Good Idea Gone Bad

As far as I know, every normal boy plays with fire when he is growing up. I don't know why. It's a guy thing, okay? It's a good thing guys like to play with fire because if they didn't, then chateaubriand would have never been invented, okay? If you can't appreciate a nice chateaubriand, then you're probably reading the wrong blog. What follows is an account of my experimentations with fire, mostly bad, which serves no purpose other than to entertain. If your kids are reading this and getting ideas from me, then you're the one that needs help, not me. Don't bother suing me, I don't have any money. In chronological order, here goes:


1) Caps
Remember caps? That little orange roll of explosive dimples that you're supposed to put in the cap gun and then run around pretending to shoot your friends with? Turns out they're really cheap, so we always got extra when we went to the store. If you take a whole roll and whomp it with a hammer, it makes a very impressive bang. Also, if you unroll a roll and carefully scrape the cap part along the ground with your fingernail behind it, then you can get it to flare up. With a little practice, and some patience, you can start a fire easy! If you did it wrong, then your burned your finger up pretty good. Thus, as kids, maybe five years old, we had already advanced to the neandrethal stage as far as fire was concerned. We weren't sure what to do with it yet, but we knew that we liked it!

2) The Magnifying Glass
Screw the caps, grandma had a magnifying glass. Now fire became much more portable and predictable! Having a magnifying glass in your pocket is almost as good as having a pack of matches. My father thought I was spending my time torturing the local ant colonies and burning my name into little pieces of wood for mom, but it was all a ruse to guard the power of fire! This also answered a great deal of important questions such as 'exactly how important are antennae to the various species?' and 'How long can I stare at this intensely bright little light before I see the world in black and white for the rest of the day?'

3) Fireworks
You thought that the magnifying glass was bad? Now the whole colony is in danger. I swear I could hear little air-raid sirens amid the scurrying of the ants after the bombs had gone off. Also, did you know that you can take apart the fireworks and do whatever you want with the powder inside? Muhahahaha. . . Okay, well, actually there's so little of it in each firecracker that it takes forever, and the final product is rarely as satisfying as what the many smaller originals were in the first place, so mostly this is just wasted time, which is why I jumped straight to -

4) Gun Powder
Yes! Having been given a shotgun at the ripe old age of barely 11, and having a father who believed in loading your own, I now had access to gun powder! Not only gun powder, but insane amounts of gun powder. I tried lighting little piles of it on a piece of plywood, but it burned up way too fast to do anything other than singe whatever got close to it and smell bad while doing it. I never had any success starting fires with gun powder, but I could still load blank shotgun shells (minus the shot) and scare the neighbors with the noise when the parents were gone :). I would get more willies thinking back about it now, but I know that I was careful to use a well-respected reloading manual to concoct these blanks. Being irresponsible is different than being stupid! Well. Okay, so it was stupid in this case too.

5) Farts
Yup, you can light 'em. Hurts like hell if you do it wrong though, and that's why I don't want to talk about it any more. . .

6) Fireworks Part Deux
Boy, bottle rockets sure are cool. They're especially cool when your dad invites a bunch of his friends over and you all sit out in the back yard getting drunk and shooting them at things (not me of course, as I was only 12 at the time. What kind of fool *cough Trent cough* would give beer and bottle rockets to a 12 year old at the same time? :) ) Anyhoo, someone *cough Trent cough* managed to shoot a bottle rocket over the fence and hit a power-line on the side of the main road perfectly dead on, after which the rocket proceeded to explode. 'No way! That could never happen again!' Everyone said. So we all spent the next oh, 20 minutes or so trying to get it to happen again (my father was inside this whole time), until one rather errant shot by yours truly caused a passing car to swerve, screech, and then come banging on our front door. I'm not sure what was said, but I can imagine, and after that little stunt was over we spent the rest of our time lighting farts instead.

7) Fireworks Part Tres`
Being a bit more seasoned with fireworks and fire in general now, I decided to start playing around with fireworks in enclosed spaces for something to do. Did you know that you can use a plastic two liter bottle lid to hold a firecracker inside the bottle if you screw the lid on loosely? The cap shoots off the bottle at an impressive speed, and stings if it hits, oh, say, your sister. The budding physicist inside me said that the smaller the chamber, the greater the pressure, so I decided to see if a little bottle would work even better. The only little bottles with screw caps we had were glass. I pressed on, ignoring the obvious issue. And surprisingly, it did work, even better! Pazzzzing!! Wow, did those caps fly good. I only got off about three shots before the firecracker accidentally fell to the bottom of the glass bottle and exploded. Since I saw the firecracker fall, I tensed up and turned my head away, which meant that when the glass shattered I got a fistful and got cut up pretty good, but didn't lose an eye or anything. You would think that after such a stunt I would be a little more careful with fire and explosives and such, but nay, read on -

8) Gasoline
Now gasoline was cool. Gasoline was my father's all-in-one solution for almost any household need. You can wash paint off your hands with it, you can kill weeds with it, power vehicles with it, sanitize with it, burn back brush with it (even if it's raining), and you can also choose whether you want it to start a fire or whether you want it to explode, depending on how enclosed your area is. And back then it was cheap too! My worst experience with gasoline went something like this:

We had a rusty old burn barrel out in the side yard, and it was my job to take garbage out there to burn it. This was back in the non-green days of my childhood where recycling was not even an option in most parts of the country, 'kay, so keep the hate mail to a minimum. At any rate, we burned flammable waste in this barrel. One day I had taken a couple of bags of stuff out to burn, and it was raining. And it wouldn't light, and it wouldn't light, and I was getting rained on still, and if I left the garbage out there in the barrel unburned, then it might be weeks before we're actually able to burn it (we lived in Portland, OR at the time, and it rains about 100 days a year there I reckon). So I say to myself 'hm', and then inspiration strikes and I go get the little red can of gasoline from the garage. I give the barrel a gentle douse, not enough to saturate anything, just enough to give it some motivation, and I come back with a matc- FOOM!!!!!! like a pirate ship cannon going off, spewing burning garbage what was probably only 30-40 feet into the air, but what seemed like 100 feet at the time. Consider this moment, frozen in time, as I'm looking up into the sky with my eyebrows still a smoking a tad, to see what the hell just happened. Silhouetted against a bright grey sky are the previous contents of mr. burn barrel, some on fire - some not, all suspended in some surreal picture of a good idea gone bad. Remembering back to the last week, I can recall various items that may or may not be in said picture, including some nakpins, paper towels, school assignments, maybe some past due bills, and oh, wait, is that a pair of underwear? Last week, my lesbian marine corps sister (who was recently discharged - something about being too aggressive with the other soldiers) managed to destroy some underwear so badly that my mom refused to put them in the washer and put them in the burn pile instead. Oh dear lord. Please not those underwear. And time starts speeding up, and the contents fall - everywhere. . .

Picture if you will, a young teenaged boy running around frantically trying to stomp out and pick up everything that is on fire in what was once a nice quiet little neighborhood. Picture also what would happen if a cannon went off in your neighborhood. Would you come to the window? Open your door and walk out on the porch? What would you say if you saw a 14 year old kid trying to gingerly remove the most disgusting pair of flaming underwear that you've ever seen off the hood of your car?

9) Bacardi 151
Alcohol burns too! When I was in college my first dorm room had a tile floor. The dorm itself was made in 1910 (seriously) and had received no major renovations since, and it was well-known, or at least widely rumored, that the whole thing would go up in about 3 minutes if a fire started in someones room. We were warned about unattended candles, incense, and anything else that might require fire - there was a don't ask / don't tell policy at the college at the time. So naturally, lighting shots of alcohol for fun was a great way to pass a Tuesday night. Alcohol burns with a disappointingly weak flame though, so you really have to turn the lights out to appreciate it. So we do. Then somone gets the bright idea to write things on the floor with alcohol and start setting them ablaze, and even that goes fine for the most part. My roomate, who went to this college for an actual education (and is my polar opposite as far as I can tell) was sleeping in the second room (our rooms are set up so that if you need to get out and you're in his room, then you need to walk through mine before you get to the hallway and eventually the outside world). My roommate opens the adjoining door just as I finish lighting a giant pentagram on the floor - but before we had turned off the lights.

Him (just woke up): 'mmbathroom'

Me: 'STOP!!!!!!!'

Him: 'Wha?'

I ran and shut off the lights in the room, at which point the huge flaming pentagram sprang to life out of nearly nowhere, illuminating all the faces in the room with a strange glow. 'F' 'Fuu' 'Fuck!' he finally manages to spit out - which is a big word coming from him. 'Just walk around, it's ok' I say. This was the first week of college. We had known each other all of three days. Our relationship was never quite the same after that.

It turns out that higher-proof alcohols burns better than the lower proof ones, and Bacardi 151 (or Monarch 151, but eww) burn pretty good. That being said, if you're going to pour Bacardi 151 in a bowl that you borrowed (heh) from the college food service cafeteria, set it on the floor, and then light it on fire so that you can toast marshmallows over it with bent-up coat hangers after a double date, then please remember to:

a) figure out where the fire extinguisher is before hand and

b) note that cheap-ass bowls from China do not resist heat as well as Pyrex from the chem lab does, and they will indeed shatter when they get hot. Also, the simple act of a bowl shattering will not extinguish an alcohol fire, no matter how much you run around in circles screaming 'Oh my God, oh my God!!!'

10) Fireworks Episode IV 'A New Hope'
Did you know that you can launch bottle rockets out of your hand? It's fun! It doesn't even hurt that much unless you light your new polo shirt on fire and have to try putting it out while dodging blows from the wife.

11) Propane
The final frontier. You can burn yourself, blow yourself up, asphixiate from it, asphixiate from the byproducts of burning it, drop it on your foot, and more. That little electric lighter on your BBQ is going to stop working the day after you bring it home, and you'll be bent over the BBQ with a long-stemmed match, piece of wood, or lighter just like me one day - trying to light that ever elusive hissing sound. And then you'll start your own blog.