In Los Angeles, whenever we were looking for something to do, we often turned to the dictionary. A random word could spark all sorts of fun associations.
One time, we used it to see what we’d write on our tombstones: Sarah's would say, "Faithless," mine would read, "Snake," and Miski's would be "Uncontainable."
Another fun pastime was playing with fire. One night, while cleaning the house, we got frustrated with all our clutter and decided to start a big bonfire in the backyard to burn anything we didn’t need. It turned out we had a lot more to toss on than we thought! After an hour of tossing in old dish towels, ugly clothes, random objects of questionable origin, and even a traffic cone (which took ages to melt), we started to wonder if we really needed any of it at all. We were all pretty drunk, which only added to the hilarity of the situation—after all, we could have easily ended up burning everything we owned!
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| Sarah Vaquero burning a shirt in the backyard. |
When someone brought the dictionary over to the fire, it shifted our carefree vibe. None of us had the heart to toss the dictionary into the flames, so we decided to incorporate it into our game instead.
The rules were simple: one person would stand by the fire, ready to choose something to burn, while two others acted as judges on the sidelines. The person by the fire had to justify their choice for burning that item. But if they paused for more than five seconds or lost their train of thought, the judges would randomly pick a word from the dictionary and shout it at the speaker. The challenge? They had to weave that word into their justification in a coherent and meaningful way.
It was a fun game and it inspired some great arguments for burning shit.
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This is what we all looked like in those days.
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[Originally posted on I'm Nacho Steppinstone, Dec. 11, 2003]
