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"Always grab the reader by the throat in the first paragraph,
sink your thumbs into his windpipe in the second, and hold him against the wall
until the tag line."
- Paul O'Neil
All Original Site Content
Copyright © 2003-2004
Phil Elmore, all rights reserved.
Have you ever wondered about those house fires that all start in a pile of oily rags in the garage?
I've lived in plenty of houses in my life. Not once, no matter how many lawn mowers and weed-whackers and cans of gasoline and drill presses and boxes (and boxes of smaller boxes) were piled in the garage or the basement, did I ever once accumulate a pile of oily rags. For what would I use oily rags, anyway? My father kept a rototiller in his garage, but never once did he get the urge to leave a glistening David Hasslehoff's Bare Chest on Baywatch shine on the surface of the machine. Sure, he greased the bearings once in a while, but I don't remember a stack of old boxer shorts and t-shirts with paint on them being gathered to commemorate the occasion.
Despite this, you're constantly reading about people whose houses burned down thanks to their combustible oily rag collection. How does this happen? Do the occupants say to themselves, "You know what this garage doesn't have? A pile of oily rags in the corner. Grandpa, come here and smoke around the rags, would you? This family is going to start living on the edge before we all die of boredom. While you're at it, stand on that top rung on the folding ladder, the one that says it isn't a step."
Not once in all the soot-covered, post-house-fire interviews I've seen on television has a reporter or an investigator ever asked, "So why did you have a pile of oily rags in your basement or garage, anyway?" I really feel this is a question that needs answering, if only so the rest of us can learn how to prevent these apparently spontaneously generating stacks of flammable cloth. Maybe every house that's ever been built is just issued a pile of oily rags that nobody can be bothered to clean up. Maybe a garage just doesn't seem like a garage without the faint smell of petroleum products hanging in the air.
Of course, this could all come back to haunt me. I could find myself standing on the curb one day as firefighters put out a small blaze that has blackened the corner of my garage and smoke damaged my favorite box of smaller boxes and empty AOL CD tins, confronted with the question, "So where did the pile of oily rags come from, buddy?"
"I don't know," I'll shrug helplessly. "They were here when I bought the house."