#3 my brother hates when i tell this story. i kinda love it tho, only cuz i survived it. the year: Late 1988 or Early 1989 the place: phoenix, az - my grandparents house characters: me (6y) my brother (11y) grandpa (early 40's haha dont ask) my grandpa was a character, to say the least. my grandma, still living on her own to this day, is a character too. i say this because you must suspend all sense of what you have that is logical. you can't understand a story about my family if you're totally rooted in logic and facts. i love these people, and they should be documented. young guns was a movie from 1988 that reached every millennial, whether they saw the film or not. warren g's "regulate" borrows the famous starting line(s) of the song from that movie. iconic was a good way to describe the movie at the time. after the movie, my brother and I did what most kids did back then: wrestled, boxed, played sports in yards, and read a lot of comic books. so after the movie ended, we were so pumped that we immediately started what i remember to be a version of cowboys and indians where no boundaries or rules are laid out and you just “play.” the fight cloud we created moved throughout the unoccupied parts of the house, and eventually we found ourselves fighting in our grandparents bedroom. my brother picks me up, suplexes me onto the bed, and in the aftermath he finds an orange gun under my grandpa's pillow nbd, right 🤷‍♂️ i get to my feet to see my brother pointing the orange gun at my face from 2 feet away. and ever so vividly, like it happened and my brain recorded it in HD to play for me on occasion, my brother lowers the gun to my feet and says, "Dance;" then pulls the trigger. BANG! a violent glowing fireball shot out of the barrel and hit the ground right in front of my feet and bounced into my chest before it bounced all over the room, leaving burn spots where ever it touched. all that happened to me was, well, trauma, but other than that… nothin’, besides a few temporary blind spots anyway. the house didn't burn down. that was nice. but probably the craziest part of all of it is that not a single person questioned why my grandfather, a truck driver by trade and living in the desert, would have a flare gun meant for SOS on boats…. COCKED AND LOADED under his fuqn PILLOW. my gramps passed away 2 days before my 18th bday and, as much as i understand life and loss, it pains me that i'm never going to be able to ask him any questions about any of these wild stories revolving around him. there were many. i was just over there in az and saw the "evidence" left on some fabric my grandma had on the nightstand. haha had to take a pic.