I've been semi-sick for the past couple days; I don't know what it is -- could be pollen, could be an actual cold -- but I've had a slight sore throat and all my muscles are really sore. I feel a little bit better today.

For the Fourth of July I went to Vancouver, Washington with my friend (and I use the term loosely) Gael, two lesbians, an extremely effeminate youth, Redface (whom Gael is apparently involved with, despite the fact that he already has a boyfriend), and a tall, dark, handsome fellow, Petra. We drove from Portland into the suburbs, and I was struck by the sheer green beauty of the landscape. This was the earth, city-obscured, the earth of fields and hills, sprouting trees and mossy locks, the life-bound, boundless, fertile globe along which we move, in flying metal. It reminded me of the suburbs where I grew up, and I felt a little homesick. The city is different from the suburbs, however close they are to each other, and I missed the hills, the neat, two-story houses, the manicured lawns, always overshadowed by the reminiscence of a more ancient landscape, domesticated but untamed, and vast. I miss now the shopping centers, domed by the long globe of the sky, where teenagers and their middle-aged, comfortable mothers and fathers came to buy groceries or rent a movie or browse, ignorant and self-content, through the clean aisles of mass-produced but ultimately innocuous books, whispering each, "This is life; what I say is different but finally kind; wars, religious turmoil, turpitude, angst are all things to be considered from the privacy of a soft armchair, and discussed politely at genteel dinner-parties; or you can brood, if you like, in your SUV, over the hum of NPR." It is the quiet, secluded, privileged life of the rich middle-class, mostly caucasians, yuppies all, but I miss it. I don't live in the center of the city in all its gargantuan hugeness, where people pour around thousand foot skyscrapers like ants around sand-castles, but Portland, in its gritty, poor, matter-of-fact realness, is tiring in its own right.

The festival was typical of its kind. Thousands of people (46,000, in fact) swarming on a common green, trampling the grass, laying down blankets, holding each other, kissing, laughing, buzzing with conversation, eating grapes, watermelon, pizza, purchased confections (and there were the concession stands, people-swarmed and swarming), massing into porto-potties set in rows like a parody of neighborhood blocks; these were dirty teenagers with fat faces and baggy pants, goateed, chin pointed men, their tall and slim, maquillaged women, clutched about the shoulders -- their lonely and broad counterpoints, soiled, stretched garments bulging with skin, clutching skirts and purses. Crowds like these remind me of the living dead, the masses of flesh eating, "rancid humanity", that eerie, prophetic painting of America in the throes of a modern apocalypse.

The fireworks began shortly after the band stopped, a sort of rolicking, insipid jazz that I think no one enjoyed. We saw them through a curtain of trees, unfolding their petals of light, soaring never high enough, but always obscured by the swaying foliage. The music, projected from the now empty bandstand, crackled, fuzzed, and halted, started up again. A country song played, "If tomorrow I lost everything I've worked for in my life / Except my twenty children and my trailer-lovely wife / And this godly country..." or something like that. I booed, a chorus of one. "What is this," I asked Chea (one of the lesbians), "the fourth of July?"

When the fireworks stopped, the paralyzed masses rose up in a turmoil, fleeing in every direction, riding bikes, boarding cars, buses, walking, whispering, chattering, and spilled over the highways like a flood. The grassy fields, I imagine, lapsed again into emptiness, into serene and midnight silence, into a post-diluvian tranquility that held with the singing of crickets at least until dawn.