No, no – I mean this is really a venting thread, and I don’t belong in it. Your response was fine. There’s just nothing I can contribute that’s in the proper spirit of The Pit.
Nope. I do feel bad for the human beings with PTSD. And I’m definitely in favor of restricting fireworks to a very short window of time, for their benefit, and so everyone can sleep.
But
Yup. I love fireworks. And i have a friend who does complex demolitions for a living, and yes, when he says, “don’t you wish you could do that?” I agree that i do, and a little I’m jealous if him. (And i avoid shaking his hand for a day before boarding an airplane.)
I’ve never actually set off my own fireworks. Mostly because I’m afraid I’d blow off my thumb. But i seek them out in season and they give me a great deal of pleasure. There’s a visceral joy to a good showy explosion. I sometimes stand outdoors in windstorms to enjoy the power of the storm, too.
If you want to pit people who don’t use adequate precautions and burn down the neighborhood, or people who set off fireworks at 2am on July 10th, I’m there for you. But I’m pretty sympathetic to people who are careful when they make loud booms at 10pm July 4th.
Thanks for posting that. I still don’t see your side, but it’s new for me to learn about people who are jealous of demolition workers. Something I learned today.
Right, now let’s move a little closer to the real world. Say you only get to use your firepit one day per year and most years you don’t even get that one day. You probably won’t get another day for several more years. Are you still going to give up your one day rather than expect your neighbors to show you some consideration?
The old doper Santo Rugger had his PhD in explosives engineering I have never been so jealous of a person.
Right. How silly that I might want to sleep because I have to get up at 3 am to get to work on time on July 5. It’s not like I was calling the cops on anybody, I knew that July 4-5 was going to be a miserable, sleep-deprived slog for me and those like me who weren’t getting a holiday this weekend like the rest of the country. It’s not a matter of being a crybaby, loud booms and flashing lights are not conducive to a good night’s sleep.
Can I bitch about people who bitch about people bitching? Or do I need your permission for that, too?
No, and frankly the description you give has absolutely nothing appealing about it. To me it’s like explaining why dropping an anvil on your foot is a wonderful and fulfilling experience. It’s not. At least not to me.
I will support your ability to enjoy that “sport” if you support my freedom to dislike it intensely when I’m trying to sleep.
We get booms on July 4th and New Year’s around here. I can cope with it at those intervals. What pisses me off are the assholes who want to do this shit nightly year round. That’s just goddamned inconsiderate of others.
Does it do any good? I figure the cops can see the roman candles going off and they never do anything. Except this year some kids in the park were setting of what sounded like sticks of dynamite at 2:30 am July 6th
BANG!
Teens laughing
BANG!
Teens laughing
Blue and red lights
Silence
I’m guessing there wouldn’t be much pushback at the idea of pitting, at least, this particular MFer:
Yikes.
That’s not “setting off fireworks”, that’s “assault with fireworks”.
And yes, i can get behind pitting the people who did it.
That’s fair and I’m certainly not defending those people or the ones ignoring fire-bans.
Ummm . . . Ya, fuck the person who did that.
I see a lot of people here using fireworks as a talisman for various life ills. If fireworks keep you from sleeping it means you probably need to fix your sleeping habits, fireworks should not be a major disruption to sleep. Additionally lots of things will be loud enough to wake you up in the middle of the night, falling back to sleep should not be very difficult or disruptive. If you’re getting otherwise healthy sleep, being woken up in the middle of the night should not be a big deal.
BTW I struggled with serious insomnia and used prescription sleep aids for years, I’m not being blase–I’m saying I don’t assume my unhealthy sleep pattern justifies me crying about the unfairness of the world. Noise in a civilized area is normal, what’s abnormal is minor sleep disruptions making you so upset you cry and throw temper tantrums. That to me is a sign you have bad sleep health, as a sufferer of that very thing, I’m telling you there are ways to improve that, and crying about noise isn’t one of them.
PTSD is a tragic thing, but I’m highly skeptical that most veterans with PTSD are set off by fireworks. I’m a veteran myself (because of all the Stolen Valor shit on the internet, I like to point out most of my military career fell in times of peace and I was a REMF for most of it but I was deployed to combat zones twice–i.e. I’m a veteran in that I’m a retired servicemember, I don’t have a closet full of combat medals); and I’ve been known to get drunk at the local VFW hall, there’s been a lot of guys in there openly mock the idea that fireworks sets off PTSD. These are people who fairly honestly talk about the fact they do have PTSD.
Now PTSD as a pyschiatric thing, is going to have variable manifestations from person to person, so I’m not saying no veteran’s PTSD has ever been set off by fireworks. But there is a fuck ton of stuff that can set off PTSD (including in the millions of regular civilians who have PTSD for various reasons unrelated to serving in combat), and we can’t structure our society around that.
I’m not sure. There may have been too many with mortars around here.
This is the first year there was so much noise that I called the police. Don’t need the mortar owners to continue with them next year and get careless.
Whoooooa there boy! Let’s not remotely diagnose people’s ills on limited information. And you’re utterly ignoring what @Broomstick and others (including myself) have said. Broomstick had to get up at 3am. Here at least, the fireworks didn’t slow their frequency to less than one a minute until nearly 11pm - and that’s slow, not STOP. So being stuck with at best 3-4 hours of sleep is grounds to be frustrated.
And again, in my neighborhood, the nightly fireworks have been going on for a week. Intermittently until the weekend, and then starting Friday, at an ever-increasing frequency. So say every ten minutes or so Friday night, Every 5 or so Saturday, and every minute or more Sunday. That’s a minimum of three days of disrupted sleep. So, yeah, I tolerate it during minimal burn risk years, for the holiday itself, but since it’s NEVER just the holiday itself, and going far into the night, it’s fair to consider it a pretty major disruption (if relatively short term)- not a one off.
I find the whole spectacle amusing. My dogs get a bit upset, but they tend to react to their owner’s emotions, and seeing me calm helps keep them calm. I actually go outside and have a bit of a fire in my firepit and invite them out with me. Sometimes they hang out, sometimes they go in. They don’t really cower or get scared. Sometimes some of the closer by mortars make them flinch, but nothing too major. This was one of my dog’s first experience with fireworks, and she did okay, but kept going back inside only to peer out through the pet door to check to make sure we were all okay.
I will note that fireworks are nothing like thunderstorms. A really good thunderstorm around here may have a few big cracks of thunder that are close to equivalent to the constant barrage of mortars going off for hours. I’ve had the tree in my backyard hit by lightning, and it wasn’t as loud as some of these celebratory explosions that my neighbors choose to employ. Storms also don’t have high pitched screaming whistles as many fireworks employ. So, comparison to thunderstorms is pretty useless.
I actually close down the shop for 2 days after the 4th every year, as most of the dogs that would come in on the 5th and even 6th were nervous wrecks. Not many dogs are in such a state after even an intense thunderstorm. Yeah, it’s not just “loud booms” to them, there is a difference.
Starting before dusk even begins, it’s a constant state of warfare. I assume that different houses and streets are trying to outdo each other. Have an almost constant pop-pop-pop like small arms fire going off somewhere around, constantly accented with larger explosions of mortars and roman candles and such, and backed by the screaming of the ones that well, scream as they are launched.
This is then occasionally interrupted by the sound of screams of pain, that occasionally will pierce through the neighborhood, indicating that someone was not practicing proper safety with their toys.
Anyway, I would personally feel like an asshole to contribute to the “festivities”, as I know that it causes a fair amount of trauma to both people and pets. I know that it is dangerous to not only myself, but to my neighbors. I also know that it is annoying to clean up fireworks off your roof, gutters, and yard. They’re also pretty expensive, and I don’t really want to waste the money on them. So, I don’t light any off myself, but I may as well resign myself to accepting that my neighbors have spared no expense for my entertainment.
I’ve wondered whether some of the people with freaked-out dogs have been making things worse by getting upset about their dogs getting upset, and then their dogs get even more upset in response to their emotions, and it creates a feedback loop?
To some extent, yeah.
People who get angry or upset will cause their dogs to become upset.
But at the same time, comforting your dog when they are upset teaches them that it’s appropriate to get upset.
Best to simply act as though nothing bad at all is happening, and enjoy it yourself, they pick up on your cues as to what of be afraid of.