“I’m carrying all my weight tonight,” he mumbled to himself.

Trudging up and down the boulevards he haunted the space between the neon patches of dandelion fire and quicksand marble archways.

With a garbage can moan and a 10 dollar suit he had watched it all slip away.

Some prey should not elude him.

He was a machine, with a gummed up cerebellum and a grudge against one eyed watchmakers who could not set his dials.

A sky-born signal, the stars had faded, replaced by an intricate pattern of static haze winding through the stratosphere.

He could see patterns, wincing through the smog and sparks of broken telephone poles and minutes after each reading he felt very clear about things.

The feeling was fleeting, like foxtails whipped up in a dust devil.

It wasn’t so much what I remember about the fire it was it’s presence. Where once there was cold, there was heat, though tangible to the eye the finger would only feel pain should it try to grasp a flame. There was “Quest for Fire” in eighth grade when Mrs. Buehler had a piece of black paper to cover up any and all nudity that would arise in the ensuing 84 minutes (or however long it was). There is excitement when you are about to watch a movie in a classroom but also a wariness. On one hand you are thinking to yourself, “Alright! Just whittle away the hours and let me kick back!” On the other: “This is in class…and we…well I mean it couldn’t be that good or else I would watch it on my own, plus we’ll have to learn a lesson out of it.” But as it always is within school there is not much you can do but sit and wait. Wait for the teacher to do what they will, passively allow yourself to be enveloped by the surrendering seconds as they float by. Time stands still in those places.

The movie wasn’t that good and to my eighth grade eyes even the possibility of getting anything of a movie where the actors didn’t talk was laughable. I mean I do remember musing that it would suck to be cold all the time, but other than that young Mason just tottered on by the point. The point is, or at least what the point could be of the film is the significance of technology in our society and a man made fire is, one of the most basic acts of technology. There are natural fires all the time, but the point where man took those branches together and made that spark; therein lies a divergence between living in the natural world and the ability to manipulate it to the point of great destruction.

Fucking kids.