So, fireworks. Eye sky-candy, and like that. I have absolutely no delusions about the things being anything but environmental toxins, but yet, there is that child-heart part of me that can’t help but still kinda love them.
When we lived on Fort Sam Houston Army Base in San Antonio when I was kid, I remember us as a family trekking July 4 to a large, dusty field not far off-base, navigating the many fire-ant hills to find a decent spot to view the sky-popping fun. It’s a favorite memory, minus those rotten little ant bastards.
Around that same time as a young, book-crazy (yes, geek) kid, I used to wish I could somehow transport myself to Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and take in Gandalf’s screaming-dragon birthday-blasts for old Bilbo.
I’ve shot off more than my fair share of consumer-grade fireworks in my time; several of our own neighbors used to come over to watch the silliness in our driveway, with me drinking Mexican beer and making Big, Dumb Pronouncements by the Roman candle light, as Franks are known to do even in the total absence of shooting sparks, or for that matter, cerveza. It was a hoot. I loved it.
And I picked up all my trash. I did. Because you should, that’s why.
But, we now have an old dog who can’t see much, and who doesn’t know where many sounds even come from, and a young dog who loses it over anything outside that makes a noise above a whisper. Not to mention a big-thug indoor alley-cat who gets chickenshit-scared when we even sneeze around him.
So, no more sparksy boom-boom, alas. No more.
I do not begrudge anyone else doing the same with their Fourth, even if it makes things tricky at our own house. It’s your right, at your house, absolutely. Consumer-spark the feck away.
That said, the annual catty-corner-backyard madness has already started, and I just know that because that Proud Boy looking tosser who lives there didn’t get a police visit, or several, last year, as he did the year prior for setting off municipal grade fireworks (hint: that ain’t at all legal in a neighborhood, yo), causing fire to rain on trees and roofs all around, mine included, that he’s probably gonna go utterly apeshit again tonight.
Proud Boy ain’t no Gandalf; he’s just one more pissed-off cracker-ass nob who likes to scream a lot at his kids and apparently blow shit up, and who used to fly Gadsden and blacked-out American flags from his front porch back even when his own neighbors were black. Lord help us now that he’s got new white neighbors, one with a (Gadsen-flag) Don’t Tread on Me sticker on his own truck.
At least so far, there’s no booming Lee Greenwood soundtrack from over there, as with the last two years (yes, it’s an overripe cliche; I didn’t make it up). Small favors, I guess. Though the Fourth is still young, I reckon …
Anyway, here comes what may just be another night of proud-to-be-a-‘Murican hell. Whee.
Our dogs are already wigged out with the daytime pop-offs that inevitably announce the Fourth is here each year, and will have to be Trazzed about 6 p.m., for the first time, if we hope to get them through the night without an onset of the full Terrors, and I’ll be up with them until the last blasts around the neighborhood, probably around 1 a.m. Thug Kitty is already hidden for good, until about that same time.
Patriotism. Light it up. Bitches.
Just know if that I could summon Gandalf’s sky-dragon magic, I’d send that Proud Boy wanker screaming into his own trees, which, odds are, might already be on fire themselves …
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