freedom....blah

when did the 4th become such a crap holiday? i remember 4th of july weekends where i'd lay out on a blanket, my mouth smeared with barbecue sauce, my hands a little sticky from all the soda and sugar, my keds dusty from the volleyball game, and i'm on the blanket with my eyes closed, smelling the grill, hearing the water from the pool, the music (ok, christian music) from the cassette player someone brought and waiting for my belly to go down a little before getting up to play volleyball again. oh, the baked beans, the potato salad, the ribs, the chicken, the bread, the hot dogs, the hamburgers, the red kool aid, the fat church ladies, the skinny deacons, the los angeles sun above and the scratchy blanket below.

now? now it's driving an hour to find a hot dog, rained out baseball games (damn those Cubs) and cable tv. the ghetto fireworks were better than the show by the pier, the air conditioning was preferable to the humidity, the bucket of kfc was worth the slight tummy ache later and catching all the movies i wanted to see was luxurious - but the holiday sloth and gluttony was missing. maybe you need to have kids to have what it once was.
...

saw F9/11 yesterday in a packed theater in evanston. it was great. depressing, but great. and awful. yes, totally partisan, but a lot of stuff not covered by mainstream media (the film's biggest target, i think, rather than bush.) like, who knew it took special ops 2 months to get on the ground in afghanistan? i had the impression we were kicking ass from the get-go!

the movie made me cry and gave the woman sitting next to me a nervous breakdown. our news outlets should be ashamed of not showing us what we were/are doing over there. the film of our bombs, the old iraqi woman, the bodies (ours and theirs) burnt and blasted apart - it was only a tiny part of the film but it was almost too much. and our young young young soldiers, who have to cover the sound of what they're doing with music - it's all so sad. the sound of the planes hitting the towers (the screen was black - i couldn't have taken it if i had to see it again) made my skin pickle and my heart beat faster. and that woman, the secretary whose son died over there, bent over in front of the white house sobbing - god. it was awful.

bush is an asshat. if i was only a little bit angry at our administration, now i'm pissed. sad and pissed. our asshat of a president made us do things we never should have done.

also went to a cubs game at wrigley field. they played the sox (who, despite being #1, field balls like they were blind) and i wanted them to lose so badly. alas. the rain, the mud, the lightning, the sox sucky field talents all conspired to deprive me of my victory. i will NEVER go to a weekend cubs game again. i thought i merely disliked cubs fans and the people who live in near wrigley. no. i've decided that my dislike has hardened into an active low-level semi-hatred. no - that's too harsh. it's contempt. men who don't act their age - sitting in seats purchased by their companies, swilling beer, treating ballpark staff like crap - they're privileged, bloated asshats. (that's my new word of the day.)

eesh. i think i'm pms-ing.