Rick Stiever is a man of simple means. The unassuming veteran of the Humboldt County Fire Department is a lean, goateed man of 46 years who enjoys his dogs, woodworking, and a good Sudoku puzzle. By the looks of it, he is not the kind of man one would associate with ‘00s-era indie rock or ravenously hot sex, respectively, and yet he has been a guardian angel of sorts for both.
“Look, I wish I had never heard of these Kings Of Leon jokers, but here we are,” Rick told us over Zoom. As the story goes, multiple reports of sex fires started surfacing in early 2009. Initially thought of as a humorous oddity, casualties notwithstanding, a panic slowly started to take shape as more and more reports cropped up across the country. Why were people’s sex on fire? And also, why was there an iPod Mini found at every sex fire site with the Kings Of Leon’s unabashed arena rock sell-out album “Only By the Night” loaded onto it?
“When that damn song hit the top of the charts there was a whole unit dedicated to the KOL Sex Fires. I mean millennials were fucking to that thing like you couldn’t believe,” Rick told us, his eyes tearing up. “Lost a lot of good men that summer.”
A major roadblock for Rick and his team was the lack of research regarding sex fires.
Common side effects of coitus are mostly limited to feelings of pleasure, feelings of shame, chafing, getting the goddamn fitted sheet all messed up again, jizz, and peeing all weird afterwards. But almost never fire. To make matters worse, the KOL Sex Fire Unit was largely comprised of hunky firemen due to their perceived expertise in the sensual arts. However, they quickly learned you cannot fight sex fire with sexy firemen. The result was simply too sexy, causing the fire to get hornier and in turn, more deadly.
While “Sex On Fire” fucking levels have decreased to a much more manageable state, Rick still cannot shake the feeling that more lives are at stake. “All it would take is one millennial couple boning in the woods with a little JBL speaker blasting an ‘09 Fuck Playlist and boom. You know, they still haven’t found the exact root cause of the L.A. Fires, but something tells me one day they’ll find an iPod Mini somewhere in the brush.”