Twinkie Executioner

I actually intended to throw this up on here on July 4th, but it slipped my mind. This is really old picture I took in my younger, less intelligent days. Well, less intelligent, or less afraid of death, whichever you prefer. When my friend and I were about 13 we were at his house goofing off sometime in December. We were digging through a drawer looking for something when we stumbled upon a couple of old packs of firecrackers. These things were probably 3 or 4 years old, we weren’t sure they would’ve even worked, but we had access to a lighter, and our curious minds got the best of us. To most kids lighting off firecrackers would've been plenty fun, but we wanted a little something more. In our infinite wisdom we decided to stuff one of the firecrackers into a Twinkie and attempt to capture the explosion on camera. (It was this same wisdom which led to us lighting off a pack of Jumping Jacks inside of his old garage later that year. It was a storage garage, no cars or oil or anything explosive, but needless to say, don’t do that.) My friend was on lighter duty and I was the photographer. So I got into position and my friend fired up the lighter and slowly approached the Twinkie. Now for whatever reason the second the fuse was lit the firecracker, along with the cream filled dessert in which it was encased exploded instantly, sending yellow chunks flying everywhere and damn near blowing our eardrums out. There was no delay at all, no time to prepare or anything, the damn thing just went off. Luckily neither of us were hurt at all. I think that was our last winter firework experiment.

Somehow I was actually able to catch part of the explosion along with one of the hands of my genuinely terrified friend with the cheap ass camera I owned at the time, probably a Fuji instant camera or something of similar quality. I think that the sudden explosion startled me enough that I pressed down on the button right when it went off. I know I seem to have some sort of weird Twinkie fixation now, given my Batman post a few weeks back followed by this, but I felt like posting this because it’s one of my personal favorite pictures I’ve taken. And since I’m bored, here’s the Twinkie Executioner Art Print (available for a limited time in the Manchester Morgue shop):