A 4th of July Story

"What the man who lives on the corner did while working in his yard the day before Independence Day." By Terry Nelson

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One day, today actually, I was working in the yard planting grass seed when I decided I needed to take a break. I went in and got my cigarette lighter, a sleek black Bic. I wanted a cigarette, but I said to myself, "No Mr. Man! No smoking for you!" I then returned outside and sat on the boulevard. The grass is all yellow and dry because we have had very little rain in the past month and naturally I have not watered the boulevard because the city used salt on the street this past winter and it killed all the beautiful grass I planted last year, which made me very, very angry.

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Anyway, I tried setting the dried, weed infested dead grass on fire. But it didn't burn more than 3 square inches at a time. (I also had a hose handy just in case it really did burn.) Although I was alone, I said to myself, "And yet people yelled at me when I'd throw cigarette butts out my car window as I drove, screaming at me that I could start a grass fire." (Of course, I'm positive many of these same people throw their beer cans and pop cans and french fry bags out of their car window onto my boulevard for me to clean up.)

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So after a couple of tries, I got bored with trying to see how easy a grass fire would start, and quickly went into the house to get my smoke bombs and cherry bombs and fire-crackers. (My neighbors are so lucky I do not have a gun.) I carefully placed several of them in ant holes around the yard to blow up their sinister tunnels by which they infiltrated my yard. (5th Column movement, you know.) I pretended it was war and the ants were filthy, despicable Germans. Nazis. I later tried to blow up a short wall along side my driveway - since I have to rebuild it anyway. I was pretending I was doing demolition work with explosives after a nuclear attack that killed off all of the ants. Unfortunately, the cherry bombs did little to no damage, so I will still have to rework the wall by hand - and the ants were still there.

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I realized it would be best if I resorted to guerrilla tactics, and so it became necessary to use chemical weaponry. I got out the smoke bombs. I positioned myself behind the fence and placed them in prominent locations - though heavily camouflaged - like landmines, but not really. They were embedded in the ivy along the fence. As kids were coming by from the park across the street, I'd light them and they would get all excited wondering where and why the smoke was - it was simply a diversionary tactic - until suddenly, the neighbor lady came running around the corner because, "After seeing all of the blue smoke, I thought maybe your hedge-trimmer... or something had blown up! Are you okay?" Then the police came by and we waved and I went back to work after assuring Mrs. Kravetz everything was fine.

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The End.