What I'm about to say comes with full awareness that I may be about to break one of my cardinal rules of column-writing: Never say anything that makes you sound like an old fuddy-duddy.
I don't care. It's story time.
It was Sunday night (well, technically, 2:15 a.m. Monday morning,) and I'd just made it home from a long, late DJ gig. Exhausted, half delirious, and ready to fall into the nearest available bed, I instead opened the back door of my house to a scene of devastation. Broken glass was everywhere. Debris was strewn about. Ceramic figurines lay shattered on the floor.
Without saying a word, I gingerly set down my gear, quietly backed out of the house, locked myself in the garage, and pulled out my phone to call 911.
"That's weird," I thought in a panic. "My security alarm never went off."
I opened the security app on my phone. My system was still live. None of the door or window alarms had been triggered, and the motion detectors hadn't sensed anything other than me coming home just now. WHAT WAS HAPPENING?
Cautiously, with my finger hovering over the button that would trigger emergency responders, I crept back into the house. A quick inspection proved that while the inside of the house looked thoroughly ransacked, the doors and windows were locked tight. That's when I realized what had happened.
No one had broken in. My house had been ransacked, alright -- by fireworks.
This holiday is officially ridiculous. Fireworks aren't even legal in Illinois, and yet every year, Rock Island turns into an Independence Day warzone. THIS year, the neighbors went so hogwild that their amateur pyrotechnics sent nearly every picture frame in my house crashing to the floor. It bounced knick-knacks off my shelves and even toppled my kitchen trashcan.
I was awake until 4:30 a.m. vacuuming up glass shards. This was NOT on my 4th of July agenda.
Look, I get it. The 4th of July is a time to celebrate America, and strangely, our preferred method of celebration is launching tiny non-American-made rockets into the sky and watching them explode. It's patriotic, it's a visual spectacle, and I'm fully onboard. Fireworks are fun.
But over the past few years, it's morphed into something REALLY different. So many people are launching illegal fireworks that it's no longer pretty and no longer fun. It's more like a low-budget war movie. The air runs so thick with gunpowder that Rock Island looks more like the foggy moors of Scotland. Quaint little bottle rockets have been replaced by mortars and explosives that share more with concussion grenades than they do fireworks.
I don't care if this makes me sound like some 90-year-old hermit yelling "get off my lawn!" This is a conversation we shouldn't even be having given that fireworks aren't even legal in Illinois. On my way home that night, I passed two police cars just sitting idly along the street while fireworks were launching from at least a dozen different backyards in my neighborhood alone.
I'm not a no-fun-nik, promise. I've been a DJ for over 25 years. Before that, I was a rave promoter. Disturbing the peace is one of my favorite pastimes. Whenever someone drives by with a booming subwoofer, I'm not annoyed -- I'm jealous. Every weekend, I stand in front of monitor speakers that propel dance beats directly towards my skull at a deliciously unhealthy volume. I'm no stranger to things that are loud -- and perhaps getting my house knocked around by fireworks is penance for my years of service spent damaging the eardrums of the innocent.
But I can say with some certainty, I have never dropped a beat loud enough to challenge the structural integrity of a building, nor have I ever snuck up behind somebody at midnight with a sudden boombox attack. We're proving day by day that basic human decency is a lost cause, but if you're one of those folks hoarding a pyrotechnic arsenal in your garage, maybe stop and think about who lives in the houses next to you. Maybe it's someone with PTSD. Maybe it's a dog scared out of its mind. Maybe it's a chubby DJ with high cholesterol who probably doesn't need adrenaline surges every five minutes.
Fireworks are fun to watch. Our area has great displays. Red White & Boom never disappoints. Matherville puts on a great show. Grand Mound has the best fireworks I've ever seen. What's wrong with kicking back and letting the pros do their thing? Their fireworks are better than yours, plus you stand better odds of surviving the weekend with all your fingers still attached to your hand. Just because you bought some mediocre fireworks doesn't mean I want to see and hear them. I own a mediocre guitar, but I sure don't expect you to attend a mandatory concert in my basement.
The 4th of July is morphing from a celebration of independence to a celebration of scaring the bejeepers out of our neighbors. Let's be honest, the other 364 days of the year are starting to feel scary enough as-is. If preferring to NOT have all my picture frames knocked off the walls and my floors NOT covered in broken glass makes me an old fuddy-duddy, so be it. Get off my lawn, and take your fireworks with you.
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