Happy Independence Day: Random Exploding Brain Fireworks

• From the "The Crazy Shit you Remember" file: Brother Marky used to play baseball.  Quite well, actually.  Anyway, he had a Babe Ruth League game one Wednesday evening back in the day, and I rode to the ballpark with my parents.  My buddy Mike had just played a game before Mark's, and he was all excited to try out his new screwball.  Fernando Valenzuela was the new thing then, and he had a wicked screwgie.  Anyway, Mike and I were off throwing screwballs to each other.  It was a warm spring night, and the air smelled like a ballpark, one of nature's most perfect aromas--grass, clay, sweat, burgers cooking, peanut shells, dirt, and adrenaline.  The next morning at school, Mike and I were playing basketball with a bunch of our friends.  This jackass kid nobody liked tripped me when I was going for a lay-up, and I fell and broke the hell out of my right wrist.  The things you remember.
• I didn't like Fernando Valenzuela after that.
• I have always liked the Gin Blossoms, though.
• The Gin Blossoms' guitarist is Jesse Valenzuela.
• I don't know whether A) he's related to Fernando Valenzuela, or B) he can throw a screwball.
• Gin blossoms refer to the ruptured capillaries on the nose of one who drinks excessively (see: Fields, W.C.)
• The Gin Blossoms were formed in 1987 in Tempe.
• In 1987, I was in Tallahassee, and I didn't have any gin blossoms, although I could throw a pretty good screwball.
• Now, I have some gin blossoms; I like the proper noun Gin Blossoms, can't throw a screwball, and stopped drinking gin.
• Though you'd never know it from reading this blog.
• In honor of Independence Day, we've had a potluck type thing here at work.  As always, we're a bit dessert-heavy, with a couple of cheesecakes, an Italian Dream Cake, a fruit platter, a giganto birthday cake, a coconut custard pie, and other things my pancreas wouldn't allow me to examine. 
• One lady brought a huge crock pot full of Cuban black bean chili.  Woo-hoo!!! My plan was to eat about four bowls of that, then go home and create my own fireworks.
• Damn the luck, though, that masterful chili was all gone before I even got a spoonful.  However, big props to Linda for making the absolute greatest deviled eggs in the history of either the devil or eggs.
• Seriously, if Satan made these while preparing for a picnic, he'd call them Linda'd eggs in respectful tribute.
• Linda doesn't have any obvious gin blossoms.
• Her eggs, though.  OY!
• Okay, not her personal ova, but the deviled eggs she made.
• She said they were the easiest thing ever, containing horsey sauce, bacon, salt & pepper, and did I mention bacon?
• Adding bacon to eggs seems like a subtle perfecting of the existing chicken egg, and I mean no offense to chickens.  God forbid I offend the poultry-American community on Independence Day.  We damage human-poultry relations enough as it is.
• Another one from both the "Human-Poultry Relations Snafu" and "The Shit You Remember" files: One year, my family was in Ft Oglethorpe, Georgia, for Independence Day.  There was a big celebration in the Chickamauga National Battlefield.  My grandmother packed a picnic of fried severed chicken parts, Golden Flake potato chips, and Coca-Cola in those little 6.5 oz glass bottles.  The Chattanooga Symphony Orchestra played, and there were fireworks.  Being there on that blood-hallowed ground, Civil War cannons still scattered throughout verdant fields, eating that quintessentially Southern American meal while fireworks exploded and patriotic melodies soared, my patriotism swelled.
• My greatest fireworks experience was after the U-92 Tenth Anniversary Beach Blast, a big concert we staged on Clearwater Beach.  Predictably for an August concert, a giant thunderstorm came blasting through before the headliners were able to play, thus ruining our giant fireworks finale over the Gulf.  Well, here's the problem.  With all the lightning and ozone in the air (so the tetchy pyrotechnics guy said), the fireworks were unstable, and there was "No damn way (he was) driving them sumbitches back across the bridge in (his) truck.  That shit could explode at any time."  By this point, the crowd was gone, and Digger the promotions guy and I had taken down all our stuff.  Mike the Engineer, aka "Gorgonzola Monster Boy," asked Mr Tetchy 'Splosion Guy what we should do.  "Best thing is just blow the fuckers up." 
• I should mention that Mike the Engineer had given two weeks notice two weeks before that night.  He didn't really care if the lingering dozen or so station VIP's and sponsors snootily lolling about the hospitality tent would be scared.  In fact, all the better. 
• "Go right ahead!"
• The fireworks display was to have been twelve minutes long.  I know this, because I had spent a few hours Friday painstakingly editing together a 12 minute musical montage to accompany it.  The annoying station brass and sponsors didn't know what hit them, and somehow we'd neglected to give them a heads-up.  The 12-minutes worth of fireworks were launched and exploded in about 25 seconds. 
• The Apocalypse will have to work mighty hard to outdo this.  It was jarringly, violently beautiful, like nuclear explosions.
• Thank God I don't have any nuclear explosion stories to share.
• I should note that my buddy Mike from school and baseball is NOT Mike the Engineer, aka "Gorgonzola Monster Boy."
• My buddy Mike went on to coach high school baseball, and there are few greater motherlodes of colorful language than baseball people.  Their expressions transcend the narrow ballet of ball and bat, forging into every facet of life, including meteorology.  For example:

The Weather Channel: "There were heavy downpours."

Baseball people: "It rained like a cow pissing on a flat rock."

• That night, my buddy Mike would have told Gorgonzola Monster Boy Mike that "It's raining like piss from a boot."
• States I've been in: Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Colorado, California, Hawaii, Wyoming, Idaho, South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Illinois, Missouri, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, District of Columbia, Indiana, and Michigan.
• Maybe Ohio, too: I'm not sure.
• Things change.  Many of the states I've been to were once fighting each other right on that Civil War battlefield where we had that picnic long ago.  My grandmother and grandfather are buried maybe fifteen miles north of there, in the Chattanooga National Cemetery. 
• The Chattanooga National Cemetery was established Christmas Day in 1863.  By 1870, more than 12,800 folks had taken up residence there, 4189 of whom were unknown.  There are actual German POWs buried there, too: 183 of them from World War 1 and World War 2. 
• Just to be clear, my grandfather was a World War 2 veteran from the United States Army, and NOT a German POW.
• The last time I was at the Chattanooga National Cemetery was when we buried my grandmother on April 1, 1993.  It was ridiculously cold (Baseball term: "Cold as a witch's tit"), and I'd left the houseful of mourners by myself, just so I could hot-box a few cigarettes before the funeral.  I parked next to this beautiful valley, and all at once it started to snow.  Just a tiny flurry that didn't stick to anything, but I smiled through my misery.  This was just how my grandmother would've said "howdy" when I was sneaking cigarettes before her funeral.
• Today there are over 43,000 bodies buried in the Chattanooga National Cemetery.  Watching over them since 1879 is a large monument erected by the State of Ohio.
• Ohio is next to Indiana, which is where my buddy Mike now lives.
• Ohio was also the home of a judge with the impressive name Kenesaw Mountain Landis.  Judge Landis was named after Kennesaw Mountain, from which his father and fellow Ohioan was shot during the Civil War. Landis pere was extremely pissed off that he left most of one leg in the shadow of Kennesaw Mountain, thus he named his son after it, just as sort of a sick memorial.
• I suppose it would be like me naming my son "Fournier's Gangrene Melancholy Socially Retarded Drunkard" (Biff, for short).  
• Anyway, Kenesaw Mountain Landis went on to be one of the most revered and influential baseball commissioners in history.  His biggest achievement was maintaining the game's integrity following the 1919 Black Sox Scandal. 
• His second? The phrase, "busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest."
• Happy Birthday America, and I hope everyone has a safe, happy weekend.