Before I knew about girls and my testosterone valve was a t normal
setting for a few more years what really excited me was explosives
and guns. I still like explosives and guns but in a strictly legal
and law abiding way now. We were always trying to make different
bombs that we had heard about or tried to invent. The dry ice bomb
was an easy, if low powered, explosive fix but we wanted more. My
brother and I wanted fiery conflagrations like in the movies and
devastation to whatever was targeted. I didn't have a good grasp on
explosive theory or chemistry but I new some things blew up and tried
to copy that without getting under the hood of the magical black box
which was explosives. I would decommission and steal raw materials
from a ground bloom flower that I had horded during the brief sales
period allowed for fireworks in my state. I would then find something
flammable in my dad's shop and then wrap it up in a container and
insert the purloined fuse and then light it and see what happened.
Almost always what happened was nothing. I did find that if I used
some black powder and the powder from the ground bloom flower and
packed it tightly in a cardboard tube and them taped it together it
would explode with a loud bang but without any of the fireworks,
mushroom cloud and devastation I had envisioned. Wow, I know you are
thinking right now you invented a fire cracker how did you come up
with that idea? By copying, that's how. I made a few of these and
would treasure them because they were so hard for me to manufacture I
couldn't just light them off all willy-nilly. I always imagined
needing some for my arsenal in case I needed to fight off someone
like in The Swiss Family Robinson. I think for the nerd the naming of
a thing is very important and so I called my black taped firecrackers
'Black Magic' which for some reason made my little brother
uncomfortable for its evocation of the occult and the name was
changed to the less poetic 'Black Bombs.' I never needed to use one
in self defense but that is how cold wars sometimes go.
