firecrackers raze they keep you from sleeping when you're not trying to sleep, sounds without the pictures the sounds make, and you wonder if light you can't see is any kind of light at all. if you saw the tiny explosions but didn't hear them happen, that would be a different thing. you'd go to some stoned place without a drug to take you there and you'd think about the beautiful part of something ending, something already dead dying six or ten or twelve feet over your head. but that's not what this is. 140701 ... raze some idiot is setting some off right now. in the freezing cold. in the snow. i mean, really? 171223 ... raze the same special snowflake has set off firecrackers almost forty nights this year. and that's just since the middle of may. i wasn't counting before then. the real number is probably closer to sixty. sometimes he'll only light off one or two before calling it a night. sometimes he'll go on for hours. he's done this seven nights in a row. twice. once in june, and then again in july. it's thirty-six degrees outside, and he's making gunshot sounds right now. if he took a piss it wouldn't freeze, but his dick hole would start singing "do you really want to hurt me?" i guess there are a lot of holidays i don't know about. 211104 ... raze it's not yet six o'clock at night. it's cold enough that a thin film of today's first_snow is still on the ground. and he's at it again. pop pop bang. 211114 ... raze he couldn't even do his business like a normal person on new_year's_eve. he started at 5:45. he didn't stop until 1:22 in the morning. as usual, he didn't just light them all off in one go or build to any kind of crescendo. that would have been too simple. he lit some off and stopped. lit some off and stopped. lit some off and stopped. again and again and again. for almost eight hours. something tells me he didn't have any company. he was just sitting alone in his backyard making intermittent noise all night long because he has no life and no imagination. sleeping in is easy to justify on the first day of the new_year. but i only did it out of necessity, so i wouldn't feel like a walking wet rag caked with shit today. if he does that again tonight, you might never hear from me again. because i'll be in jail after what i do to him. 220101 ... raze you know winter's on its way out when there's a flurry of small explosions for all of thirty seconds, and then silence. he's predictable, if nothing else. 220319 ... raze four minutes last night. from 12:07 to 12:11. i bet that's about as long as his easily amused ass lasts in bed, too. 220424 ... raze he lit four of them off at 12:41 a.m. you read that right. four. it's 9:58 at night, and he's at it again. it's a long weekend, after all. so i expect him to go nonstop straight into tuesday. he must be fun at parties. 220521 ... raze i would say i missed him, but that would be a lie. at least he wasn't out there doing his thing a few nights ago when it was over a hundred degrees with the humidity. that's something. 220618 ... raze this time he lit five off at 11:24 p.m. on a sunday that's getting ready to turn into monday. then i guess he went back inside, having accomplished what he set out to do. yeah. i've got nothing. 220626 ... tender_square some dickbag is lighting them off one street over, an explosive pop that ricochets off the nearby houses every few minutes. each time it sounds like gunfire. 220629 ... tender_square it's not even the fourth yet. the neighbour that was lighting them off yesterday is at it again. it's even louder now that i'm sitting in the backyard. "that's really annoying!" i yelled from over the fence. i don't think they heard me. 220630 ... past this weekend is one of the few times it's legal to fire them off in the city. there'll be the big official display, but lots of sporadic local ones. i really wish there was some way to discourage it. cities don't need haphazard fireworks. for victoria day, freelance pyros woke one of the kids who was distraught thinking we were in another derecho and the house was being hit by falling trees. 220630 ... raze he started at 10:06 last night, stopped, lit two off at 12:31, one at 12:36, one at 12:40, and one more at 12:57. just to mix it up a bit. there are people who live next door to this shit and know exactly who's doing it. and they do nothing to try and stop it. i guess they must enjoy not being able to sleep on a thursday night. i hope they get explosive diarrhea that's so horrific it leaves them wishing for a merciful death that never comes. 220701 ... past someone has started already. i don't think they have the same effect during the day as at night. 220701 ... kerry i used to like them. i liked them less when i got a dog and even less when we moved to philly. during summer of 2020 people set off fireworks all the time, randomly, even during the day. teenagers, i think. my theory is they buy as many as they can and for some reason don't set them all off on the 4th, just ration them out. when paloma first moved here, which was the next spring, there was a shooting in the target on washington right as she was leaving, and from then on all the pops she heard were gunshots and not firecrackers. in my neighborhood they are almost certainly firecrackers, but i read articles about shootings all the time, so who knows. two blocks away is the guerin rec center, where an enormous parking lot is nearly always fenced off so no one parks there and the kids use it for skateboarding and riding their bikes and playing ball. and now they are using it for setting off firecrackers. and there's so little to block the sound that it may as well be next door. i wrap louie up in his thunder shirt and shovel "calming" tablets into his mouth but he still trembles so violently the bed shakes. 220701 ... raze it figures that on the actual holiday we're supposed to be celebrating he would stop an hour and a half earlier than he did the night before. now, for the third successive night, he paints his masterpiece, as the foreskin of our fathers quakes with pride. yesterday he started when the sun was still out. today he waited until it got dark. he'll either pack it in right before i go to bed, or he'll still be going at 3:00 in the morning. like every brilliant artist, he's unpredictable. 220702 ... raze last_night he started at 9:00 and stopped around 11:00. tonight i'm not so lucky. same start time, but it's a few minutes before midnight and he's still going strong. i would have thought sitting in your back yard and forcing some transient bit of store-bought lightning to clap its witless hands would get old after you'd watched the same thing blink and disappear six million times. i guess not. i hope a grumpy bear eats him. 220703 ... epitome of incomprehensibility I read this as "I hope a gummy bear eats him" and thought, ooh, that's creative. I hope a gummy bear encases his firecrackers in cheap gelatinous ooze soon, so that they stop going off and earritating your ears. 220703 ... raze i think the gummy bear did the trick! because he stopped not long after i put my laptop to sleep. i'm blaming you for that. and i thank you. 220704 ... raze i was sure he would use the american holiday as an excuse to terrorize the neighbourhood some more last night. he set off about three firecrackers at 8:30. that was it. surprises abound. 220705 ... raze i knew he'd be back at it once spring rolled around. at least he confined his inaugural performance of the year to one controlled burst of idiocy three hours and change before my bedtime. 230328 ... raze i thought canada day weekend was over. i guess i was wrong. it's a pretty sad fucking species that gets off on the sound of something going "bang" over and over again. 230704 ... raze (oh. right. fourth_of_july_fireworks. i forgot.) 230704 ... raze he's setting them off right now. in the rain. 230708 ... raze after being strangely silent for most of the summer, he's letting it rip on a cold night in november. i mean, i get it. when you've dedicated this much time to being an asshole, you have your reputation to think about. 231104 ... raze i guess nothing says "remembrance_day weekend" like the impotent sounds of illicit flatulence. 231112 ... raze all this time later, i'd still love to know what kind of person goes outside on a wednesday when it's below freezing to ignite exactly two firecrackers ... and then calls it a night. 231213 what's it to you? who go blather from