Tuesday, November 07, 2006

 

Fire Update:

Yesterday's fire apparently wasn't arson, but caused by a furnace malfunction. Though the local grapevine is still peddling stories of hot demolition. I wonder why the police seems to have no interest in following up on those rumours.

The bungled performance of the local fire brigade was apparently due to a gas main which couldn't be shut down in time. And to the fact that the fireplugs were too far away and water supply a problem. Which I find rather worrying, considering that my home is no closer to the fireplugs.

And as fate would have it, I had a dream of fire last night. It was your standard always-on-the-run dream (I get a lot of those and usually don't mind them), but it did feature fire. I dreamed I was sitting in a 1950s car with an American family (father and two kids) trying to escape some sort of wildfire. Eventually we ended up in some sort of mall, thinking we'd be save there. And then the mall caught fire as well (malls and department stores have the tendency to burn down in my dreams - no idea why), we lost the kids' father and I was cruising round the mall parking lot desperately trying to find the exit. Then I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep, even though I had left the lights on.

I suspect that I have some sort of mild trauma - at any rate, I feel sort of disconnected from the rest of the world. And depressed whenever I see the gutted ruin and the blackened beams where Blockmeiers' house stood only yesterday. And I wasn't even directly affected by the fire, I was just a witness. For some reason, this makes me wonder whether I have depicted the trauma suffered by the characters my novella Prisoners of War (which is much more extreme than just witnessing a fire) strong enough.

That's the curse of the writer, everything that happens to us gets turned into fiction.

posted by Cora link 23:27