"Pyromania" Ain't Just A Def Leppard Album

I have to say, I have a love/hate relationship with fireworks (unlike my relationship with the Fourth, which is strictly platonic love, although the Fourth and I might make out once or twice over the long summer evenings behind the bandstand). Scratch that - my relationship with fireworks is all love, but my relationship with idiots using them is all hate.

This mostly stems from an incident when I lived in Tulsa, OK. There, a group of dirty feral children thought it was good fun to light off bottle rockets from an empty Big Gulp container. This allowed them to sort of crudely "aim" the bottle rockets, predominantly at my friends and I, who were trying to enjoy some Ground Bloomers, Whistling Petes and Keystones Light nearby.

Anyway, feral Okies aside, this is an exciting year for Utah - we are now allowed to use big-boy fireworks.

I was very excited to hear this, because there is a directly proportional relationship between my love of something and its capacity to go "Kaboom."

Unfortunately two things have very quickly become apparent to me: first, that I am broke and festive high explosives are expensive, and subsequently, that the areas in which you can legally let one of these suckers off are actually pretty limited.

Oh well. I have a BBQ to attend on Saturday, and I'm sure that Monday night I'll try to stay up late enough to watch some of the professional stuff. I get a childish thrill out of fireworks displays, amateur or professional, and it's good that my annual night of pyromania has come around again. Happy Early Fourth, y'all.

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