You know, the nice thing about house fires is that they progress in such a leisurely fashion that when the homeowner comes to your house to beg you to save her son, who’s gotten caught in some Halloween decorations and can’t get out, there’s plenty of time to try to clean out an absurdly tiny tunnel that’s somehow crammed full of assorted junk, give up on that, climb over the fence, make your way into the burning house through what appears to be some kind of zoo facility, make a mental note to tell the firefighters (when they come) about the large fluffy wild cats in that cage, pass through a group of squirrel-sized baby hippos lying around the floor, have the distraught mother show you to the weird floor-level cubby where her son is supposedly trapped, get down on your knees to look inside, turn around and see the woman about to bash in your head with a fire extinguisher, grab it from her while realizing that she killed her son and crack her on the head a couple times, then run out, climb over the fence to run back to your own house, first having to stop to take off your flip-flops so you can run, then getting stuck behind some jerk who’s walking too slow and won’t move aside so you can get by, find a girl waiting for you on the front lawn of your own house, ask if her dad has called the fire department yet, start running to your house, then wake up saying, “We gotta go!” out loud.

Anyway, I just thought of that for no reason.

Also, poor Brad Beyer. I don’t know why my brain cast him in the role of the murdered son, but there you go.

P.S. That was the longest and possibly the best sentence I’ve ever written. I wish I could get paid for it. I wish somebody would read it. Aloud. In public.