I never thought of it this way; maybe you have. Life is a game of Tetris.
You remember the Game Boy Tetris, right?
It’s that captivating game with the Russian theme music, where you position tiny blocks as they descend from the top of the screen, to earn points and keep the game going. Early-on, you make a positioning mistake, here and there, and clog things up, and — oops, oh well! — you still have plenty of time to keep the points coming.
Only at some point, the mistakes pile up, you run out of space, you feverishly struggle to reposition the falling blocks and keep the game going.
Finally, inevitably, it’s game-over.
The grim reaper runs the casino. You can only outfox the outcome for so long. I think about this now, as the aches and pains mount. I guess the good news is that I’m too old to “die young” — so there’s that.
Bette Davis was right. So are those dour, fatalistic Russians. Gevalt.
Light the fuse! And BOOM! You’re not a powerless little kid anymore. You used a Zippo, or Diamond wooden kitchen match, or your friend’s lit punk, to ignite a ladyfinger, or firecracker, or cherry bomb, or ashcan/M80, or bottle rocket, or Roman candle.
You went on the roof with your friend, held the ashcan while he lit it. You waited until the fuse started to sizzle and then you hurled it off the roof and across the street, with the practiced form of a WWII soldier hurling a grenade into a Kraut bunker.
BOOM!
In June, some creepy white guy in a beat-up Galaxie wagon with New Hampshire or Georgia plates would troll 190th street for us kids. In hushed tones, we’d conduct business. Some kids had real money, and bought mats of firecrackers. We — the real little kids — bought a pack or three of firecrackers off of them for, what was it, 10 or 15 cents each. We’d be ready for July 4th.
One year, a local 19 year old in the National Guard, came home on leave with a box of simulated artillery for us. We blew up melons and broken baby dolls, a precursor to wars to come.
We were outrageous. We annoyed the grownups. We courted danger. There were some close calls. Jimmy’s chest was singed by an ashcan explosion although none of us could figure out how THAT happened. An errant bottle rocket got stuck in the window screen of Mrs. Donohue and nearly set the curtains afire, and her son Billy caught holy hell for that one.
The cops would come and we’d scoot; they’d leave and we’d return to annoy the neighborhood.
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The firecracker debris and smell of spent gunpowder was everywhere on July 5th mornings. The paper shards seemed knee high up and down 190th Street and across Devoe Terrace.
Some of us grew up. Some, like JPP, nearly lost their lives to the drug that is being outrageous.
And then others, addicted to this drug, pushed the envelope in other ways. Anti-social behavior is a powerful narcotic. So powerful that some so-called adults vote for politicians who — in giving the middle-finger salute to the world — are outrageous on their followers’ behalf.
So powerful that a subset of those followers actually took a shot at storming the Capitol on January 6th.
And that worked out about as well as the night JPP almost blew his hand off. He learned from the errors of his ways. Did they?