Now here’s a guy story: Police chief charged with setting downtown fire. It seems that last weekend, after the Chief’s girlfriend broke up with him, he tried to win her back by starting a fire in the downtown building where she lived so he could save her and be a hero. Let’s see, a few cardboard boxes should do the trick… oops. There goes the downtown.
I’m guessing this will end up on next week’s Leno or Letterman because it’s as funny as it is sad.
Whenever my wife’s computer goes to hell in a handbasket and I perform some magic on it, she’s gives me a juicy smooch and coos, “My hero,” half-mocking, and half-serious. I love it, of course. My daughter hates spiders of all kinds, so whenever she finds one or two in the basement shower, she calls for me and I ride down there on my white horse and slay those daddy-longlegged dragons. She’s half-embarrassed and half-grateful till I jab her with a “You just had me kill the parents of a bunch of baby spiders who are now orphans.” At that moment, though, I’m a little bit Indiana Jones, saving Marion from a tomb-full of tarantulas.
So I’m sympathetic towards the chief, as goofy and wrongheaded as he was. It’s a lifelong task figuring out where my source of power and status comes from as a man, and I’ve gotten it wrong plenty. So yeah, laugh at this guy, but know that he’s suffering from that which ails most of us. And unless we keep working at figuring it out, we’ll occasionally do similarly stupid stuff.