Common Nonsense: We didn't start the fire

To reach my age (I’ll turn a decrepit 27 in March) and still be hopelessly incapable of building a sustainable bonfire for friends and loved ones (especially when it reaches record lows in Palm Coast) is just one of the many traits about me that help dial in that “utterly undatable” vibe I’ve been trying to perfect since, oh I don’t know, age 14 or so.

“Think what we want to do is go for a teepee shape,” I mumbled to Cody and Nik, trying to prop logs of Publix firewood against each other, desperately hoping they don’t topple over again this time, or at least that they’d stay up long enough to light the newspaper I strategically balled up underneath them. “Yep, no doubt about it: The teepee shape is key.”

But what did I know? In case you missed it, I said I got my firewood from Publix, where shopping is a pleasure. Real men would’ve put down their coupon book, grabbed an ax and got chopping, I thought, disgusted with myself as I bantered about this week’s BOGO cereal deals with the sweet, old lady at the checkout counter. Real men, rugged-palmed, ripped-flannel-shirted and grizzly bearded, wouldn’t waste their money on something they could get for free in the empty lot down the street. And they wouldn’t eat cereal, either — they’d throw some mulch and berries in an old hubcap or something, soften it up with water from the nearby crick and choke it down.

Just like that. Breakfast.

But I knew I wasn’t most men. I was a thoughtful intellectual.

“Owie, splinter!” I said, letting the teepee topple to attend to my wounded, moisturized fingers. “My hands are my livelihood,” I told the guys, making an air-typing motion. “What a close one.”

But a breezy 25 minutes later, and the pit was ready to go. The logs were erected, and stuffed inside their triangle was balled up newsprint. I didn’t know much about fire, but I knew it needed oxygen to thrive — now you see the architectural genius behind my teepee theory.

And boy, did it pay off.

I lit the newspaper, and the flames were roaring, I mean really kicking — for a good 30 seconds or so. After that, the bottom of the pit was heaped in flakes of molten ash. The teepee’s insides were charred, but the wood wasn’t close to catching.

This wasn’t working.

And that’s when we got the rubbing alcohol.

With every splash, the fire roared upward, its glorious heat cutting through the cold to warm our undeserving faces. And that’s how it felt, like we didn’t earn this fire. It felt like cheating. And plus, since we were burning only paper, the flames died just as quickly as they came alive.

Real men dig down deep inside themselves, tap into those primal instincts and make fires with nothing but a couple rocks and some actual, useful, can’t-learn-this-in-school know-how; and here we were, unable to do it with lighters, stacks of newspaper, Publix precut firewood and a bottle of alcohol — the equivalent of liquid fire, the bottled version of “Bonfires for Dummies.”

“It’s got to be the wood,” Cody said, finally breaking the silence.

“It just won’t catch,” Nik said.

“Fire’s dumb anyway,” I said, pulling up my hood and staring into the mockery of that glowing, red center, how it seemed to stare back from inside a teepee I built for it and scoff in its pops and crackles. “Stupid fire.”

Then we scooted our chairs closer to the pit, determined to soak in any heat the coals might grant us. We zipped up our jackets and stuffed our hands inside our pockets. But the night grew colder, and so did we — colder, and less evolved, and so much more undatable.