It never fails. Every

It never fails. Every April, when the winds pick up and rush right down the wide open avenues around my apartment building, the pilot light blows out on my water heater. And so every April, I wake up one morning to find that I must either join the polar bear club or forego the shower experience altogether until PG&E can show up to relight the pilot.

As much as I enjoy showers—which is perhaps more than I should admit in a drought state like California—the mere thought of standing naked under an ice cold jet of water just makes certain appendages shrink in horror. So I called the fine people at PG&E who kindly let me know that they would drop by on Thursday and take care of my water heater. The only problem with this plan was that it was Monday. And Thursday was just not acceptable. So I took my flashlight and a box of matches and went for a little walk behind the building.

The heater is located in a dank boiler room at the back of the garage. Although I had been down there before, poking around once after I had moved in, I had forgotten about the turn-of-the-century boiler for which the room was originally built. This freakish bowl of iron hangs like a giant tarantula with countless rusting pipes for legs that jut out at odd angles and punch into the walls at random spots. It's Brobdingnagian, really. It gives me the creeps, the heebie-jeebies, the willies if you will. And if ever one of my neighbors goes missing, this is without a doubt where I’ll have the detectives look first.

The thing about relighting a water heater is that you must avoid blowing yourself up at all costs. If you should forget this rule, the six or seven warning labels on the side of the heater will help make sure you put your priorities in order.

Now, I’m sure that some of you who are lucky enough to own a home or unlucky enough to work in plumbing are reading this and thinking to yourselves, What a wimp. That may be so, but I’m not one to take gas lightly. Gas has always caused me trouble, and since I don’t have any fancy gas-detecting equipment like PG&E does, I’m not going to mess around any, that's for sure. If there’s a sticker on the side of a water heater that tells me to get on my knees and sniff around the floor for fumes, then by god, that’s what I’m going to do. And that’s what I did.

I’ll spare you the rest of the details except to say that, after you’ve taken the appropriate precautions, which include a larger insurance policy and a general outline of the life events that you’d like to have flash before your eyes in your final seconds, the act of lighting that first match is quite a spiritual one.

As it should be plain by now, I did not in the end lose my life or my appendages or my eyebrows or any other bits in a violent explosion. But I did lose some sense of innocence. I’m not talking about that sentimental innocence that people are always losing in near death experiences. I mean the sort of innocence that you only have as long as you're ignorant of your own stupidity. I mean the kind that you had back when you didn't think twice about jamming a knife into the toaster to pry out that last bit of bagel. Hot shower, or Explosion Rocks SF Neighborhood. Which will it be?