I went to a street dance in my old hometown, Wayzata. My ears still haven't stopped popping. Greasy, dirty, disheveled, disorderly drunks were lighting off firecracker after firecracker, tossing them here, tossing them there, tossing them at people standing right in front of them. One girl nearly got her poor face blown off.
There was a band for a little while, but they quit, calling, "You are a bunch of assholes!" into their mikes as they took apart the stage setup. Not too many people could hear them over the noise of the firecrackers, I don't think...
I saw people I hadn't thought about in years wandering through the crowd, and almost every one of them was high on something or other. A couple of people were recently out of treatment for chemical dependency.
I watched the fireworks on Lake Minnetonka -- there were thousands of boats, and they all honked at once at the good explosions. The lights on the lake were breathtaking.
On the way home I stopped at an all-night, self-service gas station to buy some pop, and there were these two rotten-looking old ladies who looked like they could be celebrating their own bicentennial, if they added up the years between them. One of them actually got out and started fumbling with the gas pump. The one in the passenger seat looked like she'd probably die before the last drop of gas was pumped. I certainly hope the effort those two ladies made to live through our nation's 200th birthday was worth it.
