Fire

I remember when I was a little boy in India, we used to regularly set our neighborhood garbage bin on fire. I don't know what prompted us to do it, perhaps it was just the sight of humongous quantities of flammable material in the bin that were currently not aflame. So whenever the garbage in this bin rose up above eye level, which was always because no one ever came to pick up this garbage, we applied matches to it and hey ho, a great fire was had by all. It was very enjoyable.

Enjoyable only to us kids, of course. This fire resulted in a lot of foul-smelling smoke. Especially in the evenings after the cool air set in and the smoke refused to move to a higher altitude. Practically every dwelling in the neighborhood turned into a smokehouse and everybody's dad and mom cursed at us for setting off the fire. But we didn't give a fuck. Matches were freely available. And in our youthful wisdom, it was God's will to set shit alight otherwise He wouldn't have bestowed upon us so much pleasure in the aftermath.

But the point of this flashback is, today my fucking neighbor across the woods decided to start a fire in his backyard. Gathering twigs and leaves and what not. I saw the industrious bastard spend all his afternoon walking all over the woods gathering stuff and putting it on his fire. The smoke drove away all the birds and it blew right into my home and onto my deck where I was trying to watch some birds. How times have changed for me. This is what it must mean to be an adult. To have all the goddamn senseless acts you did in your childhood to be perpetrated on you in return. Being an adult sucks big time. But not just because somebody started a fire and blew smoke into my house. It sucks because I totally lost the ability to enjoy that fire.