I’ve had problems in the past with my temper, but through some anger management practices that I’ve incorporated into my life, I’ve been able to control my temper issues much better in recent years.

This post has nothing to do with any of that.

Rather, it has to do with gasoline.

My wife and I bought our first house about eighteen months after we got married, having lived in an apartment during that first year-and-a-half, saving money for the eventual starter home.

It was small and it was never going to be forever, but it worked well for about seven years. It had a lot of things going for it as a starter home, but the clock was ticking all along, and we were going to end up leaving that place. Nevertheless, we made improvements to the place, here and there. We made one of the bedrooms into a nursery where all three of our children spent some of their youngest nights. We planted a side garden one spring that yielded more zucchinis than you would have imagined could come from so few plants.

One of the issues that we tried to address with the house, an issue that we tried to fix but never completely tackled, was a significant stump in the middle of the backyard. One time, we gingerly wiggled my pickup truck in between the side of our garage and our neighbor’s nearby fence so we could get the pickup into the backyard, where I proceeded to hook the truck up to the stump with a tow cable. The truck tires dug some pretty impressive trenches in the dirt of the backyard, while the stump held the truck solidly in place.

And then, there was the time that I thought that the best way to deal with the stump was to go at it with an axe. Not at any particularly decent level of upper-body fitness at the time, my physical strength gave out long before the stump took very much damage at all. As a matter of fact, if I remember correctly, the axe head ended up coming loose from my axe handle at one point; I don’t know if you’ve ever seen how far an axe head can fly when it leaves the handle to which it was once attached, but those suckers can go quite the distance.

And then, there was the last battle with the stump. Which isn’t to say that we beat the stump. Rather, we quit the battlefield.

I’d read something on the internet somewhere that said that you could soak a stump in gasoline (remember, back at the start of this post, when I said it was about gasoline) and that doing so would cause it to slowly burn the stump out when you set fire to it.

Now, before you start to SMH, understand that I am not what you would call a dumb person –> I am in the top thirteen percent of educated people in the United States, according to recent information from the Census Bureau. However, I never registered for the class in college on starting fires with gasoline.

So, I soaked the stump with gasoline. I put a decent amount on there, and I let it soak for hours –> it may have even been overnight. And then, very cautiously, I approached the gasoline-soaked stump with a lighter, and I lit the stump, and…

…nothing.

Well, not exactly nothing.

It burned. The gasoline, not the stump.

Several minutes later, all I had was a stump that appeared unscathed by having been on fire for several minutes. And the smell of burnt gasoline tinging the air. And the smell of my defeat, also tinging the air.

So, I went and got some more gasoline. As smart as I am, of course I didn’t have the gasoline anywhere near the stump as it was burning; I mean, what kind of a fool do you take me for?

And, of course, because I am significantly intelligent, I put the gasoline in an open container, because only an idiot would put it in a closed container, thereby making an explosion much more likely.

So, with my one-gallon ice cream bucket filled about half way with gasoline, I approached the stump once again.

As many times as I’ve looked back on that moment, leading up to what happens next, I can’t remember having thought to myself at all about the fact that the stump was just recently on fire and that the stump might still be hot enough to cause the gasoline to catch fire upon contact. That thought never entered my mind, at least not as far as I can remember.

Of course, the stump was hot enough still to catch the gasoline on fire on contact, so when I poured the gasoline on the stump, the gas caught fire. Then, the fire climbed the stream of pouring gasoline, back up and into the bucket, to the extent that I was, two seconds later, holding a ice cream bucket with burning gas in it.

This caused a total freak-out.

I threw the ice cream bucket, with burning gasoline in it, up in the air, in a panic, and burning gasoline left the bucket, mid-air, and rained down on my head.

In retrospect, it probably would have been more intelligent to just calmly set the bucket down and step away, but that’s not what I did.

Did you know, by the way, that the old trick that they taught all of us when we were in elementary school –stop, drop, and roll– doesn’t work in the slightest if what is burning is a liquid on your very skin? You can roll around till the cows come home and it’s not going to put out the burning liquid on your skin.

It’s about here in the story where I should bring in the hero, the person who saves the day.

While I was doing all of these ridiculous things in the backyard, my wife was mowing the lawn in the same general vicinity. She ended up seeing me and putting out the fire on me with the nearby garden hose. Even after the fire was out, I told her to keep spraying me because the gasoline on my skin felt so hot that I was concerned that I would start burning again.

After my wife was done with the garden hose, I ended up taking a cold shower to wash gasoline off of me (and because I had been rolling around on the ground, trying to put myself out). After the shower, it became pretty clear that the skin on the side of my head and on one of my ears was very badly burnt. I almost ended up having to have my ear reconstructed.

So, if you are looking for some lessons to take away from this story, here’s a couple:

**No matter how intelligent you believe yourself to be, there are things that you don’t know anything about; it’s dangerous to pretend that you do.

**Any husband who is preparing to do something stupid would be best served in having his wife nearby to “catch him when he falls”.

**Don’t believe everything that you read on the internet.

**The one sure way to make a bad situation worse is by panicking.

When we sold the house in the summer of 2009, that stump was still there. I wonder if it still is.