Don't You Just Love to Play with Fire?

The fireplace, whether it's a chiminea, fire pit or campfire, is a place of imagination. When I was a kid, I liked to imagine that I could manipulate the flames with my mind. I would look for faces and animals in the shapes of the charring logs. I would throw things into the fire to see what would happen when different things burn; peanuts, bread, unpopped popcorn. Okay, actually, I still do all these things as an adult. I just love to play with fire.

I love watching the unpredictable meanderings of flames and the smell of smoke in my clothes; it gives me an ancestral sense of connection with what it means to be warm and safe. Fire makes my DNA happy at some deep level. But also, I just like to play with it.

I'm not the worst firebug in my family. My wife finds the most exaggerated excuses to toss burnables into our backyard chiminea and fire pit. Technically, we should probably be recycling more paper and burning less, but she thinks of herself as some sort of mountain-woman-master-of-fire type, so I let it go.

My father-in-law, Bud, is the real fire addict, though. Bud hadn't been around a campfire for a while when I took him on a weekend fishing trip a few years ago, and it showed. While the rest of us fished, drank beer, and roasted marshmallows, Bud spent the entire first day at camp gathering huge armloads of sticks and leaves, carrying them to the fire, and raptly watching them burn. He couldn't look away. He was still doing this when I crawled into the tent that night, and I half expected to find him the next morning standing at the campfire, naked, dropping his last article of clothing into the flames because he had otherwise cleared the area of burnable materials. For the record, he was still clothed the next day, but the forest floor was very clean in all directions around us.

But I do love playing with fire, and as with everything else I do, I like to be good at it. So it's natural that I found myself in my garage workshop a few years ago playing with some thin slabs of galvanized steel, thinking to myself, "Hm, I could make a really big pair of fire tweezers out of this."

My first design worked pretty well, especially with the chiminea and fire pit, but some of the angles and dimensions were wrong for grilling, forcing me to place my hands over the hot coals for a little longer than I liked. The first pair of "Apocalypse Tongs," as my family named them, was also a bit difficult to for my wife to squeezed down. I went back to the workshop, made a couple of minor changes to the design, and boom! We've been spoiled by Apocalypse Tongs ever since.

I never thought much about how cool they were, but over the years, my wife often said, "You should really make more of these and sell them to other people. Everyone will want a pair." Keep in mind that I have a long history of inventions, entrepreneurial pursuits and, well, failures, so I've grown cautious over the years about trusting my own ideas, and my wife has long since adopted a suspicious glare when I say, "Hey, I have a new idea!" So we kept using these things for the home fires and campfires, and I never seriously considered starting a small business around them.

But my wife has never shut up about it. When I do have a "new idea," her stock response has become, "I think you just make Apocalypse Tongs and sell them. You like being alone in the workshop, you're good at marketing (my business for the past 25 years), and I really think people will buy these things."

I finally took up the challenge a few days ago (late September of 2018), and I do enjoy making them. And while I've marketed many, many products over the years, I've never felt the confidence I have in this product. They're tough, well designed, easy to use, and they really do change the game, if you love playing with fire like I do. I hope you'll visit my store and give them a try.