2:47 AM and I'm Wide Awake

 I'm wide awake and as I was laying there trying to force myself to sleep of course my mind starts wandering.

And I remembered an incident that happened last century. Isn't it weird to be able to say that?

About 2:47 AM one fine morning in the late 80's early 90's I was in a deep heavy sleep. When I was awakened by the sound of a large vehicle screeching to a stop in front of my house. Then a large sound of whoosh as air was released.

Look out my bedroom window and I see a very large firetruck with lots of red flashing lights parked on the street.

Son of a bitch. Now I am very much awake thank you very much.

Throw on some pants and then, barefoot and shirtless I haul ass outside to the firetruck. The firechief is coming out of the truck yelling at me Where's the fire?

My brilliant response was, What fire?

He said, we got a 911 call that said there was a fire in the backyard of the house at this address. I said, MY BACKYARD?

 I turned and went to my side gate and unlocked it and went to my back yard followed by 3 or 4 firefighters and there is no fire in my backyard. WTF?

And then, this voice comes out of my neighbors backyard. It says, Hey guys the fires over here.

Holy crap. The firefighters turned in formation like they had practiced that move all day long, the neighbor opened his gate and we all filed into HIS backyard.

My neighbor's house had a beautiful fireplace/barbecue grill area.

And this jackwagon, at 3AM, was burning a buttload of chinaberries in this fireplace, and that's what this anonymous caller saw.

Chinaberry Tree

You see those brown things? I guess those are seeds, and these trees spread about a blue million of these things in the yard. I had two of those in my backyard and took them both out. I used to fill 30 or so 30 gallon garbage bags a week of those things to get rid of them.

And my neighbor decided to burn them in this barbecue at 3 AM. With his 3 year old son out there with him.

When the firechief told me what was going on, I said to him: He's doing this at 3AM? And the chief said yeah. So I went in to try and go back to bed. Then the chief went back next door, and they were there another 30 minutes or so and then left.

You will have to excuse the formatting a couple of paragraphs above. Blogger is going haywire and doing that by itself. Anything I do to try and fix the formatting makes it worse.

Anyway, the firetruck left, I don't know if I went back to bed or not. But it was definitely a weird night.