I start this entry with a mixture of gratitude and relief. Sirens woke me up last night (I didn't note the time), but I dismissed them, as I regularly do, as the more common action of the police arriving to pursue stunt driving/street racing punks, or vagrant delinquents partying in the local park, or hunting down other such creeps, the likes of whom I've seen hanging around the block lately, who gave me the impression that they'd be soon destined sometime in their miserable lives to be rightfully thrown in jail. The sounds of approaching sirens in this area at night annoy me at first for a small instant, but then I shrug them off; feeling satisfied that the police are trying to do their job as best they can, and that somewhere out there some dimwitted criminal is getting the karma that's due to him, and I then try to return to sleep without any extra worries. This time was no different: I let my real need for a healing slumber anchor me in my warm bed; no whim of curiosity came strongly enough to make me want to peel away the sheets and peek outside in the chilly night air on the balcony to see what kind of ruckus was happening. I continued settling myself for sleep, even though the sirens sounded closer than usual.
However, the sirens last night came from fire engines instead. What has been appearing on the local news today is video footage and reports of a fire that consumed the upper suites of an apartment block last night. I'm much less indifferent to it, because it was the building that's just across the street from where I live that was burning. I discovered the evidence latently this morning of the too close for comfort blaze that occurred last night in the area. It struck me that if the conditions were such that had it been a bit more windy, and had there been a little more dried fallen leaf litter around to get lit up and blown about, other homes in close proximity to there, including mine, could have been ignited by this fire also. It would have been just small degrees of change that could have made things possibly worse. Given this hindsight, my gratitude comes from all that not happening, especially knowing how ridiculously minute the conditions at play were which started the nearby blaze to begin with. The investigators determined the cause of this blaze, that resulted in an estimated two million dollars worth of assessed damage, to be a single improperly extinguished cigarette butt.
Thankfully, there were no fatalities, but I can't help thinking that it's a shame that the careless smoker who was ultimately responsible for all this couldn't somehow suffer just a little more. Not with pain of death; just a long bout of excruciating suffering. It would be a just thing if the stupid dickhead who caused all that had gotten third degree burns over 90% of his body. Had I lived in that complex, and lost all my irreplaceable belongings, being now rendered homeless along with many others over something so stupid, and if I found out that this guy got away physically unscathed, I'd be wishing for a slow lingering prolonged torture to be set on him that was akin to something used in the Spanish Inquisition. Luckily, I turned out to be not a victim of any of this and need not take any ownership of such a problem, but I can't help but to think that the innocent tenants affected by this particular series of cause and effect might have similar such thoughts. One certainly shouldn't blame them for having them.
What is unfair in life is that the repercussions of small nuisances seem to have much greater potential to rapidly escalate into something so much larger in degree and magnitude than the repercussions of finding small and trivial things of good fortune. Those seem to always require a hell of a lot more help, work, and effort to transform them from something good into something super fantastic on the same relative scale of exponential growth as the stuff triggering disasters. Sadly, everything in this universe is slave to the state of entropy; it's always easier to destroy than to create. A carelessly chucked cigarette butt burns down a building within the course of a couple hours, while finding a coin on the street does relatively little in comparison to expand your riches so wildly. It takes a miraculous series of events, even with soundest of investment savvy, to take a quarter you find on the street and transform it into a million dollars by the end of the month*. On the same token, it's more likely that this same quarter may been have lost by someone who needed it for exact change for bus fare, and was then denied a ride without it, which may have then consequently set off a chain of horribly inconvenient events that make for lousy day fraught with bad luck.
I'd rather not end this all with thorny remarks reflecting of a sense schadenfreude directed at that bonehead smoker for this latest fire, but they're there to share. I'd be satisfied, given the fire investigators' findings, that their insurance claims (if they had insurance) would be now null and void in light of this evidence of such carelessness, or if there was somehow some other flaw or insufficiency in liability coverage for him.
I'll instead end all this with the sincere hope that the others victimized by all this recover their material losses, and have some means of change for the better throughout this ordeal. On a personal level, I'll take this close call event as lessons learned about: heeding sirens with some better discretion, the impermanence of things, and not to mention a prompting reminder to have a closer review of my own insurance policies and coverage (protection and liability).
*- Mathematically, it is possible, but in real life not probable. If I took that quarter and somehow found a way to double the amount of it each day, I'd be a millionaire in a three weeks.
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