I’m going to make a personal confession.

As a pre-adolescent, I—like Norman Mailer, I discover from the obituaries!— was an obsessive assembler of model airplanes from those plastic kits sold by Revell, Monogram, and (in the U.K.) Airfix. I can still recall the thrill of opening up a new kit, carefully cutting the parts away from the “tree” they were produced on, planning out the color and decal schemes… Oh boy, I’m getting a lump in my throat.

Anyway, the problem with this particular obsession was, that pretty soon I had so many model planes in my room—on the desk and table, hanging from the ceiling—I could barely move, let alone keep the place clean, get homework done, or any of that other boring non-model-plane-assembling stuff. What to do?

Reader, I’d take ‘em out in the back yard, where I’d crash and burn them. Plastic model planes burn with a very realistic thick black smoke, and turn into shapeless tortured blobs, very much like beer bottles in a log fire.

Imagine the pang I felt on first encountering Oscar Wilde’s observation that “every man kills the thing he loves.” Oh yes indeed.