Back in my day, if you wanted to blow up part of downtown, you had to work up a whole theory about how alien lizard people were secretly running the world. You needed a grudge with AT&T — one that AT&T didn’t even know you had. You had to have your girlfriend call the cops on you for building a bomb in the RV in your backyard, and you had to depend on the cops looking at the weird RV in your yard and then shrugging it off. You had to pick a song. And then you had to make a creepy recording warning people to run away.
You wanted to blow up part of downtown? You put in the work. And then you died, so you didn’t have to endure the rest of us staring at you with hatred and disgust. Or laughing at you.
Pictures indicate several canisters’ worth of flammable gas could have fueled blaze that damaged Metro’s downtown library garage
Instead, the Nashville Downtown Partnership just let their buddies store some “stuff” in a room in a parking garage downtown. “Stuff” that, as reported by the Scene's Eli Motycka on Friday, appears — from pictures he was able to get his hands on — to be “several tanks typically used to hold flammable gas” like propane.
I may be missing some of the wisdom or insight that comes with being at the top of the heap, but I am a person who has mowed the lawn a lot. And down here in the non-rich world, if your buddies want to store a room full of "tanks typically used to hold flammable gas" in your garage, near where your children play, you say, “Hell no. Are you trying to blow up my garage?”
My God, we had a racist gas station with a Nazi fight club in the attic, owned by a guy stupid enough to get a cheek tattoo, and you didn’t hear about him storing tanks like this in his garage. He kept his flammable materials in tanks in the ground. You think gas stations keep gas in tanks in the ground because they like digging holes into all the rock we have around here? You don’t think it’d be cheaper and easier to just keep the gas in a huge, clear tank up in the air out back of the gas station where you could look out and see, “Yep, we still have enough gas,” or, “Oh, we need to get a truck in?”
You know why they don’t? Because fuel is very flammable. The safest place to store fuel is where it stays cool, away from heat sources and ignition points.
I am in awe of the NDP and, as Eli puts it, the “urban beautification contractor Block by Block.” (Maybe hold off on putting “urban beautification” on your marketing materials for a little bit after this. Just saying.) These folks unintentionally closed the downtown library for at least six weeks. Somewhere there’s a Moms for Liberty member jealous that these guys appear to have carelessly done what she’s been unable to do, even with years of careful planning — keep library books out of the hands of kids.
But, you know, maybe I’m being too harsh and I should see this as progress. We’ve gone from Nashville bombers with intentionally made bombs and a hatred for Black people and Jewish people to Nashville bombers with intentionally made bombs and no coherent political agenda to ... this. A fire, possibly caused by negligence, in a space run by people who have no agenda other than helping downtown thrive. Oops. But also, hey, an improvement.
Instead of casting blame, let’s focus on how we can prevent this kind of thing from happening again. I have a plan. It’s going to take a little bit of money and, probably, some weed, but hear me out. We contract with Crossville’s own Billy Wayne Davis to be Nashville’s friend — like give him a special phone with only our number in it so we can reach him whenever we need. This is no offense to Trae Crowder, but if we called Trae Crowder and said, “Hey, our buddies are going to fill a room in the parking garage behind the library with what appear to be propane tanks,” he’d say, “Please don’t do that,” and we’d be like, “Well, he said ‘please’ so it’s probably OK if we don’t listen to him.”
But if we called Billy Wayne Davis and said the same thing, he’d be all, “Shit, I better come see this.” And then we’d know we were about to do something very stupid that we should not do and we’d have time to change plans.
It’s failure-proof.
Unlike our current plan to just do dumb shit that, if we’d thought about it for 30 seconds before we did it, we’d realize made no sense. This approach is going to continue to blow up in our faces, sometimes literally.
