2 thoughts on “Which is fine until the spring…”

  1. It wasn’t that hard to make a pen shoot beebees. And you could make a little gun that simultaneously lit and shot strike-anywhere matches across the room (out of the matches’ striker strip or a bit of sandpaper, some wire, and a clothespin with the spring inverted), though loading and shooting it again and again bent your thumbnail farther and farther backward until it really hurt. Regular paper matches and aluminum foil made tiny rockets. Three Campbell’s soup cans of the era could be opened, bent properly and fastened together with duct tape so that, with some lighter fluid, you had a powerful tennis-ball cannon/mortar. A broken lawnmower, or anything with wheels, and some scrap pipes, became a coaster-kart for the hill street. And so on. In those days it didn’t matter what you started with, you could make something incredibly cool to play with. Weird bicycles made out of other bicycles. Giant arbalests made of planks and flagpoles and clothesline. Underground forts (that were like six inches underground). Green plastic army men that when you lit their gun or arm on fire, fizzing flaming fireballs fell away from them making the most amazing sound. Slingshots! A transformer from broken tube electronics! What do kids have now? Phones.

  2. I spent most of my highschool years disassembling pens and putting em back together, taking the place of learning.

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