This is rumor control; here are the facts.

So someone tried to burn down my backyard today.

After the fire was out, the fireman nonchalantly told me there had been eleven similar alley fires in my neighborhood (which most of you know as Gummo) this past weekend.

I was a mess. You can imagine.

I can now say that I've had a waiter ask me if I was okay because I was crying in my fajitas, which says a lot about me- all of it unprintable.

There's just the utter helplessness of it. That, and the fact that I'm running out of elements that haven't tried to destroy the place where I live.

Fire is fast. And I am sitting here, in a swirling paranoid swamp, absolutely terrified.

I don't have anywhere else to go.

And of all the countless ways I've been terrified of dying since I moved in here, a fire was never one of them.

Until now.