For all the belly-aching about the high price of gasoline, you know perfectly well you’re going to be driving to work and school, to the grocery store, and even to family and friends for parties. You won’t be getting a Volt any time soon, nor will you be jamming onto unreliable, uncomfortable, and already crowded public transportation. Yeah: that’s you—standing on a freezing cold corner, waiting with a couple of high school students practicing their swear words for thirty minutes, waiting for a bus that has no seats left that aren’t filled with freshly inked gang symbols, knife cuts, or bodily waste.

You, like the Czar, will be driving, and staring at the gas pump tick ever closer to $100 for a fill up. Maybe, you concede, you will walk your trashcans to the curbside rather than drive them there each week.

But you know who really is feeling the pinch? You know who really will have his lifestyle altered because of the high price of gas?

That moron next door to you who has his annual bonfire. Yeah, the guy who invites his car buddies over—all their antique vehicles are under tarps in their garages, so you never actually see any cool hardware at his house—who drink about a case of Falstaff beer each, and then decide to have fire on the property line.

He gathers a bunch of wooden crates, some four-by pallets stolen from the local grocery store parking lot, scrap wood, trash, yard waste, and a broken wooden kitchen chair, and pile it all up together.

He then douses the pile with a couple gallons of gasoline, and hits it with a cigarette lighter. Fwoomph! Your entire house lights up with an orange flash, and you race to the window to see if, hoping maybe this time, he killed himself. But instead you arrive to see a yellow mushroom cloud rise up over your garage roofline, see his buddies scramble back from the unexpectedly intense flash heat of the ignition, and hear his annual announcement: “Dude, my &%#$ing eyebrows are gone!”

But what a fire. The flames are going a good eight, nine-feet high as they pick their chairs up from the ground and put them back in a drunken circle around the fire. “Who knows some swear words we can practice?” one of them asks, and a fresh round of beers and curses are handed out. “Bazoomies,” one of them says, and they all laugh. Morons.

You stand at the window and shake your head. But part of you wants to be out there, near the fire, because there is something so instinctual about it. Of course, you would have stacked the fire properly, used a bit of fatwood and proper ventilation, and got the fire going with a simple match and no gasoline at all. But still.

The fire settles down now, and the flames are a wildly flickering strobe of orange and yellow, only three feet high and floating over the white and black speckled wood below. It is self-sustaining now, and a good fire, a welcoming fire. A hearty one that throws off steady warmth and light, and adds to the convivial atmosphere. “Dude, the &%#$ing fire is going out.” You startle. Is it? It looks good to you, although maybe you might open up the bottom a little bit to get some more air into the fwooomph! Another mushroom cloud goes up as he dumps another gallon of gas into the flames. The guys scramble and yell, bolting for cover from the thick, black smoke as one of them observes “My &%#$ing shoe laces melted!” And they all gather around, laugh, and agree that indeed, his &%#$ing shoe laces melted.

This repeats. The next morning you go out, and there is an acrid smell in the air. A smell that tells you that the fire got too small for them, so they fed it with old car parts and plastic bags of garbage since they used up all the wood they knew how to gather. You take the dog over, who for some reason wants to go in any other direction than the spot, and see a huge black patch on the ground, wispy tendrils of gray smoke coiling up from several places. In the remains are blackened aluminum beer cans, nails, unidentifiable twisted black shapes, and part of the old kitchen chair. And about a third of your wooden adirondack chair from your deck.

You also notice that about half the burned patch of grass is on your property. “All right,” you mutter, and take the dog back to the house. As you walk back in, your five-year-old daughter asks if everything is okay. You say it is; that this only happens once a year, he is quiet most other times, and that the grass will grow back in a couple weeks. She asks what &%#$ing bazoomies are.

Yeah, he might skip the fire this year.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.