There are long days when you are a kid and in the early nineties
there were not that many options in small town for entertainment.
Once when I was over at my friend Cole's house without any adult
supervision we were hanging out in his room when he mentioned that he
had some firecrackers. Firecrackers you say? Well then good sir, let us have a
gander at them. Firecrackers and pornography were the two types of
mythical contraband that many boys claimed to have but not everyone
who could talk a big firecracker could demonstrate their ownership
when pressed. Cole not only had the goods he had a huge string of them
and was willing to do a little exploding for a diversion. Like all
frugal boys with a string of crackers we took the time to dismantle
the chain so that instead of a long chain we had hundreds of individual
ordinance. It was a cold and icy day with that over-bright and long
shadowed dimness of a winter afternoon when we went out to find
something to blowup. We fooled around with some snowballs and action
figures until one of us decided to place a cracker inside a pile of
dog poop. When it exploded and spread poop all over the place it
struck us as really funny. We invented an impromptu game right there
on the spot, we were going to play dog poo explosion escape. Cole went
first and he buried his cracker in a fresh pile, lit it and ran across
the icy driveway sure he had avoided the poo-splosion and was standing by the
porch laughing when a few seconds after the blast a piece of crap the
size of a marble it him right in the face. He started hollering and
ran inside to wash the fresh manure of his face and came back outside to
make sure I got mine. When I was up I placed my charge and lit it but
as I turned the excrement blew up all over my back. Cole and his
brother were both laughing really hard about my misfortune and now
all that was left was to see if we could get his brother to loose the
game. His brother was in a bit of a cowboy phase and was wearing some
authentic cowboy boots with smooth soles which made walking on ice
all but impossible. He had on a billowy western shirt and tight pants and looked like the least likely person on earth to outrun the crap-tastrophe we were planning. We gave him a firecracker and he placed and lit
it and then slipped around comically trying to make his escape while his fuse slowly smoldered
for the longest time I have ever seen a non-dud burn. He got back in
plenty of time and watched the show with us from the gallery. Undaunted, Cole
and I both took our uneventful turns and then we tried to set his
brother up with a artificially shortened fuse. Still he lit, slipped
and came back un-pooped. We set him up a second time and still no go.
It was dark and cold and we called it a game with Cole's brother technically winning, I guess, but when you blow up poop isn't everyone a winner? The next day at school Cole and I were relating what
we thought was a hilarious experience to a cute girl who sat by us in
geography. In spite of the obvious entertainment value and funny
outcome the girl looked at us while we laughed our way through a
recounting like we were brain damaged. I didn't care what she thought, blowing up dog crap with my friend was one of the funniest things I
had ever done.
