This year I spent the 4th of July like a lot of other Americans did; in the theatre watching TransFormers. I am a Yankee Doodle Dandy, however, so my weekend was all apple pie and Uncle Sam. Click the pic to check out a bunch of illegal, sci-fi themed fireworks.

I have to start this article with a few apologies, first and foremost to the demon eyed teens to the right, Sci-Fi Girl and Sexton. They kindly accompanied me to SugoiCon 2006, an anime convention here in the K-Y, and since then I have been promising I would repay them by writing a grand review of the con starring them. Every time I talk to them about it, I say something to the effect of the article being the next one I'll publish, I promise, and you can take that to the bank, my friends, I swear it this time. The truth is that I'll totally mean it at the time, but something else comes up, and I push it back yet again. I've been doing this to them since September. I know; I suck, I'm a horrible big brother, and a generally despicable human being. I'm sorry. It will be done, though. Very soon. Probably.

Next, I have to apologize to Q. He called me Thursday, July 5th, and let me know he had seen TransFormers. He didn't ask if I had seen it, he just made the assumption that I hadn't and started speaking to me as such. Honestly, he seemed so excited and boyishly giddy that he had experienced anything TransFormers related before I had that I just didn't have the heart to burst his bubble. However, my intent to deceive does make it a lie on my part, and thus I owe a confession: Mark and I saw it on Wednesday at 4:30, Q. Sorry, dude.

So I've got a TransFormers review, an anime convention article, a TransFormers movie toys review, an in-depth discussion on the merits and flaws of Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines, a look at AFI's top sci-fi films of all time, and a couple of other articles, all at least partially written, all waiting, unfinished, for publication. So why am I writing this?

'Cause I'm an American, god damn it.

Wiser words were never spoken. Or typed. Whatever, don't get technical, you know what I meant. The point is, the international stereotype is kinda true; on the whole, we Americans love gunpowder and its various uses, especially when those uses are loud, colorful, and entertaining. I like shooting guns and blowing stuff up. I am not ashamed. I like to think the founding fathers would be proud of the inventive, eclectic, and often visually striking ways I've managed to detonate and or incinerate a wide variety of materials, all without causing harm to myself or others. Mostly.

Frog Boy can back me up on this; chances are very good I'd burned or bombed more shit by the time I was 13 than a lot of people do their entire lives. It was, and to some degree remains, a proud and cherished hobby of mine. People used to joke that I was a pyromaniac, and I was always quick to correct them. Pyromania is a compulsion. I light things up by choice. I'm all about planning and free will. Clinically speaking, pyromaniacs set things on fire as an outlet for their repressed sexuality and/or psychoses. Not me. I set things on fire because it looks cool and its fucking fun. I've gotten good at it through years of practice and experimentation, and I'll not sit idly by while some ignorant bastard cheapens what I do by comparing it to the random burnings of some nutjob with a Bic and boner for his mommy. I'm a pyrophile, thank you very much. And now I'm old enough to buy the really good shit.

But this year wasn't about buying the really good shit. This year was all about trying new things… and getting material for an article. Being an American holiday fueled by cheap Asian products, I know very well that a lot of fireworks have mystical or science fiction themes, and I wanted to see what sci-fi themed explosives were the best. For an experiment of this sort, there's really only one place I could go: Indiana.

I'm not sure about the laws in your neck of the woods, but here in the beautiful Commonwealth of Kentucky, it is my understanding that fireworks are legal so long as they can't leave the ground under their own propulsive power. No bottle rockets, no flares, no mortars, not a single luxury. That's okay, though, because we have three other things here in my old Kentucky home that more than make up for those restrictions: 1) hundreds of miles of unpatrolled rural roads along tens of thousands of acres of sparsely populated farmland and countryside, 2) a healthy disregard for laws we deem as pointlessly intrusive or limiting, and 3) a nearby border with Indiana.

Much love to my Indiana peeps out there, but Indiana, for those who don't know, is a state that proudly roots itself in the past and means to stay there. I mean that literally; they just recently, and with furious internal uproar, started observing statewide Daylight Savings time. I'm not kidding. Some parts of the state used to use Daylight Savings, some didn't. Some parts near more civilized places like Kentucky and Ohio resorted to observing modern American time- keeping illegally in order to differentiate themselves from their caveman-like brethren, Homo erectus indianapolis. Really, you could drive through Indiana and never know what time it was. I've been late for meetings in Indiana because they refused to follow the standard time zone rules, opting instead to divine the "correct" Indiana time through some unknown Hoosier witchcraft involving the position of the sun, the shadows of birds flying overhead, and the reading of entrails of dead fish for portents and omens.

But this attachment to the past brings with it some great advantages for me. Probably so Indiana's mountain men and grizzled old prospectors will still be free to go dynamite fishing and/or more quickly blast open mines and get to the gold 'afore the savage, heathen Injuns massacre and scalp them, Indiana law gives fuck all about selling explosives. It may sound like I'm giving Indiana a lot of shit, but its all good natured, I promise. The truth is, I love that state for a bunch of fireworks related legal reasons, and I swear to god I'm not making this up:

There are some kinds of illegal fireworks in Indiana, or at least there used to be. I'm talking about the really big stuff that you probably shouldn't be setting off without the use of a remote detonator, or maybe a shitty little cousin that no one likes. Well, Hoosiers apparently like blowing up the big shit as much as I do, because so many of them were buying these big professional fireworks that for 20 years the state law enforcement largely ignored it. And they did so by coming up with the most awesome legal compromise I've ever heard of. They made them blow them up in other states.

That's right, you could buy all the illegal pyrotechnics you wanted, but then you had to sign an affidavit promising to cross state lines before igniting them. How fucking great is that?! "We don't want you burning down or blowing up the homes of decent Indiana tax- payers, so you can buy these illegal explosives, but only if you promise you'll go blow up Michigan instead." Hilarious. In March 2006 the state legislature threw up its hands in a unanimous vote of "Fuck It," and completely legalized fireworks on private property. And they did so with a really ingenious twist; they got the State Fire Marshal on board by tacking a 5% public safety tax onto fireworks sales, generating an estimated additional $1 million annually, all of which goes to regional firefighter training. Pretty clever.

The Indiana borders boast scores of fireworks stores, each screaming at you in thirty foot red letters about the amazing buy-one-get-two-free deals you'll get when you purchase the type of firework that'll take your arm off at the shoulder if you don't get away quick enough. These stores are all over the place, and until this year, I admit in shame, I had never set foot in one. But all that was about to change. This Independence Day weekend, I hopped in the Scifimobile and took a drive to that mystical crossroads where unfettered capitalism and a deep, abiding love of saltpeter and sulphur commingle to form a garishly colored Mecca for the pyrotechnically inclined. That's right, my babies; I went to Trav's.

Trav's, more properly known as "Party At Trav's Fireworks," is your typical Hoosier gunpowder bunker; a red and white warehouse complete with two semi-trailers semi-permanently attached to the loading docks, and every square inch of the exterior painted to tell you something that Trav feels is more important than the cure for cancer. Trav wants to sell you stuff. And he's got the lowest prices in town. Guaranteed.

I've got to admit, I loved this place before I even walked in. There were signs plastered all over the outside to the effect that, as soon as September rolled around, all the fireworks were going bye-bye and the Halloween stuff comes in. But somebody somewhere seems not to care for Trav's carefully planned schedule, 'cause as soon as you walk in you see that the place is already packed with skulls, cauldrons, bloody hockey masks and Freddy Krueger gloves. And millions upon millions of fireworks. I very seriously considered buying a small cot and asking the owners if I could just live here.

You are confronted with a fireworks clearance section as soon as you walk in the front door. Frog Boy and I definitely inherited Ma Sci-Fi's bargain hunting genes, so clearance racks call to us like the pied piper of Hamlin. This was the first thing I saw; an empty Merlin mortar tube on clearance for 99¢. I didn't have an plans to buy mortars, and it didn't matter that I could just launch skyrockets from any old upright tube. This was a sign. A sign from the gods of sci-fi/fantasy that my quest was holy and just, and that I had not traveled to the mystical backward land of Indiana in vain. This was a sign that things were going to go very well for me. Into my cart Merlin went.

Next I was treated to a spectacle I doubt many people get to enjoy. I saw Trav. Then I saw Trav emotionally destroy his own son. Well, I saw a guy, anyway. He was a tall man in his late forties, one of those guys who tucks his overly white t-shirt into his running shorts and walks around his store with his socks pulled up almost to his knee, projecting the air of a man who thinks his position here on Earth is very nearly the equivalent of the position of the angel that sits next to the throne of The Almighty. He was one of those guys you know not to look at for too long, because you'll start giggling like a schoolgirl. Anyway, he kept strutting around like the cock of the walk, referring to the store as "we," so I'm guessing he was either the owner, or otherwise in charge. Guy in the ridiculous outfit, I dub thee Trav.

When I came upon him, Trav was just wrapping up his conversation with the lady in yellow in the pic above, and I swear to god, the man is the single worst salesman I have ever heard. He was trying to explain Trav's Fireworks shady convoluted sales scheme, and the lady had clearly heard enough. She was just pushing her cart away from him like he was no longer speaking, making a big show of reading the labels on fireworks we all knew she wasn't going to buy. A nearby pre-teen, whom I will assume was his son and will henceforth call Trav Jr., was going through something I recognized to be the deconstruction of his belief that his dad was a good person. You could look at his face and watch it happening as he struggled pointlessly against it, his little heart breaking. It was the look of a kid being forced to come to terms with the fact that a trusted and beloved father figure is completely and utterly full of shit.

Not content to cease his sale pitch when the customer walked off, Trav turned on Trav Jr., who listed intently as Trav explained that the buy one get two free on the outside of the store didn't literally mean that you bought one and got two for free. No, Trav explained, when you bought one and brought the other two to the register with you, you were really buying three. Trav's prices were so low, however, that compared to the fireworks store across the street, it was like getting two free. I italicize that for a reason; Trav was fucking obsessed with the store across the street. He wouldn't stop bringing it up. Whenever Trav Jr. asked him any sort of reasonable question, such as "Isn't saying 'buy one get two free' a lie, then?" or "Why don't you just mark the prices lower to show everybody that we're better?" or "Can't you go to jail for painting stuff that isn't true on the side of the building?," Trav would act all disgusted, like Trav Jr. was the slow kid in class, and he would launch into a diatribe on how Trav's could offer a better deal than they do across the street. The kid was trying every way he could to absorb this information in a way that would not make his dad an asshole, but it just wasn't happening. Despite all his verbal bargaining, the kid was slowly coming to the painful, inevitable conclusion. I felt a little bad for him, but I couldn't help but smile. We've all been there. A lot of people are full of shit, kid, and your parents are no exception. Welcome to the world.

After witnessing Trav Jr.'s loss of innocence, I went to the back of the store where, near another entrance, there sat another clearance rack, with totally different items than the first rack. I didn't know a man could have that many consecutive orgasms without ever touching his penis. This place is Nirvana. What a wonderful, beautiful, hope filled world we live in (except for Trav Jr.). I felt like Billy Gibbons thinkin' 'bout that night in Memphis. Then it got even better. I found the Thunderous King.

Thunderous King is one of those weird cubes made of 25 cardboard tubes, each of which has a miniature mortar inside. You can see up above that the Thunderous King is a denizen of outer space, and, in case anybody wanted to write some fan-fiction about him, he obviously exists in the Star Trek universe. The Excelsior class USS Enterprise NCC-1701-B hovers behind him; click the pic above for a larger view. But he's not afraid of it. Not just because he's the Thunderous King either. No, he's not afraid of it because its been cut in half.

They don't give a damn about copyright violations in Guangxi, China, and they obviously don't care much for pride in their workmanship, either. The Enterprise wasn't cut at a seam in the wrapping; you can tell from the phaser beams and light in the background that this is one continuous sheet of paper. No, it was printed this way on purpose. I could offer a list of guesses as to why, but the bottom line is that, because the paper was torn up on top and it was on clearance anyway, I managed to haggle Trav out of a very cool 25 shot firework for $10.50. For that price, I'll let Captain Harriman deal with his own problems.

There are four things I consider essential fireworks purchases, even though they're usually kind of lame and are in no way sci-fi. I'm talking about tanks, smoke bombs, snappers and snakes. Being some of the safest types of fireworks, these are usually doled out to youngsters, and I bonded with these early on. Way before I was technically allowed to use matches, in fact. Because I was drunk when I took the pic above, the tanks are all backwards. It doesn't matter; these tanks were horrible. Easily the worst I've ever seen. They were the only ones available, they burned for about 15 seconds, they wouldn't roll at all, and they're not even green. Trav, your tank selection sucks.

Trav has all kinds of ways to make smoke, and none of them are any good. Well, I can't say that for sure. Truth is, I got drunk and lost interest, so I never got around to lighting up those big ass smoke globes. But the smoke balls were crap. Why aren't they called "smoke bombs" any more? And why are they made of paper? I didn't bother taking any pics because there wasn't much to see, but I'll be skipping on these next year in favor of another brand. I saw the purple smoke sticks and entertained dreams of dancing around with these like Lance in Apocalypse, Now!, but they suck, too. The small smoke balls did have one saving grace: the blue ones are impressively intense. Its the prettiest, most dense blue color I've ever seen in a smoke bomb. But still not worth the price. As far a the big ones, I have no idea what became of them. They were either stolen or pitched. Either way, I didn't get to see them in action.

 

click here to read Part II