 - Last login: 3 hours agoTextuous
- Textuous is a 51 year old guy from Near-N-Yondered, Texas, USA.
- Likes 6 pages • 75 fans • Received 47 reviews
- Member since Mar 30, 2006
Antique Cowboy with tarnished six-shooter, rusty spurs, and swaybacked steed. Garage kept, housebroken, and mannerful. Grammatically textuous, with traces of chivalry and dance-floor etiquette. If you read the blog...the least you can do is say hello and leave a smile or sumthin'.
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MINI MEYER (Volume 3)
I was not a bad kid, and as little cowboys go, certainly not a terror. I was merely curious, inventive, creative, and imaginative...so I got in trouble a lot.
Today they're called pop rockets, but in 1967 we called them bottle rockets, and you got a dozen for a quarter. They look like a fire cracker glued to the end of a little stick about a foot long. Supposedly, you sit a (real glass) soda bottle on the ground, place the stick in the bottle with the rocket pointed skyward, and light the fuse. The thing will roar off the launch pad, travel a couple of hundred feet into the heavens, then explode like a firecracker.
(We always wondered exactly where those things were made, because the only discernable writing on the package was the warning label: LIGHTING INDOORS WILL PRODUCE YOU STARTLING RESULTS AND EXTREMELY. PLEASE DO NOT.)
For a ten-year old, making a rocket launcher isn't...um...rocket science. Simply find an old piece of pipe about four feet long, and lay it over your shoulder. Slip the rocket in the end of the pipe, light the fuse, aim, and ZOOOOOOM. Surprisingly, the launcher was reasonably accurate too...we could hit each other from 50 yards away about one out of ten times, and the other nine times were close enough to make things interesting. Functionality aside, the real beauty of the design lay in it's adaptability...any time Momma Meyer came outside, we simply jabbed the butt end of the pipe into the ground, and shot the rocket upwards like the little angels we were.
One night I was holed up behind the old washing machine in the back yard, fending off an attack by a gang of ruthless, cutthroat outlaws (consisting of my sidekick Bubba Wayne, who I always made play the bad guy, and who, perhaps subsequently, became a convicted felon in later years).
The battle was fierce, and his shots kept hitting the side of the appliance and exploding with a deep metallic ring. When the ringing in my ears became constant, I decided to retreat inside the house and take care of some business in the little cowboy's room. I made a mad dash for the door, flung it open, and ducked inside...just as a bottle rocket whizzed past my right ear.
The fizzing projectile glanced off the rounded front of the 1948 Frigidaire, which changed its course just enough that it missed the big, green, glass vase on the table. The new heading took it directly into the door frame dividing the kitchen from the living room, and slowed it's velocity significantly.
On a slightly upwards trajectory now, the sputtering rocket passed directly over the sofa, (nicking the TV Guide in Momma Meyer's hand), dinged off Perry Mason's nose, and bumped the rabbit ear antenna off it's perch.
Then, due to forces unknown, the blazing arrow turned upwards, interrupted Jesus and the Twelve in mid-meal, and exploded right against the ceiling, knocking down two white ceiling tiles and leaving the room filled with smoke and ringing silence.
Like I said, I got in trouble a lot. Bubba Wayne was nowhere to be found, and I didn't see him for more than a week afterwards...just about the time I was able to sit down again without wincing.
Meyer
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