the taximen of cleveland 1

Luxury, its soft, bouncy lap. Sitting in the kitchen, eating ice cream and reading Ian Hacking, looking up occasionally to see the afternoon sunlight through the back windows, and through the open door my plants, all of them still alive after weeks and weeks of care by me, the renowned herbicide. I go out on the porch often to talk to the plants and try to cool off my lungs. Lately the air has mostly been still, stifled with heat, the molecules in their hellbent acceleration knocking anything in their way flat on its back. Including me: there’s a spot in the middle of my living room where the floor is frosty on the very hot days. Why the people below me would have an air conditioner in the middle of their apartment is not completely clear to me, but sometimes I lie down on the floor there to cool off. It’s like hooking on to my neighbor’s internet connection.

We’ve had a month or so of quiet around here since the big explosion that any normal person not familiar with local ritual could have been forgiven for thinking was a war. The Fourth of July is not a triflling matter in Logan Square. During the day someone let off a very loud firework right near my car as I drove down the street (I reacted as a dog would: anger and whimpers), but the real noise started a bit before sunset. By nightfall the air was actually foggy with smoke, stinky with sulfur that you could smell all the way in the house. We walked out to get some supplies for the barbeque and stopped to watch a group of people ranging in age from five to fifty setting off exploves next to their cars and on their porches. A police car drove by, leisurely. Carnival in the traditional sense. Two days later I saw some large, flatish cardboard boxes piled up in a tumbling way, several tall stacks at the mouth of an alley. They had a kind of beehive of round cardboard tubes in them, and Chinese writing describing the contents as some sort of flower. Firecracker cartons.

By this time my traveling companion had, luckily for her, left for greener, hillier, cooler climes. We’d traveled from the east coast to the middle, the good old American way, for a good old American purpose: to transport our means of transportation. I’ve had a, and been in proximity to the, car for the better part of a year now, and my driving has gone from jerky and unpredictable, frightened and audacious, to only occasionally spastic (although it has stayed steadily self-righteous from beginning to end—I’m the sort of person who remarks snidely to her closed windows, “Yes, that’s lovely, just stand *right* *there* in the midde of the lane like that, that’s just a great place to stand”). But driving pretty much the entire way from western Massachusetts to Chicago (my traveling companion managed to wrest the wheel away from me for a couple of hours only) makes me feel like I have fulfilled the requirements for a certificate of driving. Not a certificate of good driving, necessarily; but I feel I ought to—I mean I could—I mean I wouldn’t feel an imposter to—have a little plaque on the wall that said, “This is to certify that / Blahgstein / drives.”