Glory Days, Yeah They'll Pass You By.

Still in DC and missing Nicola a pretty gigantic amount, so here's an old story to cheer myself up.

My friend Jimmy and I used to get annihilated and do the dumbest things possible.  We set fireworks off in our sleeping housemate's room, crashed college parties to drink free beer pong beer by losing on purpose (most of the time Jimmy would get his penis out), and caused a general ruckus at any available moment. 

Jimmy had this old laptop that died and could not be fixed.  Naturally, we decided that we should find a way to blow up its battery, under the assumption that it would be some sort of insane display of destructive force.  We tried setting it on fire.  It wouldn't work.  We tried lighter fluid.  It wouldn't work.  We ran out of available materials. 

We decided to go get some gasoline. 

We walked to the gas station (obviously, driving was not an option, so at least there's some amount of responsible thinking going on here) with a gas can and filled 'er up.  Upon return to our house, we realized that we really only had one shot at this, and we needed to ensure the maximum amount of guaranteed fuckery possible.  We found a cooler, and placed the laptop battery inside.  We poured a healthy amount of gasoline in.  Standing back and staring at the situation we'd prepared, we realized that neither of us was willing to reach a hand into the cooler with a lighter and start the conflagration.  Eyebrows are important.  So are arms.  Doing as any reasonably intelligent couple of early 20's middle class males would, we make a trail of gas from the cooler and stretching about ten feet away, and balled up some paper to light on fire and toss at the gas.

At this point, some scene setting is necessary.

We lived in downtown Kalamazoo, Michigan.  Not in the country.  We had neighbors whose houses could be touched by stretching an arm out a window.  We shared a driveway and parking lot with our very cool and super nice neighbors on the south side of our house.  There were eight cars in the parking lot, lining each side.  The cooler and path of fuel were placed equidistantly from the two lines of cars.  We were really drunk, so give me a break.

We lit the paper and tossed it.  Have you ever seen gasoline on fire?  It's dramatic.  The wet line of gasoline on the asphalt immediately became a ten foot high inferno racing toward the cooler.  When it reached its destination, a ball of flame exploded into the air, and the flames from the cooler hovered fifteen feet above the ground. 

We were at a loss.  How we expected something else to happen is beyond me, because if we'd really thought it through, I think we'd have realized that gasoline does not fuck around with fire.  That's how people die in car crashes sometimes. 

Jimmy ran inside and filled a bucket with water, which he threw at the chaos.  Guess what?  Water spreads gasoline.  The flames, now much closer to the cars, did not recede, but stayed the course.  After panicking for a few minutes, I ran inside and grabbed our fire extinguisher, which I didn't know how the fuck to use.  After arguing and slapping each others' hands for a minute, we figured it out and put out the flames.  We then ran inside the house and turned all the lights off, convinced that someone had seen a massive amount of flames at 1:30 in the morning and reported it to fire department (you know, like you're supposed to.)

No one came.

No lesson was learned.

Also, we told our landlord someone stole our fire extinguisher so we wouldn't have to explain why it was used. 

I don't do this kind of thing anymore.