Every time I leave my house, whether it be for stalking James Van Der Beek or attending a twenty four hour Shia Labeouf film festival, I’m convinced when I come home I will find it burned to the ground.  I don’t know where this mentality comes from, but I always think a wire will short circuit somewhere, or my pets secret Fourth of July celebration will go awry or that I left my dream journal too close to a lit candle and just like that everything will go up in smoke.

I will return home to a mountain of ashes with my burnt Wii and charred Justin Bieber posters being the blackened cherries on top.  Everything important to me will be gone and I’ll be forced to live out of dumpster behind Chick-Fil-A with two possums and a nest of abandoned baby pigeons.

I will violently throw myself on a roasted box of Milk Bones after discovering my loving dog perished in the blaze.  He would have slept peacefully through the whole ordeal, dreaming of cookie dough, since a violent pack of murders could raid the house and he wouldn’t notice.  Still I’d feel his ghost licking angrily at the back of my neck as he’d now have a personal vendetta against me and want to haunt me Ebenezer Scrooge style. 

“Max, I’m so sorry I forgot and left my Yankee Candle French Vanilla candle lit while I went to Target and bought more shit I don’t need!  It just smells so good!  Like birthdays and now burnt toast!” 

My cat would of course be alive and strutting angrily around in the front yard because I believe my cat is incapable of dying.  She ate a crayon last week and I was convinced I would have to drive her to the nearest human hospital in order to get her stomach pumped (that has to be toxic to an 8 pound cat’s immune system right?!), but instead she just looked at me like “What of it bitch? I’ll eat all your fucking crayons! Speaking of crayons why do you even own them you’re like 27 years old!”

“Well excuse me for enjoying to color!” I told her as she playfully clawed at my ankles while vomiting up Burnt Sienna.

Seriously, my house burning down, my dog dying, that is the shit that keeps me up at night.  These are all images my mind can’t handle, so every time I leave the house I hug my dog tightly and tell him, “Don’t you fucking die on me!  Don’t play with fireworks and whatever you do stay out of the cat box!  Stay out of the cat box!”