Dysmey Post Archive > Pages for 2002 > The Fourth of July 2002 Edition
Given this was the first Independence Day since the Muslim attacks last September, I was expecting a more impressive fireworks display this year just to show our American pride. Foo! What a disappointment!
In my town the fireworks go off on the third, so that we can visit other towns for their fourth of July fireworks. The evening started off OK, with the coming of twilight with a bright star in the west, which I thought was Venus but my sister Tina identified as Jupiter.
Then the cars kept coming and coming and coming. There were more cars in the park this year than I can remember. Worse, some boy in a humongous truck parked not ten feet in front of us, forcing my sisters Tina and Vickie to move their tarp around the truck to view the sky.
Evidently Kokomo canceled their fireworks this year. It probably spent their fireworks money to investigate the Mystery Hum, a low-frequency noise that's driving some of the citizens there nuts. Anyway some of them decided to come see our fireworks: thus the crowded park.
Whatever the reason for the crowd, they were probably as disappointed as I was. The fireworks themselves lasted only a half hour; there were fewer of them; and the firemen shot them up two or three at a time. OK, so fireworks are more expensive due to the higher demand, but what's with the dumb change in routine? In their favor, there were some impressive bursts, like the one that burst into a red heart.
Afterward Little-Boy-In-Big-Truck wanted to get out right now. He damn near ran over my sisters and some children before his friend kicked the driving cabin from the back of the truck to get him to stop. We ourselves had to wait fifteen minutes before the traffic was thin enough to let us drive home.
I did a little shopping in Indy on the fourth, even though it was a broiling day, because the traffic was lighter (everyone is at the lakes area, I guess); because I have other things planned for Saturday; and because I needed the book for which I made the trip.
I drove to Indianapolis to visit Border's in order to buy some books. The chief among them is the Novell CNA NetWare 5.1 Study Guide, because I plan to take the CNA exam on the seventeenth and pass. After years of working on Novell networks, I figured this time around I can pass that monkey.
The book comes with a three-user license for Novell NetWare 5.1, because studying the system without actually having the system to study is foolish. Mind you, its presence on CD is the main reason for book's painful $75 price (while O'Reilly books rarely hit the fifty-dollar mark).
On my way there I found a new Sam's Club on 96th Street. This is west of the I-69 interchange rather than east (where the former one is no doubt closed). That's convenient for me, because I take 96th Street on my way to Border's on a path that keeps me from fighting the always-terrible Castleton traffic. Anyway the bigger size means a lot more stuph, and the bigger parking lot means more suburbanites and their clubs and small businesses to shop inside.
The superstore is inside Indianapolis, so I am not so worried about eating up farmland. That field had not been used in years. It was just lying fallow, waiting for some greedy developer to build on it. Why, though, Wal-Mart just could not punch out the back of its old Sam's Club box and expand that out is a mystery.
As the date of the Muslim attacks grows further away and the World Trade Center is now a couple of pits in the Manhattan granite, a new equilibrium has been set.
In this new state of balance we must all remember that for a wide variety of reasons—mainly oil—we are trapped in the Muslim world with no painless escape possible. We are forced to deal with people who hate us and who will keep on hating us no matter how conciliatory we are towards them. And we will always be open to more attacks, no matter what measures we take and no matter what freedoms we forsake, until we give up oil as a source of energy.
Oil is the cocaine of our economy, and it is time to go cold turkey.