I know my history. Independence Day is celebrated here each July 4 to commemorate the day Will Smith blew up the alien mother ship and saved the planet Earth from those damn strange-looking interlopers with skulls like manta rays that vaporized LA and several other cities around the world. What a movie!

Fireworks is the way we celebrate it. Until the first Independence Day we ignored fireworks. Fireworks was the plaything of the elite. French kings and queens gathered in their splendid parks and gardens to sip Moet and watch the colorful explosions. Czars and Czarinas loved to watch them. Emperors and Empresses, too, and even the occasional Baron, Duke or Earl could afford them for the birthday or wedding party.

But until the USofA was born fireworks were not an American party favor. Now they sell fireworks on some street corners. In my old west coast habitat, a few communities allow "charitible" organizations to sell those explosives that are called "safe and sane" to raise money. Other communites, right across the street, deem them illegal but don't intercept the explosives when their own citizens bring them into their jurisdiction.

This creates dichotomous situations.

Down the street from me in Long Beach, an elderly couple's house caught fire on the night of July 4 in the late 1980's. A rocket fired by a neighbor had landed on their shake roof and the wood caught fire. By the time the fire department arrived a half hour later - they were very busy that night with many other fireworks related fires and injuries - the house was half gone. Fortunately, the couple were spending the holiday in their Winnebago out at Borreaga Hot Springs.

They had good insurance, but the neighbor was charged with negligent malicious destruction and hit with the Long Beach fireworks charge, which carried a very steep fine and some jail time. I can't recall how much it cost him but he disappeared and his house was sold. I think it may have cost him his property.

On the front page of every newspaper out there on July 5 was a tally of injuries, mostly to children and fools.

Some people never learn.

Every community has free spectacular professionally-engineered fireworks shows. They don't even charge admission. They allow you to watch really big boomers such as ten and twelve-inch rockets go off that will not blow off your fingers or set you neighbor's house alight.

Recently someone told me that he had the "Constitutional Right To Possess and Blow Up Fireworks."

I read the Constitution again, as I have many many times, and could find no mention of a Right To Possess and Blow Up Fireworks."

He made it sound like it was his patriotic duty to blow up something every 4th of July. Deep voice. Low pitch. Frown.

But I hazard the guess that he never served the country in a combat zone.

I told him that I watch the big fireworks on TV, the one on the Mall in Washington, D.C., because it lasts longer, has more color and the music is better. Also, I don't have to fight the awful traffic, get my arse wet on the damp grass at night, or fight off these Ohio mosquitoes waiting for the next round of bottle rockets.

I didn't tell him that I have had a couple of lifetimes worth of rockets and fireworks. When those boomers go off that do nothing but BOOM I feel like digging a hole with my bare claws. They sound like 133 mm mortar rounds falling just the other side of the sandbags. They sound like the report of a command-detonated land mine.

I'd rather sit in a chair with the TV fireworks, sipping a Rolling Rock and chewing bratwurst. And the bathroom has no waiting line.

Be safe. Be careful. Don't put your children in harm's way tonight. Go watch a real show.