OP ED wrote:i accidentally caught myself on fire a few minutes ago.
I wish I could say that would be news worth writing from home about when it happens here. Oh, all right. Fine. I'm just
kidding, it's not a crime. The truth is that I rarely accidentally catch myself on fire. In fact, I think the last time I accidentally caught myself on fire was while having my picture taken for a contributor's page on a windy day down in Battery Park City, and it was long enough ago that the World Trade Center was still standing. I'd been handed a small hair and make-up budget for the shoot. But I don't like being professionally made-up, since you can never rely on the make-up artist not to leave you looking like Joan fucking Collins, no matter how clearly you explain that your skin has nothing to hide, or that you are not going to be under bright TV studio lighting. So I skipped that part. However, I
did like having my hair done. Especially because though it's long now, it was chin-length then, and that was always a style for which executing an absolutely perfect blow-out was simply beyond my girlie-skills. I therefore happily went and had my hair rendered supernaturally straight and shiny, before proceeding to the location, with a small bag of accessories and the kind of Pantene aerosol hairspray that you can only buy in Europe. I forget what it's called, but presumably it has some ingredient that only destroys the environment in North America and not on other continents. I guess. I don't really know. The only reason I had some was that I don't like having things withheld from me enough to smuggle it into the country, even though I never used hairspray of any kind. Including that one. Which it turns out makes your hair extra-sensitive to accidentally catching on fire if it happens to blow across your face while you're trying to light a cigarette on a windy day. So it was kind of a shorter photo-shoot than scheduled. Which was okay, really, because nevertheless, it produced the only picture of me I've ever looked pretty in, in my own estimation. So I was delighted with it. Until the art department lost the film. Those fuckers. Though I think I may still have one of the Polaroids somewhere.
Anyway. For a while I had to work more of a layered hairstyle than I would have opted for, had I had any choice about it. But it was worth it. I always hated that pimping-the-brand part of the job so much that I only ever did it under extreme duress. It doesn't come naturally to me and I had come to frankly regard it as torture, on the fairly straightforward grounds that it always was. Except for that one shoot, of course. Because it totally comes naturally to me to appreciate the enjoyable part of spending a small amount of the corporate media's money accidentally catching my illegally perfect hair on fire. Though needless to say, in a larger sense, I'd maintain that actually, I didn't start the fire, 'cause it's been always burning since the world's been turning.
Still. Thanks for reminding me of it. I really couldn't say
when I've had more fun than that, whenever the hell it was.