The Fourth of July Fireworks
Dusk on Puget Sound Omaha, Kouryou-chan, Lisakit and I all trooped down to the Des Moines marina, the suburb just south of Burien, where some of the comfortably wealthy of Seattle keep their boats and put on a little show for the plebians annually. I'm only slightly kidding.
We arrived a little later than we'd planned, and the little park was already filling up when I dropped off my passengers. I had to park blocks away, and walk back.
The population was a mixture of middle class, with some uncolleged twenty-somethings lying on a blanket in front of us, the women chain smoking and showing off their tattoos.
Fireworks over Puget Sound I walked down to the waterfront to find vendors selling soda pop, normally $0.75, for $2.25 a can, and others selling bags of sugared popcorn for $5. Cops were everywhere, and security officers at the gate checked everyone who had a bag in case they were carrying their own explosives, or worse. I had a windbreaker with which I could have carried in several pounds and nobody would have been the wiser.
The fireworks themselves were lovely, but it's hard to dislike fireworks. They boomed and banged. The chemistry and physics are getting better; there were many geometrical shapes this year, lots of flat-plane explosions, and the colors were more crisp and precise than in former years. Americans like fireworks because they represent the potential to blow stuff up.
I forget just how Christian this part of King County is sometimes. When the fireworks ended, a group erupted in a "spontaneous" breakout of, not the national anthem, but "God Bless America," a fairly sectarian song that the Christianists have for years been trying to subsitute (and ultimately replace) the anthem.
Ghostly Kouryou-chan writes her name in sparklers The drive home was brutal. Des Moines just isn't built for a mass exodus, and it took 35 minutes to get five blocks.
When we got home, as promised, we let Kouryou-chan light off a few sparklers. She enjoyed them, bright and dangerous as they were, and then it was time for bed.