Chemical Warfare
My aunt asked me to take her to go get some oil for heat. I'm surprised at how many people have no idea what that means. For the privileged: Not all houses are heated by electricity or natural gas. Some people have tanks that need to be filled with oil in order to be fed into the furnace and burned for heat. My aunt's house is one such place.
I thought she wanted me to take her to the office so she could pay for it and have a truck come deliver it. Nope. She wanted to get some kerosene for her personal heater. We put two 5-gallon cans in my trunk and went to the gas station. We were a block away from her house when some jackass slammed on his brakes to make a turn at the last minute.
An object in motion tends to stay in motion. (That's called inertia)
One of the gas cans fell over. I thought it was just a minor spill so I decided to just clean it up when I got home. The ride home became increasingly bumpy, earthquake-like almost. The only problem was that the violent shakes were all in my head. The fumes became unbearable even with the windows down. That's when I pulled over and double checked the trunk. I lifted the trunk floor to discover that the entire wheel well was full of kerosene and the spare tire was submerged. I BP'd my own damn car. The guys at the fire station told me to put kitty litter in it to absorb the gas and then just vacuum it out. They said it'd also help the smell.
I spent the next four days filling my trunk with kitty litter, letting it sit overnight with the windows down, vacuuming it out and repeating. Didn't help. That brings us to part 2 of the story...
Do-It-Yourself Car Bomb
Today I went to the car wash to try and clean the trunk. I took a few household items with me. At no point did I consider how I would look to other people on the street. Imagine a guy getting out of his car at a self serve car wash at 8 o'clock at night with a black hoodie, dark jeans, skull cap, one of those masks the women wear in nail salons (the fumes), a pair of latex gloves, several bags of kitty litter, a jug of Tide, a gallon jug of vinegar, some white powder in a zip lock bag (baking soda), and some electrical tape. And, because it was dark and I'm from Southeast, I kept looking around to see who was watching me. It's no wonder that everybody left at the same time and every car that pulled up afterward peeled out when they saw me.
So anyway, that's not even the car bomb part. I ended up taking the trunk floor out altogether, because it was too heavily saturated. That's when I noticed a set of wires running underneath the exact area where the can spilled. The wires were still soaked in gas. I look on the underside of the floorboard and there's this huge charred section where I guess they either got hot or sparked a bit. So I immediately thank whatever deity guides my life for keeping me, my daughter and aunt alive.
Apparently as I was riding around with two 5 gallon drums of kerosene in my trunk, one tipped over spilling two gallons of kerosene directly on top of a set of electrical wires. All of this inside of a trunk which sits above my car's gas tank. All it would've taken was one spark to kill all of us. As far as I'm concerned, that's my Christmas gift.
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