So last night I found out that genetics will kill me.

I have, in my living room, a lamp. The lamp has a white cone that extends upward from the black base to form a lamp shade of sorts. The light shines upward and illuminates the room. This is all fairly simple lamp mechanics here. Not anything special.

Except a few months ago the lamp and the wall it is near met with a hefty collision. The white cone snapped off. It still sits on the lamp just fine, and it does its job, the cone of plastic simply isn’t attached to anything, so at times it tips. Nothing major there, either.

Last night I wandered back into the living room and brushed against the lamp without noticing. I sat down at my desk to write. I wrote for a while. Then I started to notice I felt a bit dizzy. I couldn’t pin down why I felt dizzy but I certainly did. Also kind of nauseous. I chalked it up to life and kept working.

I decided, after a few more minutes, to get up and walk around the place in an attempt to feel better. As I stood up my eyes naturally ended up pointing toward the lamp. The plastic shade had tipped worse than ever before and the cone rested directly against the bulb. The bulb was merrily melting a hole in the cone. I quickly moved the cone away from the bulb, turning the shade so the discoloration and hole would point into the corner where it couldn’t be seen.

I opened some windows and moved the bigger fan into the living room to help clear out the noxious plastic fumes that were making me feel like crap. The fumes themselves were sparse, so it wasn’t a horrible thing but I just kept ignoring it.

And I thought back to a story my family would tell me. My father wrote in a tiny room, with a typewriter, a metal trash bin and an ashtray. One night he emptied the ashtray into the bin, which being near a typewriter, already found itself full of discarded paper.

One cigarette in the ashtray was still smoldering.

So my father keeps writing. The room fills with smoke? He writes. My mother and a friend get us all out of the apartment? My father hasn’t noticed because he’s writing.

They went back for him.

But there you go. Death by absent-minded stupidity while writing? In my genes.