Fire

Soon after falling asleep, the song that play when you clear a world in Super Mario Brothers brought me back to the waking world. I ignored the call. Sputnik called back to Earth with a voicemail from an old roommate now living with her boyfriend in a high-rise down the street who had a party I was too anti-social to go to last night. Then the cries of a thousand sirens wafted up the hill. Okay, something was wrong, maybe I should listen to that voicemail. 

Good idea. She spied a huge fire somewhere near my house and wanted to make sure I was okay. So yeah, I called her back. I couldn't see or smell anything, so I figured I must be safe, but now I had to go check it out anyway. I felt kind of crappy for becoming one of those annoying lookylous, but fuck it, this is my backyard now.

Smoke blew up the street as I tried not to slip down it (oh yeah, we had a nasty winter storm last night. 660,000 without power right now in MA. Thank you underground utilities).

I just took an extended break from this post to eat, watch a terrible movie (Demolition Man, E's in the future don't have vertical lines, Arnold Schwarzenegger became president, Sylvester Stallone was programmed to be a compulsive knitter, etc.) and shower, then walked down to Calumet Street to check out the aftermath:

It still smelled like campfire, just like me this morning up until I finally decided to shower. This was left over from last night I assume:

I thought something witty or insightful might come from this episode, but I lost heart after seeing what happened. It's a pretty first world problem to consider everything the residents here lost. Books, clothes, computers, furniture, and the like while keeping their lives, but it's pretty devastating. Almost everything I've ever created sits in this apartment. Photo negatives, prints, files on my computer that haven't made it onto the internet. Most of the things I'm proud of would disappear. Sorry to get all maudlin on you. It just happens sometimes.