happy 4th

You want your fireworks merchant to have his full compliment of digits. You don’t want a man in a stained t-shirt with a mentholated cigarette hanging from his mouth and three to four fingers left on each hand to be your connection to the world of explosiontainment. Your purposes may not be scientific, Chief, yet you are above turning to second rate carnie folk this holiday season. Go that extra mile to the sturdy wooden stand on the outskirts of that shantytown of dingy white tents off the interstate. Find yourself someone with all their original parts and a good sulfuric smell ground into their skin. Frequent not the gypsies and whores with unlabeled Mexican contraband in truckstop parking lots. Be safe, kittens and cats.

Or at least be unsafe in a kickass manner.

I haven’t been shot with a good bottle rocket in quite some time and I must admit to missing the burn a little. Of course I dealt it out more than took it, as I recall. I could nail a bastard running at a good forty yards. The key is to anticipate, to know when your prey will zig and when he will zag. You also need something loud and primal over the truck speakers. Yes, some AC/DC will do nicely. Make it Back in Black and make it blow a speaker or two. Wear a schoolboy uniform if you want—just wear it proudly and let me hear you from the neighboring state. And when you are too far-gone to handle the subtle quarterback-like nuances of minor rocketry, just throw a lighted match into a box full of the little banshees and let a higher power sort them out. We will salute you.

I myself will have no part in such activities this year, as I am off to Alabama. Yes, in Alabama they do enjoy firework craziness and all manner of dangerous mayhem, and do not require government-sanctioned holidays for either; but I am, in truth, too old and aware of my own mortality now. I instead plan to get out on the river and work on the beergut a while. I then plan to either head to either Tunica or Graceland on Saturday because that is what America is all about. I will then end things with my grandfather’s annual birthday bash because a man who was born on the fourth of July, lived through the depression, spent time in the WPA, and was there on the beaches of Normandy is really what America is all about. Drink to him on his 85th, if you don’t mind.

Whether you spend your fourth standing shirtless over a grill with Toby on the speakers and enough domestic beer in the cooler to drown a small horse, or you spend it giving your much-practiced rant about US foreign policy to a table full of heavily pierced comrades at the coffeehouse of your choosing, have a happy and independent Independence Day.