Fireworks

Was it last week some time?  But I was at the club exercising and listening to the radio, and as I did so a commercial comes on saying: basically, buy our beer for the 4th of July because it’s the middle of a long hot summer.  And I go, what the hell.  How can it be the middle of the summer already?  So I had to look it up and in the USA at least summer begins on June 21st or 22nd, depending.  So how can it be the middle of the damn summer when it’s not even the 4th of July yet.  Maybe they were just trying to freak people out, like, Oh! My God.  The summer is half over already and I have missed most of it, so I should get really drunk and drown my grief.

At the beginning of every summer, too, I look out the window think damn, but it’s still light outside and it’s like 830 pm or something.  But every summer I miss the solstice, the longest day of the year.  I will think, pay attention to the solstice.  That’s a special day.  But I miss it every time.  Usually, the day I look out the window and think, damn but it’s a long day, is the solstice, but I am unaware of the fact that it is the solstice.

Maybe that’s because the whole solstice thing confuses me.  It seems to me that the solstice shouldn’t be at the first of the summer, but right in the middle of it. But it’s not the middle and so I miss it every time.  It just doesn’t seem right that from the solstice on it’s all down hill into darkness.

Last night they set off fireworks at the nearby park.  They are so close by we don’t have to leave our place.  We go outside and set up folding chairs on the sidewalk around the main parking lot of the condo development.  Usually, I don’t go out to watch because it upsets my routine.  But last night I did.  Carol and I sat in our folding chairs with our neighbors, Joy and Bill, both in their seventies I think, and long retired.  Bill plays golf all the time and Joy does lots of volunteer work of different kinds. 

Another neigbhor came up and stood right next to me, and Joy and Bill were right there too, so I had to pay attention not to fart since I had pretty bad gas, and was sort of torn between getting up and going off somewhere to fart in private or just sitting there and watching the fireworks.  I decided to watch and after a bit the urge to fart went away.  Looking at the fireworks, I wondered what the big deal was and remembered they had been more of a big deal back when I would get stoned and watch them.  But I don’t do that anymore.  So I started feeling sort of sad and nostalgic looking at the fireworks.

This year they had pet friendly fireworks with not as many big bangers mixed in.  Those fireworks just drive the pets crazy.  Our neighbors a while back had a dog named Teddy.  One time when the fireworks went off, he shat and pissed himself all over the condo.  So every year when the fireworks came, they had to pack the dog up and move him out of the area.  That was one unhappy dog.

 

 I have added a couple more sections to Tingle Territory:

Early Tingles

William Berner Tingle, 1892-1946

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