Fallback Friday:  I originally wrote this on 4th of July 2017 — but little has changed – only the neighbors have gotten older and the fireworks end earlier.

It’s the 4th in Phoenix, time to prove how much you love your country by burning it down.

It’s been between 90 and 9000 days since we had rain. The temps are topping 110. So what do you see on almost every vacant corner for the past week? Fucking fireworks stands.

These aren’t the kind of licensed and inspected fireworks you might expect to find at a quality institution like Walmart. It’s a fucking temporary tent, staffed by carnies on parole selling explosives to children.

Starting in late June, every night the teens head outside and blow this shit up on empty streets and any open desert. The desert is filled with the corpses of spring flowers decayed to sticks and brown twigs that are as dry as geriatric vaginas.

I’m surrounded by kindling. And these shit heads will spend a week shooting combustibles in my direction.

I’m old enough to remember when this shit was illegal. So at least these dumb shits had to go to Mexico and smuggle their explosives back home. And those Mexican fireworks were small, crappy and half the time didn’t explode – you know – safer.

But in the name of “freedom” the state legislature made explosives legal about 20 years ago. Every firefighter organization in the state opposed it, saying it was too dangerous. Every year they spark at least one significant fire.

The national forest around Mt. Graham in the eastern part of the state has been burning for more than 3 weeks. But right now, it would be legal to shoot canisters of gunpowder filled with purple, green or red shit right at the edge of the fire.

Let’s celebrate our country’s birth by finishing off a national forest. Brilliant.

In my right-wing section of Gilbert, fireworks are even more popular with the LDS dads than the kids. All the Mormon dads I know (and I know a lot of them) love guns, fireworks and dynamite.

They shoot something, or blow up some small animal and giggle like 13-year-old girls.

One dude runs out into the middle of the street every July 4th and blows off what I think is a full stick of dynamite. There’s a 10-inch wide hole, that grows every year with each explosion.

It shakes windows and sets off car alarms for half a mile. 25 years ago, it went off around midnight. But now he usually blows up the street before his 8:30 bedtime. He can’t tell you the story with a straight face.

Every year, somebody calls the cops and they cruise the neighborhood looking for the terrorist who blew up the cul-de-sac. He’s never been caught.

I suspect the underlying cause of this love of god and gunpowder is the lack of alcohol.

If your life is filled with work, obligations and children, a grown man has to release those pressures with some anti-social bullshit. Without a few glasses of beer, a few times a week, to make you swear and leer inappropriately, that stress builds up like the pressure in a rusty boiler… And BOOM goes the dynamite…

Happy fucking birthday America. Check your homeowners insurance. Because those goddamn sober “patriots” might accidentally burn your house down when they are blowing some shit up.