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Like most ‘Mericans I had the day off today. Liz and I re-arranged the house and now I have my own studio room again. This will be good for “Bits”.
We also bought a $7 firework special at Freddy’s. It came with the smallest fountains I have ever seen. I took some pictures of our arsenal of heavy explosives.
We cruised on down to the Hawthorne Bridge to watch the real display and Liz and I snapped some pics of the big ones going off.
I’ve always loved fireworks. When I was in sixth grade, my sister Auria and her friends Rafe and Jill cut apart a bunch of bottle rockets and dumped the gun powder on my desk. I put on my army helmet and lit off the pile. We also covered the door, my electric fan, and pretty much anything we could get our hands on with hairspray and lit it on fire.
My mom busted in on us and we ran outside with our ammo. We hid in the back yard and built one last bomb out of Roman Candles. We set it off just as my mom came crashing through the bushes after us.
I was grounded for six weeks.
Another time, when I was 15, my best friend Dewey and I found some lantern fuel in the shed out back. We grabbed a couple of grosses of bottle rockets and headed over to the bridge spanning the gulley by my mom’s house.
We dumped all the bottle rockets in the middle of the bridge and doused them with lantern fuel. We poured a trail of lantern fuel from the pile of bottle rockets to about twenty feet away where we were standing (on purpose).
We flicked matches at the trail of fuel until eventually one set it off. As we ran for our lives, the bottle rockets whizzed past us exploding in fiery balls of lantern fuel enhanced goodness. That was one of the best 30 seconds of my life…
… then there was the time my cousin Ian and I tied bottle rockets to one of my Star Wars action figures and sent him flying into the air. “Jetpack Johnson” we called him. I think I was about ten. His last flight sent him careening over the cliff near my mom’s driveway, setting the dry brush ablaze.
The flames grew and started to curl up and over the bridge.
Ian and I started freaking out. My mom wasn’t home. I started to link some hoses together from the yard to try and reach the fire and put it out. Ian, who was about 7, stood up on the edge of the bridge and started peeing on the fire.
My neighbor, Tucson, drove by and asked us if we needed help. I didn’t want my mom to find out, so I told him we were just burning the trash.
After a while, I was able to put the fire out. The brush that had burned away revealed a vent for a gas line.
Gulp!!!!
{I in no way condone the inappropriate use of explosives as entertainment.}
