauce pan and turned up the heat. As I cleaned the strawberries I ate a few and placed my focus on the sweet, juicy flavor. Every once in a while I would go back to the chocolate and stir it a little. When the oil started to make a popping noise, I turned the heat down and then decided to take the sauce pan off the pot of oil, it was at that moment, as I picked the pan up and a stream of air entered into the hot oil that the entire pot went up in flames. I remember staring at it and thinking about the flaming cheese they served at Greek restaurants. I thought about yelling OOOOMPA and imagined that this wasn't really any different from a hairy Greek waiter carrying a plate of saganaki and figured it would slowly die down and go out. Unfortunately the flame began to climb out of the pot, the hands of hell reaching for anything flammable to grab onto. It's amazing, both my elementary and junior high years were filled with fire education. They teach you what to do, how to respond to different types of fires, and the big no no's of fire safety. What they don't seem to tell you is that, in the event of a fire, you will most likely panic and forget everything you learned in the first place. I'm sure it doesn't help that, during those years that we were given the opportunity to learn about fire safety rules, I was a hormonal 12 year old at the cusp of puberty and they always seemed to send some sexy, uniformed 20 something fireman in a pair of package-pinching pants to educate our overly-stimulated, sexually driven minds that were already cursed with poor attention spans and a knack for making guest speakers exceedingly uncomfortable. So, I did the one thing you're never supposed to do, I took my flaming metal pot, dropped it in the sink and turned on the faucet. What happened at the point almost seems too big to define, like my description of the blast would be an insult to fires everywhere, and, being that I have a new found respect for an oil-based kitchen holocaust, I find myself sweating for words. To me, a person who has never stepped out of the comfort of a softy lit fireplace, a combustive inferno shooting 6 feet upwards from my kitchen sink both stupefied and terrified me. The power of that flame was enough to start the entire place on fire; enough to suffocate me; to burn my hair and my clothes right off my body. It could have destroyed everything that mattered to us, but, in spite of this, in those astonishingly long 10 seconds, my life did not flash before my eyes, I did not find myself problem solving or thinking about what matters, I stared at that rising flame and thought about how embarrassing it would be to explain this to my neighbors, how much my landlord would hate me, how much I wished I would have a better story for the fire department then "I wanted chocolate covered strawberries," or "I was trying to melt chocolate like they do at The Melting Pot." I guess at those vital moments, all that talk about "what's important" is a sack of shit, really what comes up is a more refined image of our greatest defects, mine being, what the hell is everyone going to think of me?
