It started innocently enough. I wanted one more campfire before I exited the Downeast region for a couple of days.
Oh, and I wanted some music to read by.
I gathered up my Kindle, my almost-new, electric blue portable Skullcandy tune emitter, and a bag of paper plates and egg cartons we were saving to start the next marshmallow festival.
I’d sawed up a bunch of old cedar formerly shaped like a ladder to the loft and set out toward the fire pit.
Once there, and the paper bag full of fire fodder and cedar kindling was conflagrating nicely, I began to look for my Bluetooth speaker. I had some Stephen Wilson Jr. to listen to.
Clearly, I must have dropped it on the walk to the pit. I retraced my steps, offered five dollars to my granddaughter if she could locate my speaker, and genuinely scratched my head—for real—on how it could have disappeared so quickly.
That’s when the sizzle and smoke from the crackling cedar changed tempo. The bright flashes of blinding light and strangely colored smoke were accompanied by the sound of a small jet engine coming apart from the inside.
My first thought was that my bride might have unwittingly discarded an empty can of Aqua Net in the bag of what I believed to be only paper.
She doesn’t utilize much hairspray in her day-to-day, and never at camp, but she once attended a Pentecostal church, so my suspicion did have some factual basis in a distant past reality.
Teasing your hair high enough for the good Lord to see it from the throne upon high was a thing in the 80s.
I digress.
The fiery show was a spectacle. The cedar boards became cinders, and I did a cursory check of my extremities to see if the heat had removed any of my phalanges. The smoke was acrid, but the white-hot, welding-worthy flame blinded me temporarily, burning my retinas to the point that I’d not be able to confirm what was disintegrating deep within the Hades-like hole boring its way into the scorched earth beneath my stone fire pit.
It was only later, once we gathered up the children who had run into the forest to hide until the Apocalypse passed, that we located the remains of an excellent speaker.
The photo attached depicts me pointing, from afar, at a metallic frame from my suddenly-lost Skullcandy speaker. There it was, hiding beneath the ashen ruins of a late Saturday afternoon recreational fire. We all stood in wonderment.
The nuclear-level fire was not caused by exploding hairspray; it had been the Timmy-ignited lithium battery—you know the one they ask you about before you get on a jet plane, or send something through the United States Postal Service? Yeah, there is a reason they ask. I have confirmed that those things burn like the fires from hell itself.
I have since surmised, after ridding myself of singed blue jeans (shout out to American Eagle) and clipping the melted tips from my eyelashes, that I unknowingly had dropped the speaker into the bag of paper, threw it in whole, and lit it off like any moron might.
I have not contacted Skullcandy to inquire about whether or not this might be covered under the warranty. Although when I bought it at Walmart, I did sign up for the extension in coverage for only $4.99.
I’m stupid, but not stupid enough to blame this on a manufacturing defect.
And that, my friends, is why I need a new speaker, warranty be darned.
These times do try us.
From the Jagged Edge of America, I remain dumb as a stump, and—
TC
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tc