so I guess I should specify, this is minmay posting on duvessa's account. this happened when i was 15 during my 3rd of july party. we did it on the 3rd because we wanted to watch the city fireworks on the 4th. there were about 30 people there, including the woman i had a crush on at the time, and a swedish guy i'd never met before. here's a timeline:
~18:30: we set out chairs and tables in the driveway. i bring out a bag of several-month-old extremely stale crackers and an old guitar with a cracked frame and 2 strings left on it.
~18:40: i accidentally drop one of the stale crackers on the driveway and my dad grabs it off the ground and eats it without hesitation.
~18:45: i amuse myself by playing a small part of
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWj1WLhoR0A with the guitar. i would have played a larger part if it had more than 2 strings. the guitar has not been tuned in over 20 years so the strings are extremely loose; one just goes “whump” instead of vibrating, and the other one is at least two octaves low.
~19:00: people show up, i am introduced to swedish guy and then everyone spends a few minutes talking about the girl that wanted to come but couldn’t because she has crazy fundamentalist parents that will almost never allow her to leave their house (she’s 17 years old)
~19:10: a few of my friends and i get started on the fireworks. we do the noisy/smoky ones before it gets dark and the non-boring ones after it gets dark, so we start on the noisy/smoky ones. we do them in order from shittiest to best, so we have to start with the
pulling firecrackers, because we ended up with about 20 boxes, each of which has 36 firecrackers. “pulling firecrackers” are tiny firecrackers that you set off by pulling on the two strings at each end of the tube. you have to pull the strings extremely hard and half the time they just pull straight out of the tube instead of igniting it. when they do work, the explosion is about as loud as the average fart. they are shit. we start by pulling progressively larger numbers at once, eventually making it up to an entire box of 36 at once. then we realize that the firecracker part is sensitive enough that you can set it off by just holding the gas lighter up to it, so we start doing that instead, again with as many at once as possible. we still hold them by the strings while doing this instead of putting them on the ground or something. eventually a shard of burning firecracker manages to land on my friend’s shoulder and burn a hole through his shirt, which he doesn’t even notice. we also try putting a bunch of them on top of a stale cracker and igniting them, but they are so pathetic that 20 exploding at once doesn’t have any effect on the cracker. i think these crappy things are actually illegal in some states now, presumably so that future american children won't experience the same disappointment i did when i ended up with 700 of them
~19:30: we finally finish with the pulling firecrackers and now we have to do the
pop its. pop its are the little white things you throw on the ground and they pop. we have maybe 6 boxes. we give 3 of them to the younger kids at the party, then use 2 to throw at each other’s feet (we are all wearing sandals for some reason) and the last box we carefully dump out on a tree stump and smash with the guitar. guitar is not visibly damaged further than its original state.
~19:40 - now we get to the not completely lame fireworks. we have about 36 of the smoke balls and like 4 of the smoke canisters (these are horrible deals normally but we got them free). they are called smoke balls because americans are not allowed to say the word bomb. most of them we set off inside the guitar.
~19:50 - finally starting to get dark. swedish guy swipes one of the tanks without us looking, takes it into the middle of the fucking street and lights it. as soon as the tank starts moving it gets run over by a speeding car. swedish guy also almost gets run over by the car.
~19:55 - we do the rest of the tanks but not in the middle of the fucking street. tanks are great because
there are four tubes and you can open the tank up and rearrange them however you like. one of the tubes shoots a gout of flame that is supposed to move the tank, two of the tubes shoot out a bunch of flame and sparks and the remaining tube shoots out a fireball that travels about 20 feet. we have tank battles where we put 2 tanks facing each other and then light them both at once, then they both veer off in opposite directions and torch random patches of grass. i do my most popular tank mod a couple times. my most popular tank mod is the one where i take the two tubes that dont shoot the fireball and move them to opposite sides of the tank, with one facing up and the other one facing down. this makes the tank flip over and tumble on its side for 5 seconds, then it shoots the fireball in a completely unpredictable direction, then it sets itself on fire. usually when a tank catches fire we let it burn out on its own or throw more tanks at it, but this time we smashed them with the guitar instead. my friend also did his most popular tank mod, which is when he moves the fireball tube up so that it is angled to hit somebody in the eye.
~20:00 - we start on the
crackling eyeballs and
ground blooms. crackling eyeballs is a misnomer because what they actually do is spin around for 10 seconds and then explode. they are also not actually eyeballs, but plastic spheres painted to look like eyeballs. ground blooms are designed to spin around on the ground and stay in one place, but what you actually want to do is put several right next to each other and light them at once. that way they ricochet off each other and fly 50 feet in random directions. they also make funny noises if you light them inside a metal trash can. anyway, we put lots of both of these inside the guitar. there is still smoke coming out of the guitar from the 19:40 events.
~20:30 - this step is 30 minutes later because you can buy ground blooms in bricks. a brick has 60 ground blooms in it. we had 3 bricks. anyway, there’s still a little bit of light out, which means it’s time for the last daytime firework. i go into the garage and bring out my 1kg potassium nitrate/sugar smoke bomb that i prepared earlier. usually people just mix potassium nitrate with sugar and light the dry mixture, but what i do is melt them together. this way the end product burns much better. the downside is that the end product also looks like someone mixed peanut butter with cow shit. the bomb is on a paper plate. i put it on the tree stump from earlier. the biggest smoke bomb i have done before this was maybe 20g. we light the smoke bomb. smoke bomb immediately erupts in massive purple fireball and makes a lot of smoke. chunks of it fly everywhere. smoke goes straight up and makes massive cloud, much bigger than our house. smells nothing like burning sugar. one of the flying chunks hits my crush and i don't notice, in fact i don't find out about it until days later. after maybe 10 seconds its all over. paper plate is gone. tree stump surface is completely black, has a massive hole in the middle. we smash the tree stump with the guitar for good measure.
~20:31 - we set off the fountains and stuff. after a fountain goes out we smash it with the guitar.
~1:00 - last fountain used, we are cleaning up all the crap. guitar is covered in scorch marks inside and outside. one of the strings disappeared at some point. crush comes up to me smiling and says “thanks for the show andrew, it was phenomenal”. i'm full of adrenaline for some reason and can't think straight, so i say "thanks, but i'm not sure you know what that word actually means", then i finish cleaning up and go inside (nobody else heard this exchange)
~2:00 - lying in bed i realize how douchey i was
this is not the main reason i cry myself to sleep every night however
Thursday, 7th July 2016, 23:21 
