It's that time of year again, when the smell of burnt nitrates fills the air and it gets much more difficult to answer that timeless question of 'was that a gunshot or firework?' I'm starting to suspect that climate change is affecting the 4th of July, it keeps starting earlier and earlier every year.
As a kid I loved fireworks. As an adult I still do but they won't let me play with the fun stuff. If there's no secondaries, does it even count as fun? Fortunately the hold my beer crowd is usually more than happy to make up for that.
Hell, sometimes things go sideways even when you're not drunk. One year my old employer had bought some illegal fireworks and put me in charge of lighting them. First thing I lit was a 16 tube block of mortar shells. First shell went off fine, the second not so much. Lift charge went off just fine but the shell never left the tube, so I bolted. I thought that'd have been a clear signal that everybody should probably skedaddle but when I looked back nobody had moved.
To make a short story kind of short, the second shell went off in the tube and the block disintegrated, with the other 14 shells firing in every direction but up. Wouldn't have been too bad if we were in an open field or something but we were in a driveway, so you had shells bouncing off houses, cars, and garages. Once they started exploding it was the stars, the sparkly burny bits, turn to bounce off everything. Side note: Those things hurt, think I still have scars. As I was finally starting to be able to hear the ringing in my ears, I heard a voice call out through the smoke "Wooooeeee, are the aliens here?"
Watch out for them aliens, y'all. They done run off with my original blog post and now I'm having to improvise. Speaking of improvising, growing up we discovered that metal conduit makes a great improvised launcher for bottle rocket wars. For some reason we could never get our stepbrothers to follow us into the woods after that.
The aircraft in the first photo is responsible for dropping the biggest firework of all. It's a B-29 Superfortress, modified versions of which dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The second aircraft is an AC-130 gunship, which is its own special spooky sort of fireworks.
On a final reflective note, if you're going to play with fireworks, try not to meet the aliens y'all.
