Author’s Note
Fire and demolition are ugly words in a culture obsessed with preservation. We prefer makeovers, revisions, “continuous improvement.” But every builder knows there are ruins that cannot be renovated, forests so choked with tinder that mercy arrives as flame.
This closing entry in the exploration of my tools is the one I resisted writing until it felt necessary. To write about triage without addressing what comes after—the clearing, the renewal—would feel dishonest. If the earlier essays offered lenses, stances, mirrors, and splints, this one sets the match. It is the tool of last resort—the decision to destroy what cannot be redeemed so that anything healthy can live.
I am not prescribing arson of the literal or rhetorical kind. I am describing what happens when endurance turns into infection, when a structure becomes a trap, when clarity, judgment, and survival have done all they can and the rot still spreads. When the ledger of sunk costs starts to feel less like commitment and more like a mooring line tied to a sinking ship.
If the thought of deliberate destruction feels reckless, I invite you to read slowly, breathe, and notice whether the resistance you feel guards something worth keeping—or merely something familiar.
— Dom
He walks through the forest alone, dragging a metal drip torch that coughs a line of fuel across pine needles baked dry by three merciless summers. Each footstep pauses just long enough for the flame to kiss the ground. Saplings hiss. Deadfall crackles. Within seconds a wall of orange rises in his wake—disciplined, but ravenous. It looks like madness. Like vandalism. Like a final gasp of a forest that once mattered.
He does not run. He does not look back. This is the job.
Then—concrete, rebar, the stale‑dust scent of an abandoned ten‑story walk‑up. A second man kneels in the basement, gloved hands steady as he checks the thermite collar cinched around a load‑bearing column. The building is empty, condemned, one winter storm away from an unplanned collapse. Still, his work feels heretical—something sacred once echoed in these halls: laughter, grief, ordinary life. He tightens the charge, smiles almost kindly, and walks out through a ragged hole in the foundation.
Minutes later the skyline shifts. Brick folds inward, steel sighs, dust billows. When the cloud clears, sunlight touches ground that hasn’t seen sky since the Reagan administration.
Both scenes begin as violence—flame, collapse—and both are acts of care. In the forest, the prescribed burn devours excess fuel so an uncontrolled wildfire will not. In the city block, controlled demolition erases a death trap before gravity chooses its victims. Devastation as prophylaxis.
This, then, is the last tool I carry readily. Not a lens, not a shield, not a map—but fire. Because sometimes what saves you is what you’re willing to burn.
Recommended Listening:
Prescribed Fire — Burning What Won’t Save You
Overgrowth looks lush from a distance: dense boughs, thriving underbrush, the postcard shorthand for untouched wilderness. Ecologists know better. Too much fuel turns a forest into a fuse. One lightning strike, one stray cigarette, and every tree becomes kindling.
Our inner landscapes follow the same physics. Beliefs that once sheltered us grow thick and brittle—hand‑me‑down loyalties, martyr myths, nostalgia sold as virtue. They crowd the understory of conscience until comfort becomes confinement and fresh growth starves for light.
I used to mourn the ideas I set aflame—traditions that felt like heirlooms, loyalties mistaken for love, faith that promised peace if I could ignore the holes in its plot. The first sparks hurt, always. But when the smoke cleared, there was space where guilt used to grow. I used to think I owed the fire an apology for lighting it. Now I know—I owed it to myself.
Prescribed fire is less a spectacle than a ritual. You walk the boundary first, boot‑heels pressing an invisible ring into the duff while you whisper the names of what must remain. A tree where owls nest. The creek that brackets childhood. A friendship, a faith‑line, a song—anything that still feeds more than it consumes.
Only when the circle closes do you draw the match. You start small, letting the flame test the air, giving yourself time to taste every second thought. Doubt rises with the first smoke. You breathe it in, cough, and keep moving, because hesitation can spread faster than fire if you let it pool.
As the line of flame snakes back to its origin, you stand watch. You listen for the pitch of the burn, ready to stomp sparks that stray. Friends who know the terrain keep pace at the edges, calling out if the wind turns sudden. This is not drama; it is choreography—a slow waltz with something that can kill you if you forget the steps.
The work isn’t finished when the last ember winks. You walk the ground, feeling for heat that hides under ash. You name the stumps, the singe‑marks that hurt most to see.
You stay in the hush long enough to imagine what might root here next.
The forest will green again—healthier, less prone to catastrophe. So will you.
Controlled Demolition — Taking It Down, Not Letting It Fall
It begins with a hush, not a siren. You pace the footprint of a structure that once sheltered dreams but now mutters threats in every gust of wind. Concrete spiders, rebar bleeds, joists whisper of the day they will let go. Some things you can shore, some you can patch. And some—if you are honest—want to meet the earth on their own terms.
Controlled demolition is mercy translated into physics. You do not blitz the walls in fury; you lean close, read the hairline cracks like braille, and decide which beam must fail first so the rest may follow in orderly surrender. Gravity is always hungry. Your task is to plate the meal, not spray the room with shrapnel.
I felt that strange tenderness the day I set the date to leave a job that had begun to cannibalize the people inside it. I loved the crew, hated the engine. For months I stayed late, bracing rotten joists with caffeine and bravado, hoping loyalty could pass for mortar.
One morning the whole edifice groaned—a spreadsheet here, a missed anniversary there, a WARN notice delivered to a room full of people I’d worked with—and I heard the future collapse in the wires. It was time to clear the block.
Preparation looked like betrayal: whispered exit plans, quiet warnings to anyone standing too near the blast radius. Every step carried the same question—How small can we keep the rubble? You seal the sidewalks, pull the fire alarms, double‑check that no one is sleeping on the upper floors. Only then do you tap the falsework, gentle as a violinist finding middle C, and feel the weight shift under your feet.
When the charges finally speak, they sound like punctuation: a string of brief, irrevocable full‑stops. Dust blooms, the roof exhales, and nine stories fold into themselves as neatly as a letter slid back into its envelope. In the silence that follows, grief walks the site—counting memories, blessing the absence of bodies.
Controlled demolition is the burn turned outward. Prescribed fire clears your own understory; this topples whatever looms above, casting shadow on every neighboring garden. It is analysis with consequences—a well‑placed tap on a load‑bearing falsehood. You loosen one honest bolt and let the lie topple under its own impossible weight.
The dust will hang, will sting, will coat your tongue with what‑was. Breathe through the mask. Wait. Sunlight will arrive like a first‑time visitor, astonished by the space. And there, in that blank rectangle of sky, you can begin to imagine what might rise that will not require your spine as scaffolding.
Truth as Spark and Blade
Truth is antiseptic: it stings, sterilizes, and leaves no perfume to disguise the burn. Some call that cruelty; I call it precision. Musashi reminded us there are many paths to the summit, but he never said they’d stay open. A single landslide of lies can seal the switchback behind you, forcing a steeper ascent.
I have forfeited friendships—family, too—over a lone articulated fact. No insult, no rhetoric, just data set gently on the table. The hush that follows can roar louder than any argument, but untreated infection spreads. Better a clean cut than gangrene.
So before I speak, I test the blade. I hold the edge to the light and ask whether it is honed by evidence or ego, because a dull blade tears more than it severs. Then I gauge the angle; a scalpel serves both surgeon and assassin—intention distinguishes them. Finally, I commit to one decisive stroke. Repetition turns surgery into torture. Once the wound is open, air and time must do their work.
Truth can spark as readily as it cuts. One mismatch in the numbers, one timeline that refuses to align, one photo of children in cages labelled “policy,” and the dry grass of public conscience ignites. Let it burn—firelight reveals faster than lantern glow—but tend the perimeter. A wildfire of outrage without containment consumes more than it cleanses.
Wielded this way, truth becomes both blade and flame: sharp enough to excise rot, hot enough to cauterize, brief enough to leave space for healing once the damage is done.
What Grows Next — The Space You Make
Ash is alkaline—bitter on the tongue, generous to the soil. A day or two after the burn, the clearing still smells of smoke, but the palette has already shifted: charcoal greys giving way to blush‑pink fireweed, the first optimist on scorched ground. Blink, and grass spears through soot as though roots had been holding their breath for this very moment.
The human aftermath is quieter but no less alive. Obligations you once carried like sandbags suddenly feel weightless, and the hours they soaked now lie open, startled by their own expanse. You wander inside them at first, unsure whether freedom is a blessing or a prank. Then something small takes root—a half‑read novel reclaimed from the bedside stack, a walk taken without headphones, a hobby you abandoned when hustle masqueraded as identity. None of it looks heroic. That is the point. Heroics belong to the blaze; renewal hides in the ordinary.
Not every absence requires replacement. Some gaps beg to remain gaps: silence where a ritual argument used to roar, blank Saturdays where a toxic side‑gig once devoured weekends. Leave those spaces untouched for a season. The urge to replant everything is just the old clutter lobbying for parole.
Emptiness is not evidence of loss; it is proof of capacity. Nature abhors a vacuum only when neglect lingers. When intent presides, the vacuum becomes a vow: I will not fill myself with what used to choke me. It doesn’t promise safety. It promises freedom. And freedom—uncertain, drafty, exhilarating—remains the only climate where integrity can breathe.
Conclusion — The Tool No One Asks For
We began with a lens to see, forged a stance to hold, learned a strike to act, patched the soul-deep wounds left by endurance, and now arrive at the match. No other tool in the set is so decisive. Once flame or gravity does its work, the skyline edits itself and cannot be revised back into comfort.
If the sirens in your head are wailing—This is irreversible!—listen, then look at the terrain one last time. Are you preserving a habitat or an inheritance of hazard? Mercy often dresses like violence when rot has been allowed to settle in.
Light the match only on days when the wind is steady, the exit lines chalked, the new seeds cupped ready in your palm. Destruction without blueprint is just a tantrum; destruction with intent is architecture in negative space.
When the timber pops or the columns fold, stand witness to the transformation, but resist the reflex to mourn the noise. Stand your distance but feel the heat, the radiant shove against your ribcage, taste the metallic tang of adrenaline—copper at the back of your throat, and remember: you are alive not despite this choice but because of it. Every act of honest ruin makes room for something that cannot germinate in shadow.
So carry the match with respect, not dread. Risk the heat when the calculus says staying is slower suicide. And when the first green blade lifts through ash or a shaft of sun finds floor that knew only mildew, mark the moment.
Don’t flinch. The work didn’t end in the fire—it began there, in the clearing you were brave enough to make.
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