The Fourth of July is my third favorite holiday, after New Year’s Eve and Halloween.  My love for the day has jack shit to do with anything other than it has usually been a good day.  Where my family could not get along on Christmas or Thanksgiving, where Easter failed me in anticipation or excitement, the Fourth has always triumphed.  I cannot remember a bad 4th of July, except for maybe the one wasted on a Grateful Dead concert.  The time was profoundly wasted.  I was not nearly wasted enough.  Even when we were living at the Days Inn at 95th and I-35, it was a good day, and one I remember well. 

My family always trusted me with lighters and liquor.  I was not raised drinking, mind you.  I was simply allowed a sip on special days, or a cordial glass filled with cream sherry, just for the taste. 

The joys of being a child of the 70s.

As for lighters and matches, I was an exceptionally good child, dextrous and well-coordinated.  I lit everything myself except for sparklers.  The only mishap I ever had happened when I was 18, in Independence, Missouri, at a light-beer-in-cans-under-age white trash gathering of the slam-dunkingest most low-brow party of my entire life.

I was lighting a sparkler for a small boy.  Sparklers, which burn at a temperature I describe as Obscene Degrees Fahrenheit, are, or used to be, considered children’s fireworks.  I had my Bic flicked and held under the tip of the young boy’s sparkler.  He started when it did, flinched, and jammed the ignited tip into the cuticle of my right thumb.  I strode into the house and plunged my fist, lighter and all, into the cooler of cans, water, and ice.  It was a festival of pain, and the blister was a lingering work of biological art. 

I don’t give a rat’s ass about the so-called meaning of the holiday.  I am not a patriot, but what sport for the sons (and daughters) of liberty.  Getting hammered and lighting consumer-grade explosives.  It’s genius.  Really. 

Plus, I have the day off.  With pay.  So.  Let’s party.