July 4th

"Gorey Stories" opened tonight, and I was disappointed by the timing. Running until 9:30, we missed almost all of the fireworks set off from Navy Pier. Disappointed because in all my many years in Chicago, I've actually never seen them, and this year I was right at the lake doing the show.

I had forgotten, though, that sometimes the civilian fireworks are just as spectacular as the city's. Biking home, west on Fullerton, the night spread out before me as a sparkling jewel. The last mile home was particularly livid. I biked through a fug of gunpowder and falling embers, and nearly hit a few parked cars as I swerved on my ride, watching the sky.

I love how into the holiday this city is, though given the high density of undocumented immigrants in my neighborhood, I suspect the fiery celebrations are more for a love of pretty explosives rather than the history of this country.

This time last year, I was also sitting under a shower of fireworks, but at a Biscuits game in Montgomery. As soon as the last play was completed, every light in the stadium was cut, and music started up as the pyrotechnics blasted. For a good ten minutes or so, the sky lit up. Finally, "Sweet Home Alabama" was played, and the crowd went wild for the finale. Tim and I grinned at each other, deliriously happy to be in that spot at that moment.

And forever since then, that song makes me happy. It reminds me of a time when I felt like part of a community. I felt like I was an Alabamian, like that sweet home was my home. For a little while, it was.

And I love that now any time I see fireworks, that's what I'll think of.

Fresh new hell

What fresh new hell is this?

I know the past two weeks have been evenly broken up by a camping trip and a day on the gulf beach, but I scarcely remember it. I don't even remember what happened the first week, or how I got through this week. Each day I barely had time to give more than a cursory glance to e-mail, then the day was filled with body-crunching stress, and my evenings melted into one drink after another to settle my nerves.

I had a moral quandry to relay from last week, yet all I remember now is that I was in one--not actually what it was. It has been replaced with a new one from this week.

My heart hurts a lot. I had the opportunity this week to receive a summons at a late hour (at which I should have been asleep) to deal with suicidal tendancies. Sometimes I revel in crises, because I am electrified by purpose. It feels like winning the Nobel prize to me, knowing how to handle a crisis.

And then sometimes crises don't have answers. They just exist. And nothing can be done. I try and I try and I try. I'm doing everything I can, and I can't fix it. I can't even moderately help it. Because nothing can be done. Nothing. Not even when you are holding someone's future in your hands, and they are pleading with you to not fuck it up.

And how does it always happen on the day that your boss says, "Leave early! It's a holiday!" that's the exact day you absolutely cannot leave anywhere near your regular quitting time?

Football season

I love football season. Football, I am indifferent. But football season I love.

It hearalds the fall, newness, and the memory of high school games. Racing to the stadium an hour early for pep band. LeAnn and I careening down Main street, pulling on our uniforms as we drove. (Well, I was able to wiggle into my flag corps outfit and flash passersby; LeAnn had to wait until she could stand up straight before being buckled into her straitjacket of a marching-band uniform.) In the early days of the season, the late afternoon sun would still be hot, and we'd stretch across the concrete steps amidst a cacophony of brass and woodwinds warming up. Then we'd line up by the locker room, instruments aloft, flags whipping in the breeze. The toms started pounding out our school song, drumbeats on the warpath, and the football players would stream through our tunnel and onto the field. There was a glorious feeling of belonging, of togetherness. Sometimes catching glimpses of a grass field crisscrossed with padded, uniformed players, and rickety stands holding family and friends makes me nostalgic for my own Friday Night Lights.

(It wasn't until my senior year that I could even follow the game, that I understood the direction our team was running pointed to our goal. I still don't know which positions stand where on the field--and I really don't care--but at least I have some sense of what happens.)

In college, the season signified lazy Saturday afternoons in the dorms, distant cheers from the stadium and, for one year, a glimpse of the field from my room. Rising late, lunch in a nearly empty cafeteria, and trips to Walmart in the afternoon. Blaring Alanis's "Jagged Little Pill" while preparing for a night out, drinking screwdrivers from plastic mugs if we were lucky enough to corral a 21-year-old before the liquor stores closed at 9 p.m.

After college, it took me a few years to lose the fall expectations, to get used to life continuing as usual, no school year to begin. And football became related to my relatives, turkey and stuffing, ham, kielbasa, and sauerkraut. Holiday dinners.

This weekend, I treated the apartment to a deep cleaning. Tim didn't have class. I scrubbed the stove while he exercised in the living room. He had the game turned on while he lunged, squatted, and did various exercise-y things. Alabama spanked the hell out of South Carolina. Periodically we'd chant: "Roll Tide! Roll!" (I feel that since Alabama is paying for Tim's degree, we should have some school pride.)

It was a perfect, beautiful day. In the evening, we went to a class dinner; at 7 p.m., twilight had already settled in, and the night vibrated with excitement, with beginnings. The biggest, orangest, Georgia peach of a full moon sat on the horizon.

I love football season.