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i am standing in a backyard on kimball avenue and basically world war three is going on - per usual on the 4th, i know, but the sun has just set and so we’re watching what is probably the annual peak of people blowing up their country. after yesterday i have a theory, which is that the poorer the neighborhood the more likely they are to blow up their country right proper on the 4th, which means going to indiana on july 06 the year before and buying a truly world-ending quantity of fireworks at 8% retail (buy 1 get 11 free) and leaving it in the basement for a year. the people in the yard immediately to our left are setting off some sort of blinding strobe thing on the ground, while the house behind us is lighting proper mortars, a few purple but the majority red.
it rained 3 hours ago and you’d never know if not for the deep fog that set over the city, one of only a few times a year that that happens in chicago, which diffuses the fireworks’ light in ways about as strange and unpredictable as the fireworks themselves - this of course (given the probability of fog here) being the first time that i’ve ever seen fireworks in fog, seeing them in such a different way brings on a degree of wonder that clichéd-ly brings on a lot of happy memories of childhood. this persists for most of the evening.
then at ~9:30p i have to bike from the party on kimball/belden to a rooftop party on grand/noble. you can take many routes to get there, and they’re probably all good, but the way i decided on involved taking kimball to homan to grand. this route involves going through west humboldt park. i’d qualify logan as a middle/working-class neighborhood but west humboldt park as a full-on poor neighborhood, which (according to said law) naturally means that the fireworks will go from innocuous world war three to possibly harmful world war three, people lighting mortars off in the middle of the street because they can, because there’s no way for the police to handle the level of widespread fireworks consumption at hand here, because the police are busy dealing with shot-off limbs at this time of night anyway, etc. and so every so often a mortar would go off less than 15ft away from me and i’d look up and behind me on my bike and almost plow into parked cars because of how damn amazing the mortar in question just was. or i’d bike past an alley at near-full speed and peek down an alley just long enough to see a dozen apparently-unsupervised kids fleeing a tiny spark which of course belongs to a fuse that is slowly dwindling into a mortar the size of my fucking torso; and of course the mortar is located under power lines but like hell anyone cares today, it being the day of hilariously wonderful and inadvisable decisions, etc.
kimball/homan are narrow-ish, major-ish residential streets; grand is a much wider street that goes through heavy industry, the metra engine shop is located at grand/california and a few random metal foundries and factories dot the strip, some warehouses, etc. they’re all very tall and tend to front the street with all bricks and no fanfare. this means grand at times becomes somewhat cavernous for a non-downtown street. sound traveled interestingly here, last night; fireworks shot 1,000 feet off (in residential areas) would travel into the cavern and sort of ping-pong around the building walls. when i biked past the metra factory - which is entirely covered with aluminum siding - the explosions took on this almost galaga-esque flanged metallic character, each bang returning two fast echoes afterward, pew! pew! and of course the whole street is empty because it’s a holiday and nobody is at work at the factories, they’re too busy blowing up their country. i think 2 cars passed me for the entire 2.5-mile stretch of grand between homan and noble. it was one of the best bike rides i’ve ever had. easily top 3.
once i get on the roof things have died down a little bit, but the area i just came from, you can see that in the far distance such that all the explosions looked about 3mm tall and you could like hold them between your thumb and pointer finger and crush them like a purple or green or red or white hairy lightning bug. it all persists for another hour and two witbiers into it i head back home. i think, living where i do, that the 4th of july is my favorite holiday. i hope you had a good one too.
