Firecrackers are stupid

Firecrackers are stupid, and so are the people who like them.

I can hear you seething with rage now.

“BUT AJ,” you whine through clenched teeth, choking back your tears, “FIRECRACKERS ARE AS AMERICAN AS APPLE PIE AND BASEBALL!!!!” Allow me to make two points. First, apple pie is NOT American you moron, it’s been around since at least the Middle Ages. Second, you’re a moron, stfu.

Pretty much year-round in my neighborhood it’s the same thing. Nitwits stay outside until 2 in the morning blasting off bottle rockets, M-80’s, Roman candles, and everything else. These inconsiderate idiots evidently don’t have jobs to wake up for in the morning (and don’t need them thanks HUD housing programs like Section 8), so they get loaded on cheap beer and play with their sparkly boom-booms into the wee hours of the night, disrupting the sleep of anyone within a 500 foot radius. I wouldn’t even mind as much if this was being done on the weekend, but just last Wednesday night these assholes were out there blasting off firecrackers until like 1 in the morning. Who the fuck lights off firecrackers on a Wednesday night? I guess the same idiots who think Natty Ice is drinkable. Also, I had no idea you could buy firecrackers using EBT/welfare money (Side note: Apparently I’m racist just for saying this?).

What’s worse, I seem to be the only person who is bothered by the noise. “I didn’t hear anything last night bro.” “How can you hear that? I turn on my AC and I can’t hear anything.” “I just smoke a bowl and I’m fine dude. Just smoke some weed!” “Can’t you just turn up your TV?” I’m starting to think I’m surrounded by idiots. If you can sleep through the sound of explosives right outside your house, you have a fucking problem. Sleeping through explosions isn’t normal, humans are not meant to sleep through those kinds of sounds. Anyone who is capable of tuning out and sleeping through the sound of explosives is on drugs, drunk, or brain-dead. Unless you grew up in the middle of Kandahar there is no way in hell you should be able to “just ignore it bro”.

What bothers me the most about this though is that nobody seems to ever do anything about these people. We just accept that they’re drunken idiots “having fun” and let it go. The cops rarely if ever come for these people (at least in my area), no disgruntled veterans or restless sleepers come out to tell them to STFU, these jobless drunk idiots are allowed to disrupt the entire neighborhood unimpeded.

Yet just the other week I was at a house party that was, for our group of idiots, under control and not too loud. This was on a Saturday night. At about 10 PM some angry old guy who looked like a cross between Mike from Breaking Bad and that old guy from that AC transit bus fight back in 2010 came storming down the alleyway yelling about how he was going to call the cops and telling us all to shut the fuck up. Since nobody else had the stones to say something back, I spoke up and told him to calm down and reminded him it was Saturday night. He started yelling “WHO’S THE TOUGH GUY, HUH?” He then accused my friend Rotten Tom of saying it. Not one to let my homies take the fall for my actions, I spoke up again and told him “I’m not a tough guy, but I fucking said it.” The old man started calling me a faggot and attempted to walk into the yard I was in. I just laughed, set down my drink, told someone to run off and get the guy who lived there, told someone else to put on “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” by Sir Elton John (I didn’t make that part up, I actually said this), then made to knock this old prick on his ass. A few people stopped him from coming into the yard, and it took six people to hold me back and dissuade me from kicking this guy’s ass. Then the Mexican neighbor from across the alley came out and talked the old man down. The old man apologized to all of us and let it go. I then did a shot of Crown Royal Apple with Fernando the Bro.

An hour after that, a cop car pulls up. The officer gets out and asks to speak to the person who lives there. Someone else apparently called on us for our mediocre partying. Thankfully the cop was cool and told us to just bring it inside after midnight.

There was another time Rotten Tom and his crew sans me were in his yard listening to music at 10 PM on a Saturday night when the cops showed up and told him to turn it down. I’m glad I wasn’t there for that, I may have gotten one of Rotten Tom’s amps, hooked my phone up to it, and blasted Slipknot’s new album (which is cash money, go check it out) full-throttle.

So people hanging out listening to music and having a good time on their own property warrants angry old men looking for fights and cops coming out, but blasting off firecrackers all hours of the night in a public park (that has signs posted all over it stating that it’s off-limits after 9 or 10 PM) in the middle of a residential area doesn’t warrant anything at all? What kind of fucked up world am I living in?

Contrary to what idiots like Nathalie Nahai say, it can be very therapeutic to read stuff by people who are having similar experiences. So I took to Google in search of poor suffering souls like me dealing with inconsiderate jobless assholes. Apparently most of the denizens of the internet live in Candyland, where the best idea is to simply approach these people and tell them how they’re hurting your feelings and asking them to stop. You know what would happen if I approached these people in Philly? If I didn’t get shot, I’d get my ass kicked by no less than 10 people. Then they’d find my house and blow off M-80’s every night outside for the next month. Are you people smoking crack? In what world is it considered a good idea to approach a group of drunk people blasting off explosives and ask them to stop? Has this ever ended well for anyone in the entirety of human history? According to these morons, we should have just politely asked the Japanese to stop bombing Pearl Harbor and the Germans to stop invading the rest of Europe. Hey, maybe if we ask nice enough then Iran won’t bomb oil fields anymore.

No you jack-ass, “asking them politely to stop” is going to accomplish nothing except getting your ass kicked and possibly even shot.

Some of you are probably wondering why I don’t just call the cops myself. Those of you from Philadelphia reading this know exactly why this is a fruitless endeavor. For those of you who live in Candyland, the cops most likely won’t show up until 3 hours later, despite the fact that I usually see the same two patrol cars cruising up and down my area for hours on end until they’re actually needed, which is when they pull a Houdini and disappear never to be seen again. In the unlikely event they do show up, the cops will just give them a halfhearted “Knock it off”, then leave. About 10 minutes after they leave, the ‘tards will just start shooting off their sparkly boom-booms again. The cops will most likely not come out for it again, and if they do it will be to tell me to stop calling. Sounds incredulous, right? I’ve seen it happen enough times. I’ve even seen cops dime out the person who called. I know not to rely on the Philadelphia Police Department for anything that requires any sort of confidentiality, efficiency, or finesse. It’s a shame, because I do know many good cops in this city. But for every good well-meaning cop there’s three asshole cops who are basically just useless sacks of shit with a blue dress shirt and a badge slapped on them. I’m sure many Philadelphians can relate to this, and probably even people from other large cities. This doesn’t mean all cops everywhere are pure evil or anything, people just tend to forget that a police officer is like any other job. For every good worker, there’s multiple shitty ones.

If you live in the middle of a residential area and you’re blasting off firecrackers into the wee hours of the night on a weekday, you can kindly go fuck yourself with a rusty chainsaw. If you’re easily amused by loud noises, you’re an idiot.

Have a similar story about inconsiderate assholes playing with their sparkly boom-booms, or jerk-off cops who told the neighbor you called? Feel free to share it in the comments!