PYRO

"The stillness of the night air can bring many to sleep, but it also gives imagination and creativity to others. "

There were nights when we just stay outside my friends Bonjings gate and tell tall tales of our misfortunes and misadventures. The story lengthens to the topic of what we want to happen in the future. And as if the topic aint broad enough, we often landed on our "hate list", which is really long!

Bonjings house is the second to the last house on a dead end street. There is a lot, opposite to his place which is full of tall grass that we sometimes turn into our personal playground. At night we use to sit outside the gate with Elvin, Ruel and Sonny to talk about stuff. This is the most condusive place to chit-chat, because the place is dark and the narrow street is clean enough to sit on. Nobody, except his family passes by so there is total privacy. I learned to smoke in that place.

One time I brought a toy soldier, a couple of baby rockets, a match and a lighter fluid to his place. I figured that the burning soldier stunt would create a nice cinematic effect on our evening session.

First we strapped two baby rockets on the toy soldier to see if it would fly. We lit the rockets and... boom! It's too heavy! (we all laughed in synchrony: bwahahahahaha!)

We put two more on his back to try and make it slide down the pavement. But the rockets exploded the moment it lit up. (more laughter...but this time with a more sinister tone.)

Failure is not an option. Seeing the toy soldier be destroyed in to pieces is the most fun we had in days. So I put the toy soldier neer the edge of the canal...poured lighter fluid and torched it! Taa-daaaaaa!!! And then we kicked it down the canal just as soon as it melted.(we all appluaded for the cool grand finale!)

But the grand finale of all is when Bonjing made a hexagram on their neighbors back gate using the lighter fluid. It burned like the one we saw in the movie! But then we heard a noise from the other side of the gate, and we started to run for it!

The next day, there was a charred hexagram on the neighbors gate. (Applause!)

That was maybe more than 10years ago. Now we are all mature (huh?) and respectable (huuuhhhh???) citizens. Bonjing is now living in Japan with his long time girlfriend Letlet. I wonder if there would be another when we can burn something up again. Ahhh! I forgot that we were singing a song when we did that, "Seek and Destroy" by Metallica. Pero sana next time barbeque na lang! =>