Mom was out of town and I was back home for winter break. I decided it’d be fun to smoke a bowl and start a fire in her wood-burning stove. Get all cozy and play some video games. Now, we used this fireplace all the time and I consider myself an expert, but under the influence of jazz cabbage, well...

I got the fire rolling, turned on the tv, but noticed a strange crinkling noise. We’d had a stink bug problem that year, so my first instinct was to look up in the air. To my horror, the black, cast iron chimney had a raging orange spot forming halfway up. Smoke was starting to seep out from the seams behind the stove.

Now, I don’t know if ya’ll have ever experienced a chimney fire while stoned, but experts would advise contacting your local fire department. Me, however, well...

The first thing I did was grab my mom’s cats and ran them into her bedroom far away from the fireplace. If shit got real, I’d grab them all again and jump out her window. I then let her dog out, who was running around barking up at the chimney in terror. While outside, I put on some leather gardening gloves and grabbed a bucket into which I shoved as much freshly fallen snow as I could. I opened up every window in the house, grabbing box fans along the way to strategically place in each window. Then, with my leather gardening gloves on, I opened the stove doors, grabbed the flaming log in my hands, and threw it out our first floor window into a snow drift. Immediately I threw the bucket of snow on the fire causing ungodly amounts of smoke to billow into our house. Every smoke detector in the house went off. I ran back and forth from outside throwing more snow into the fireplace until that burning orange spot began to disappear. It must’ve taken me two hours to fan the smoke out of the house. I shop vacuumed all the water out of the stove, stopping periodically to suck down a cigarette outside, pacing around our house in the snow and looking up frantically at the chimney to make sure no a single puff of smoke was coming out.

I must’ve been up until 4am doing cleanup and planning damage control. When my mom returned the next day, I mentioned the fireplace was making some strange sounds, but otherwise my time alone at the house was uneventful. She bought it! When we had our chimney service come by to check it out, the damage was immediately obvious. They couldn’t believe the house didn’t burn down. Chimney fires are damn near impossible to put out. I never told them anything. The chimney was eventually replaced, and when they showed us the creosote buildup inside the chimney I almost fainted. You could barely fit a pencil through the hole in between the blackened, chalky buildup.

Anyways, that experience definitely took a couple years off my life lol