P.J. O'Rourke on Stuff That Blows Up.
One August afternoon, when we had only one stick of dynamite left, we came into possession of some hashish of exceptional quality. And after several pipefuls, it seemed like an excellent idea to set that last stick off in the yard.
Uncle Mike got the stick out of the refrigerator and, while we all sat on the front porch and smoked, began to slowly bore a hole in it. It took years to bore that hole, or so it seemed to us. And years more to measure out the fuse, crimp the cap, and so on. An eon, certainly. But we’d been sitting on the porch since time began, so we didn’t care. Not us. Maybe we’d been on the porch longer than that. Who could tell? Who’d care if we could tell? And who would we tell if we could or cared to? Anyway, eventually Uncle Mike began the Long Walk into the yard. Very far out into the yard. Farther out into the yard than we could personally imagine going. So far out into the yard that he had to run and run to get back on the porch, and he ran and ran and ran but it was so far to run that, even running and running as he was, he was barely running up the porch steps when, still running, a great blast and huge wave of dirt threw him through the screen door into the living room. Juanita, on the porch swing, was blown back through the railing. The rest of us, on the other side of the porch, were dumped over into a forsythia bush. Every window on the front of the house was broken, and no one could hear for two days.
