The smart play, always: identify houses without motion lights, security cameras, or barking dogs. The easy score: everybody with an unsecured backyard patio or deck has a grill. Outside. In shadow. Move on fast from charcoal kettles or smoker models—but propane tanks are fair game.

Fair for both thief and the grill-master because unhooking the gas line is unscrew-simple, but hefting that metallic putting stone off the stainless-steel frame carries noisy potential. Full, a 20 lb. tank becomes 38 lbs. Creating risk and challenge, followed by various rewards—once you quietly caber-hug the prize off into the safety of the highlands.

The problem: best use of said propane tank.

Connected to a Dr. Infrared radiant heater pinched back in September from an open-door garage, it could provide hours of Tent City warmth. The portable kind, not those tall mushrooms with the potential to set hair and camp-shelter on fire. Your double-tent insulates already, and the heater means somebody’s going to barter a body for your warmth. 

But—pawning the propane tank pays off in cash, which would then deliver needled Joyland—a ride blazing through the veins of night cuddled in a sleeping bag.

Then again, you are in possession of a flare gun you found on an untended boat down at the river; a propane tank left on its side, strategically placed with valve open, makes for a fine target, the flaring chemicals releasing from their silo and sailing into the expanding gas of that bastard Benny’s tent with illumination and just enough heat to explode Benny’s empty, beating heart.

That’s the dilemma: too many choices. Running uphill with a burdensome weight is not the issue.

Back in Tent City by dusk, maybe a hundred people gather to celebrate bagging another day. There’s tinny, muted music, there’s erratic dancing and stone-cold weeping. This ain’t Sherwood Forest, but these are my people—the merry and the not-so-much. If I am strong and brave, if I can settle this—then our problems become fewer, lessened, the heavy events pushed back and lighting the dark.