some thoughts

The fire and its absurdly stretched-out aftermath has got to be the world's biggest example of my inexplicable tendency to feel incredibly guilty for things around me that are less than good. I have no idea why I have this need to think that the fire was all my fault and that I could have/should have prevented it. There is no rational reason for me to take full responsibility for a huge bit of bad luck, but that is exactly what I have been doing for over two years.

Maybe it was just bad luck after all…..or dumb bad luck
Fortunately I am now making a tiny bit of progress because as I continue to replay all of the events leading up to the fire, I have recently found myself rationalizing (being rational?......or just making excuses?) about it a lot more. I am now remembering all kinds of things that support the case of it not being my fault. Doug backs me up by saying “that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all along.” Hmmm…..he wasn’t very persuasive early on. But maybe I wasn’t yet ready to be persuaded.

I guess I was just letting in too much of the candle vibe from other people to notice that. I completely ignored the burned-out hole in our bed’s headboard where the lamp had been, and just yesterday we both simultaneously remembered that the stupid lamp had been turning itself on and off randomly and making occasional spitting noises for several months before the fire. Hello? Both of us are both dumb and negligent.. The stupid lamp was giving us all kinds of signs of its impending explosion and we just sat back and let it do its thing to our house.

So it’s still my fault…..just not 100%. I should have commented on the lamp’s weird behavior more forcefully. I figured the lamp was heading in the direction of simply not working and that was as far as I went with it because I tend to leave the electrical matters to Doug. I wonder if he ever gave it a second thought. I figured if it was that big a deal, he’d take care of it. I also wonder whether it was the lamp that went bad, or whether some bad wiring in the house caused the lamp to go bad. Doug has mentioned from time to time over the years that the wiring in our very old house might be somewhat questionable.

We have been living for 20 years in a really old house that probably had bad wiring when we bought it. It has exactly the same wiring that it had 20 years ago. It seems that part of the excitement of living in an older house or building is always having in the back of your mind the notion that your house could catch on fire at any time. It’s just part of that old house vibe. We were living life on the edge, I guess.….it’s very easy to get used to that.