In which six full grown people and a full can of gasoline cannot start a fire.

Late last night, Our Glorious Benefactor (Peace Be Upon Him) decided that, after slaloming home from the bar in his gargantuan white beast of a pick-up truck, he would enjoy it if we gathered up some loose cardboard moldering on the back porch and take it over to the fire pit where he burns tree clippings and other brush, as there was already a sizable haystack of the garbage waiting to be torched.

The healthy soaking we had received earlier that morning made this endeavor an exercise in futility. We studded the sodden pile of wilted leaves and branches with pizza boxes and other detritus until the whole mess loomed over us like some ominous fruitcake. This horrid abortion of wood pulp and chlorophyll was then doused with gasoline that had been sitting in its can since the Carter administration. We attempted to set the sad little pile alight, which resulted in singed eyebrows, a few spots on the nearby grass where some errant drops of gas had been splashed, and a complete lack of sustainable fire despite the massive quantities of accelerant.

These festivities went down at approximately 2 in the morning. Prior to that we had been drinking cans of beer (cans, for the love of a just and loving God, cans!) which had a decidedly salty taste to them. This was due to the actions of the future son-in-law of Our Great and Esteemed Benefactor (Upon Whom Be Peace), which for the sake of brevity we will code-name Flailing Retard. Signore Retard (let's be at least formal here), a college-educated adult male, decided to add approximately 14 metric tons of salt into the cooler where the beer cans were being kept on ice. His theory was that the application of salt to ice would melt it, dropping the temperature of the beer significantly faster than just letting the cans sit in ice alone.

The problem with this is that he added the salt while the beer was already in the cooler. Which means the majority of the salt landed on the god damned tops of the cans where the pull tabs are installed. Therefore anyone who wanted to sample the simple, backwoods pleasures of sitting down on the porch with their hand wrapped lovingly around the redneck's favorite use for aluminum had to first find some way to cleanse the top of his still-sealed beverage of all the crystals of sodium chloride that had become encrusted therein.

After chipping away the middle-school science experiment that had grown to seal the top of my chosen beverage, I reluctantly "popped the top," as those rustic folk with less teeth than sense say. I took my first sip of not-quite-cold beer and was immediately struck by the unique flavor having been imparted from a Morton's Sea Salt marinade. When it rains, it pours indeed.

For the love of all that is holy, drink your beer from bottles like a civilized folk. We didn't crawl out from under the oppressive weight of the Dark Ages to drink from unfashionable little slugs of aluminum. There's a reason the game is called "spin the bottle." Have you ever tried spinning an empty beer can in order to play some asinine reindeer game? Of course not, because you're not a Cro-Magnon. Show some class! As far as I'm concerned (and let this be the last word) you should never imbibe your alcohol from a container that you can't easily insert in someone else's anus. It's just not good form.