'round midnight, and i step outside, for a cigarette or two and a walk down the block to get another beer and tomorrow's form. saratoga winds down tomorrow. summer ends. on tuesday it's back to work, on wednesday it's back to school.
the streets and the sidewalks, pavement a touch wet, i left the windows open in the car again.
a couple of last vacation days taken on thursday and friday now gone; summer ends tomorrow.
the summer started with heat and humidity, and it will end with it, as well. hot mist settles under the orange glow of the streetlights. a few strides in and already i can feel drops of sweat across my forehead.
to my left i see a guy, young, bearded, tattooed, wearing a black tank top and carrying a bag of groceries, walking toward me. half a block up ahead, on my side of the street, a guy in white shorts and a white t stumbles in my direction. goddamn it, i think: thought for sure i'd get alone out here. he darts up a driveway and disappears.
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the day has not gone particularly well. i seemed to do dishes and laundry for hours on end. my brother and his wife, residing upstairs from us, had a little birthday party for their twelve year old son, my godson. our two year old puked all over their brand new leather couch. what she didn't get on the couch she got in wife's hair. my brother and i cleaned it all up while my wife took herself and the baby downstairs to clean up.
my fourteen year old was very keen on some sort of fantasy football draft and tried to set it all up. things went wrong and he started banging on the computer keyboard like a rat on a crack binge, no rhyme or reason, and i lost my temper. my nephew came down to participate and he and my son got all loud and wound up, which aggravated my wife, which led to an argument between her and i.
all my work cleaning the house seemed to go up in smoke; the place was somehow a disaster by nine o'clock. i'd lost money betting horses, like an idiot. i drank just enough beers to get seriously bloated and mildly, but nowhere near enough, buzzed.
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'round midnight, just me and the streets, the humidity, the walk to the corner joint for a beer or two and a smog and the form, one more shot tomorrow, one more stab at summer, though, gotta say, it's been a fine summer. for me, i mean. for many more, of course, not so much.
i hate being complicit in a bunch of bullshit i don't support, especially that butchering of civilians shit, and i'd like to think being against it gets me off the hook somehow, but then, if i've got the time to drink beer, bet horses, clean up puke, go to the beach with a car full of kids, read the news of the world on the internet with air conditioning blowing across the sweat on the back of my neck, and so on, then i am as guilty as sin.
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i walk on in to the store and walk to the back cooler, pick out a coupla two t'ree twenty-four ounce cans and then a copy of tomorrow's form. the young 'un behind the counter, a rail-thin twenty-something woman with braces and hair dyed red, asks if she can put the beers in the same bag as the form.
don't worry, i tell her. they put pretty pictures on the cover of the form but the parts where they tell ya who's gonna win the races tomorrow is buried inside, it's ok if the pictures on the cover get a little wet.
she looks at me like i'm speaking another language.
put it all in the same bag, i tell her.
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i get out the front door of the joint, light up a smoke, and walk on home.
as soon as i get to first street i spy a quartet of kids walking, talking loudly, brashly. who they fucked up, who they're gonna fuck up. three boys and a girl. be cool, i think. you're an imposing-looking guy, people generally leave you the hell alone. they hush up as we get close to each other. they walk on past. i take a deep drag and walk on.
a few steps later, i hear some action in a backyard. no big thing. then a young kid in black pants and a midnight blue shirt strolls down a driveway, talking on a phone. jesus fucking christ, i think. what the fuck does a guy have to do to get ten minutes of peace and quiet around here anyway?
"yeah, it's weird," he says into the phone. "so i'm at this party here with these people from my church and it turns out a bunch of them are deadheads."
i try not to laugh out loud.
i get a block or two of peace in, and then see a flash of light.
lightning? a streetlight going out?
maybe thirty yards ahead of me, a young woman with straw-colored hair half-way down her back, wearing a brown knee-high dress, seems to be trying to light, well, something.
fuck me.
this is a no-win.
if i stop it looks creepy, if i keep going i'm gonna walk up into her space and that's creepy, too. i sort of shuffle, shake the bag with the form and the beers in it loudly to announce my presence.
she doesn't seem to notice. she keeps on lighting something. i take a deep breath to see if i can catch a whiff of weed, but i get nothing. for fuck's sake, start moving, kid, i think.
by the time she moves, i'm not far behind her, and i'm in full panic mode: she's gonna turn around, see a hulking, six foot four middle-aged man behind her, and start running away, and possibly screaming.
we approach the corner of third and park and she never seems to notice me. i can tell by the way she's walking that she's bombed; at one point half her body lurches hard to the left while the rest of her goes straight, and it takes her two or three steps to get straightened out. while she does, i take a left onto third and pray that she keeps heading east down park. she does.
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i get home and suckle at one of the cans out in the backyard, finally alone, and thinking, alright, if anyone bothers me out in my yard, they are gonna be sorry. but no one does. i take a leak out in the far corner and head inside to read the news.
i haven't read the news in a few days, and what a luxury. to eat, and drink, and gamble, and play games; to toss pitches in an in-our-own rules baseball game with my seven-year old son, to cook in peace, to pass out in a cold-stone sleep after making love to my wife, with no notice of the rest of the world.
but of course, you can ignore the rest of the world, but it rolls on, and now, barely past the fiftieth anniversary of our disgraceful installation of the shah in iran, we appear poised to stick our noses into the middle east yet again. you'd think after enough fiascoes over there we might get the idea that we should maybe stay the hell out, but the people running shit for us are so goddamn smart that they know better; in fact, they're so fucking smart that they're the only ones smart enough to understand that THEIR little adventures are gonna turn out. yeah, that's right; fifty years of failure and horror and disgrace and atrocity don't mean shit, pal. this time, we mean it. this time, finally, we got some gen-u-wine goddamn geniuses are running the show.
this time, it's gonna be different. just you wait and see.
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yeah, and so anyway, summer came in with heat, and it will end with heat.
school starts wednesday, and the state ed doesn't really care that, personally, i could do with another month of summer.
gettin' four kids and two working parents out the door by eight in the morning monday through friday ain't no easy task, but hey, it could be worse.
some kids'll go back to school wednesday. others might get bombed.