Fireworks and the Red Dragon

When I was a kid I used to look forward to the 5th of July. It was the coolest holiday to me.

Yeah, the 5th.

After the pyrotechnics of Independence Day wore down, Bart and I used to take a wagon around the block, and we'd collect all of the used fireworks people so kindly left behind in the street. This was the good old days before the cops were cruising around all the time busting people for having anything deadlier than a sparkler, so we'd find all sorts of cool things. Huge rockets, big cannon-shaped things, bumblebees, fireworks that looked like tanks, jet planes, etc. We'd pile 'em high.

My sister had a clubhouse when she was younger. Over time it wore down and eventually it was destroyed because it was too dangerous to play in. What was left behind was the floor, which meant I had a great wooden platform in the side of my backyard. We would take all of the fireworks we collected and construct elaborate mazes with them. We'd spend hours.

Around this time was the heyday of the Atari 2600, and especially the game Adventure which was a favorite at the time. We used to take Matchbox cars and race them through the maze, and we had a plastic dinosaur we called the "Red Dragon" in homage to Adventure, who was, of course, trying to catch and eat the driver of the car.

Looking back on this bizarre yearly ritual I wonder how we ever got the idea, or why my parents allowed me to do it. Maybe I hid it from them, I forget. I am sure the neighborhood didn't mind a couple of kids cleaning up their leftovers for them, that's for sure.

The Mallot of God

My friends and I, we all have our little fantasies about dealing with the awful traffic in and aroud the Seattle area. I think everyone has their own personal imaginary scenario about how they would deal with the offending motorists around them.

Jason, for example, has frequently voiced a desire that cartoon-like "16 Tonne" weights would fall at random on the cars in front of him, flattening them completely into the ground and leaving the way before him completely clear. It is an appealing concept.

Personally, I have always had a private traffic-rage fantasy I think of as the Mallot of God(tm). In this fantasy I have a button on the dash of my car. When another motorist does something to irritate me (such as having the nerve to drive on the same stretch of road), I would depress the button, and trigger this series of events:

1. All other cars quietly move away from the offender.
2. A huge mallot (Perhaps resembling a croquette mallot) Sweeps in from the side, conncting solidly with the offender.
3. The offender vanishes instantly.
4. Moments later, the offender is seen as a tiny speck near the horizon, falling quietly like a single dark snowflake.

I'm sure I am not alone with such thoughts. In any case, they make the often sliggish commute to and from work more bearable by a good measure.

Back from being sick, had the autumn ick for awhile.. still kinda do.

Without further ado:

The Tale Of The Great White Monster

When I was a kid I was great friends with Kenny and Bart Wickham who lived up the street from me in 21 Oaks, our housing development. They were two siblings in a household of many more, a big Mormon family. We would often wander off into the woods back behind their house, which was a big undeveloped area that is, sadly, all gone these days.

Imagination is a powerful thing. As kids, we were convinced that many things lived in the woods or haunted them, and we had our own private mythology worked out about it including how to protect ourselves from the monsters. Here are some of the things were KNEW were out there:

The Great White Monster: OK, I don't really understand this one. Bart was convinced something lived in the sky, especially on days where the sun could barely be seen through the clouds. He called it The Great White Monster.

Huge Worms: We would on rare occasion come upon long furrows of dirt which had been kicked up by construction vehicles, and were convinced they were what was left behind due to the burrowing of huge earthworms.

Triffids: Thanks to this dumb-ass movie Dawn of the Triffids, we were convinced some of the trees were alive and wanted to kill us. In particular, Bart was paranoid about them. One time, one of us hid in a big pine tree in the front corner of my parent's yard, and shook the tree as Bart walked past. It was pretty mean, but amusing too. The little weeds that grow up through sidewalk cracks with tiny yellow flowers we considered to be "baby triffids" and would pull them out whenever we could. Talk about an overactive imagination.

Sleestacks: We were big fans of the Land of the Lost back then, and we would sometimes see discarded bits of colored plastic or garbage in the woods and be convinced they were left behind by Sleestacks, the weird reptilian bad guys from that show.

Old Indian Guy/Woman: My brother got us going on this, I am pretty sure. We were told there was an old indian who lived back in the woods somewhere, in a run-down shack, and to stay away because he sacrificed things all the time. Understandably freaky for a kid to believe.

Ferns: You know how, on your average fern, there are little red spots on the underside of the fronds? Well I'd guess those have to do with pollination, but when we were kids, we thought they were alien spores left behind, hidden under the leaves.

We used to make these weird things out of paper clips and pieces of paper that were talismans to ward off the monsters that lived in the forest. I have a very vivid memory of sitting in this long rectangular room at the back of the Wickham household making those. They had these weird lights on the wall in there, kind of like globes on stalks, and I remember thinking that the way they reflected on the dirty sliding-glass door and windows that they looked like eyes.

My brother and his friends were very much into gore and horror movies at that time, and in retrospect I am pretty certain they it influenced my friends and I to some degree. This was the day and age when movies like Friday the 13th (Yeah, part 1) and the like were appearing, the golden age of cheesy slasher flicks. Combine that with numerous gore magazines and stuff lying around and I think it is easy enough to pin down part of the source of our over-active imagination.

I have no end of weird stories from my childhood, no doubt I will post many more of them.