When I was a teen, I was over at a friend's house smoking weed with coke on top of it. To say the least, we were all very, very high. I see this canister in my friend's room and decided to open it up. Inside was a flare gun that he had apparently stole or traded or whatever, and thinking it was cool, I asked him if I could have it. After all, I had always wanted to shoot one.

So, I leave his house with my other friend and head home. On the way home, there is a bridge, and pulled over on the end of the bridge and figured this would be a great place to shoot the flare gun and send it over the water and have it land in the river below. I load the gun, and stood back with my friend and fired the flare gun. It didn't really go that high in the air, and I looked over at my friend and said, "hey, isn't it supposed to go higher than that?" And he is like, "yeah, I thought so too..." right as I'm thinking, "fuck, don't even know if it's going to make it to the water from here..." Bam!!! The flare hits the ground on the side of the river and explodes. My friend runs down the hill to try and stomp it out, but I grab him and tell him it's no use, it landed in brush and was already out of control. It was a rural area, and this was before cell phones anyways, so I hop in the car and start making my way to the nearest payphone which was 20 minutes away. I was so high I kept forgetting why I was driving at over 100 mph, until I looked in my rear view and could see the glow of the fire.

I'm stressed out, and upset at how serious this is, when my friend starts laughing. I look over at him and he says, "listen to the song." I had The Doors cd on, and it was playing, "come and set the night on fire..." so, I had a brief moment of levity in the car, while I was focused on getting to the phone.

I make it to the pay phone and called 911, it seemed like forever before they switched me over to the fire department, and was so rittled with anxiety and coke, that I had trouble telling them what happened.

Fortunately, they managed to get the fire out in enough time, and it just burned a couple acres of brush bordering the lake. I ended up calling my friend who I had the flare gun from the day before and told him what happened. He kind of laughs and says, "oh yeah, I should have told you, those flares were like 20 years old, and expired." I'm just glad it wasn't worse than burning some brush next to a river.