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Blogs by Joseph W. Montaperto
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE 70's AND TODAY 1/28/2020 4:00:58 PM
The things you could do in the 70's would get you a life sentence in maximum security prison now! This is what I mean by how different society was back in the 70’s - much looser - the society now is WAY too corporate and tight-ass - everything now is so tightly controlled.
So, it’s maybe the second week of January, Roselle, NJ - 1978. I’m 18 years old. It’s f***in’ FREEZING out - like 2 o’ clock in the morning. Just one of those bleak, endless winter nights where everything seems like a barren landscape. The holidays are over, and it’s just kind of depressing, y’know? Especially when you’re 18 years old, not working and you just have WAY too much time on your hands. So, me and my friends, Richard and Luddy are doing what we do most every one of these endless winter nights. We sit in Rich’s 1967 Dodge Dart, smoking weed and drinking bottles of Michelob, crackin’ on each other, laughing, just basically trying to alleviate the boredom of winter existence. We’re still kids, really, only out of high school maybe six months - and this is what we do. Like I said, it’s the second week of January, holidays over, and everybody has thrown out their dead Christmas trees in front of their houses, on the curb. We’re parked a couple of blocks from Rich’s house, right in front of this dead end street. The night’s almost over, we’re baked - and we’re bored. Now, Luddy always carries a Bic lighter on him, ‘cuz when he farts he puts it near his ass - and the flames grow really big, y’know, because of the methane gas, I guess. He’s kind of a genius like that. Suddenly, we notice - hey - there’s, like, about fifteen or twenty dead Christmas trees all in a row in front of us! Let’s - let’s LIGHT them on fire!! Hahaha - yeah - nobody’ll get hurt - we’ll just scare them. So we drive slowly and sneakily down the street with the Bic lighter - and we light each and every Christmas tree on fire! We can’t stop f***in’ laughing, man! Pretty soon, when we’re on our way back to our parking spot, the whole block is ablaze with the Christmas trees. Luddy, for no apparent reason, carries this megaphone with him all the time, and all of a sudden, pulls it out:
“Evacuate your houses! This is the Roselle Fire Department! Evacuate your houses! One by one, all these lights go on in the houses - people start milling out in their bathrobes - and hardhats - (yeah, swear to God!) and slippers - they’re gasping in horror at their trees being all lit up. They think their houses are on fire! We turn off the car lights and duck - we’re on the floor - dyin’.
Soon, two fire trucks come screaming down the street, siren’s WAILING - by the time they get there - the trees have just burnt the f*** out! No fires - just a bunch of people standing around at 2AM in their pajamas in 13 degree cold. Everybody just kind of looking at each other with puzzled, embarrassed looks. If that was today, it would somehow be construed as a hate crime - or a terrorist attack, or something, and we’d be getting f***in’ waterboarded in some kind of Guantamo Bay set-up.
