When you're a licensed pyrotechnician and a bomb goes off nearby...

So my foam sword fighting group got together at a nearby major park as we do almost every week to do our fighting. While waiting for everyone to get there, some of us are just hanging out in the back of the jeep that I drove up there, and there's an explosion in a trashcan that wasn't even twenty yards away. Nobody saw who put it in there. Nobody got hurt. But still. Bomb in a trashcan in a park where there are lots of kids.

I called 911 and told them what happened, and that no one was hurt. Few minutes later, a cop shows up and I talk to him. Told him that we were just hanging out waiting for everyone to get there, then BOOM! Me, being a licensed pyrotechnician for J&M Displays, went to investigate, which some people were concerned about, but it's just standard procedure for me. The cop asked if it was an M-80 or something, and I told him flat out, it was too loud and too smoky to be an M-80. Personally, I think it was something possibly homemade and wrapped in tissue paper with a delay fuse. The smell was gunpowder and something else, but I couldn't place what. The cop said he had a sarge that worked for J&M, and I think it was what saved my ass from further questioning.

Later, a drunk comes out of the bar that was across the street, goes right into the middle of the area where we were sitting, which was a turtle made of concrete, and throws one of those popper things on the ground almost at where one of the girls in the group was. The report left her temporarily hearing impaired in her left ear (she was sitting on the ground...erm...turtle's shell). She was the first to go off on him, because part of the rocks inside that cause the gunpowder to set hit her, and the hearing thing, plus the fact that he had the gall to do that after the damn bomb in the trashcan. We asked him to leave. He didn't. We demanded he leave. He didn't. Now, I normally let the guy that I call my sensei deal with things like this and stay out and calm. Not this time. I stood up and yelled at the guy. He was so drunk he didn't get it. So, the girl said that if he didn't leave that she would call the cops because he was being drunk and disorderly in public in an area with children also frequently present. He continued to be a pain. She instantly pulled out her phone and made the call.

Between the drunkenness and the fact that the report from one of those poppers can, if within a certain range (based on age), permanently damage a young child's hearing, she wasn't messing around.

Same cops show up. I apologized to them for bringing them back a second time, but there's a time and place. Got that taken care of and the cops looked for the guy. We saw him go into the bar, after that, we went about our business. I don't think they found him. Then the people in the bar gave me trouble because they saw me throw my trash away (Oh! he put something in the trashcan! it's a bomb!...It was an empty soda bottle. whatever.). I just went about my business. Probably made some people unhappy, but if they really want to be a problem, that's their issue. I've got my priorities, and they aren't on the list.

All that aside, we did our sword fighting, then went to see a performance of The Merrywives of Winsor.