perfessorm's Journal: What happened to me, August 31st, 2004, first bit

Okay, so this is what's happened.

I was really tired. It was the middle of the Republican National Convention, and I headed back to my apartment to get some sleep. I got up and decided that even though I was already in the middle of doing runs of posters (which means tall piles of paper scrap as well as posters with varnish drying on them scattered everywhere)

and I had just a few days before packed up massive quantities of recycleables (read big bags o' stuff in the kitchen and by the door),

and I was packing up stuff for my move and hence had moving boxes (filled and empty) and moving supplies all over,

and was in the middle of inventorying all my computer equipment, much of it just purchased, before packing it (so CPUs and drives and cables and registration cards and manuals all along one wall),

and the place was even more cluttered than usual since I was pulling out lots of other things to see what got kept/shipped/replaced

that, in any case, it made sense for me to make room for a few protestors to sleep over.

So first I moved a few things off to the side and finished packing the stuff to be thrown out.
Then I cleared the path from the kitchen to the balcony so folks could go and hang out outside.
Then I decided to clean up the kitchen a bit to make it all a bit less obviously Mad Scientist.

As I was cleaning I found myself irritated at this one area along the front of my kitchen counters. In the area around the sink water tended to overflow and the varnish there had been looking more and more grody since the late seventies. I'd spent a bit of time once trying to sand it down but it was hard as a rock. I'd tried some light-duty paint stripper and it had taken forever to make any progress at all.

I was in a rush. I was annoyed. Enough of this shit.
I pulled out a liter bottle of rubbing alcohol (90%). Glug, glug, glug. Right down the front.
Tried sanding a bit, kneeling there in the heady aroma. Still no dice.
Oh, c'mon, this is bullshit. I don't have the time for this. I've got to get back downtown. I've already blown most of the day. I brought a one gallon jerry can (I had two) full of Bestine out from my bedroom.
Glug. Glug. Glug.
That should do it.
I stood up and looked at the counter, wet with solvent and surrounded by a large pool of mixed chemicals. At the wall of yellow-orange that seemed to rise from the floor as slowly as a garage door opening. At me standing inside of this laconically expanding ball of fire.

Woomph!

It was actually quite a modest sound. Or so it seemed to me. It would be months before I would wonder why I never heard the three hundred and fifty-odd square feet of window glass imploding.

Time then snapped back to normal speed as I found myself able to see nothing but a bright orange glow, thinking that this was the last thing I would ever see. That at this very moment my eyeballs were melting out of their sockets.
I turned and ran, heading away from the center of the fire, towards the edge of the kitchen, towards the bathroom. I reached the edge of the kitchen and emerged from the fireball. I briefly noted that I could see again. My gratitude at that, at a scale that would normally be overwhelming, was a minor note beneath the screaming drive to run. I made it to the bathroom, got in the shower, turned the cold water on full, stood under it for a few seconds, then looked down to see what sort of shape I was in.
At that moment my mind was full of the possibilities, of the chance that I would find charred, exposed bone or raw, bloody, bubbling flesh. So when I say that I was deeply relieved to see what looked pretty much like my normal legs, but with greyish triangles of skin hanging down over reddish dermis, each hanging bit about three or four inches long, trust me, then and there that constituted good news.
It meant that I wasn't about to die. It meant that I could fight back. My full-throated yell of resistance echoed off the bathroom tiles as I stood there and thought, "okay, here we go!"

Fuck the world, I'm standing firm.
I ran back to fight the fire.

Rustin