text: I quickly realised that my ability to light a fire - as in a campfire, or a bonfire, or a heath fire - was just about as valuable as gold, but unlike gold, it wasn’t rare, or finite; my gift was one that could keep giving; a paucity only as severe as I dictated it to be, and thus, as the ebbing and flowing of the stock market used to command the rising and falling tide of symbolic wealth, my knowledge was something that was as abundant or scarce as I thought was necessary to preserve a lifestyle that suited my discerning tastes and desires - of rich game, and decadent lodgings (relatively speaking); of exotic women, the best entertainment, and the most efficient workers at my beck and call: quite the fine life indeed, once again, relatively speaking, though not without its ups and downs; consider for instance my constant need to move around: for as a community learned what I kept in my tinderbox, and thus the priceless secret of “The Man of Flame”, as they zealously called me, like some Earth-walking demi-god, they would surely need to perish lest my distinct leverage become common parlance, and my position of unmatchable power compromised, a technological advancement, useless, et cetera, et cetera, and all the pleonasms my legal-speak used to jumble in for “clarity” or “comprehensiveness of message” - and on top of the moving the very need to repeat such a banal and neanderthalic task to the slack-jawed amazement of the hillbilly populace we now call Earth, as I yawn, and roll my eyeballs and watch the flames encompass the body of some ceremoniously chargrilled chieftain, or the centuries-from-succulent fowl that was uneasily burnt to a crisp by some quite frankly pointless housewife, or denwife, or whatever the type of wife it was at that particular settlement; wattle and daub wife, shithutwife; on a related note, animals, I suppose are another grievance of mine - not the majestic roam-the-great-plains type, the base pre-human type; the ones that devolved into primates just two short years after what I like to call the Shiitake Bomb, because without their computer chips and convenience foods, they’re really just parasitic worms with arms and legs and never-sated, slobbering chomping mouths; oh, how they shrieked with terror when that mushroom with the slightly too-small head leaned slovenly to the west; when that thunderclap wall of sound tore the leaves from their trees and their shutters from their windows; it’s a scene I remember like it was yesterday, and look back on with fondness for the opportunities it has offered up to me on a plate; for, in this world of smog clouds and darkness, in this world of dense, immeasurable sandstorms, and primality and fear and unknowing, in this world, of categoric, never-ending night, the man who starts fires holds the key to the dawn of a new era.