The Fourth of July is almost here!!

And hospitals all over the country are getting their burn units ready! The good times are about to roll. Oh and my wife wont let our children get anywhere near fireworks. Want to know why? Because they have my DNA in them, that’s why. Let me hip you cool cats to some history.

As it draws closer and closer to the holiday we have noticed children playing with fireworks. First it was some kids throwing those little white paper things that pop when they hit something hard. That’s cute, little kids jump when they throw them at each others feet. One day we saw some kids who were throwing firecrackers at each other, my wife made a comment on how dangerous it was and I, without even realizing I did it, said “lightweights”. This is where I should have given myself temporary amnesia or something but NOOOO I couldn’t let me ego go unnoticed, I had to say something.

I don’t know how many of you know this, but I have a brother, an older brother. Not only is he older, he is six years older than I am. So yeah, we got into a lot of trouble as kids. You ever watch that cartoon “Pinky and the Brain”? Want to wager a bet as to who was who? So yeah, hell yeah, I got burn scars all over my body. Roman candle here, bottle rocket there and so on. You see, not only is my brother the brains in many of our operations, he and I both have my fathers DNA in us too and my dad was an extremist. For example, our pool only needed a ½ horsepower motor for the pump, but my dad had a 1 ½ hp motor put on it. (Can you hear the Tim the Toolman Taylor grunt? Agh agh agh, more power!!) At one point you could wakeboard in our pool from the jets. So yeah, we might tend to go overboard just a bit from time to time.

So anyway, back to why I should have kept my mouth shut. After I made my little comment I proceeded to tell my wife how when I was younger we used to have full on bottle rocket wars. There was one time that if you didn’t know better you would think that we were getting ready to go on a special ops mission to capture Castro ourselves. We had those brown paper grocery sacks full of fireworks (see going overboard comment above). If it exploded, we had it. If it flew AND exploded we had a lot of them. Then we put our game plan together. Not only did we shoot self propelled explosives at the neighbors (they shot back, its ok) we improvised some ourselves.

So there the Brain and I are, ready to release shock and awe on the neighborhood. The first part of the plan was the smoke screen, literally. We took a propane touch, which we used to light everything with, and lit the fuses on bags and bags of smoke bombs and throw them all up and down the street as close to the “enemy” as we could get them. You couldn’t see their house any more we had lit so many smoke bombs. Then we unleashed a barrage of roman candle fire upon them. But that just didn’t have the right kick, we need more firepower!! So we found a piece of metal fence post and used it as a bazooka. Yeah, there I am posed like one of those little green Army men, my brother behind me with the blow torch and dozens and dozens of bottle rockets. We didn’t even unwrap them, we just lit the whole damn thing and shoved them in the end of this pipe which I had aimed at the neighbors house. They never knew how many of what was coming at them, poor souls.

But it wasn’t just the bottle rocket wars, I couldn’t stop there. Once while at one of the neighborhood kids house I just happen to be in the process of sitting down on their porch when one of them light a bottle rocket that they were going to shoot across the front of the porch. Yeah, I timed it just right and caught right between my butt and the porch. I also have a really nice fireball shaped scar on my leg where, in the mist of a roman candle war where we were about 12 feet away from each other, I got shot in the leg and the fireball went into the top of my untied high top tennis shoe. Not only did it hit me in the leg, my shoe held it against my ankle. One of the kids across the street shot his brother in the chest with a whistler which blow his shirt to pieces and left him with some nice small burn marks.

So I may have ruined the Fourth of July and New Years for my kids.

Don’t get dead