awake

City life.... Last night I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't go back to sleep for at least an hour. Why? Definitely more than one reason. To take a step back, I've been living in the city for almost a month now. Before moving to the nicer end of Chandler - and believe me, there is definitely a nicer end - I was living in my childhood bedroom at my parents' house, a quaint little cape set back in the woods on a back road in what could be classified as the poster-child of "small town". Where you step outside your back door and wave to your neighbors who are enjoying the summer afternoon on their bench in the shade of their giant oak tree. The same neighbors you've had for all 25 years of your life and who had not-so-typical farm animals growing up such as geese, chickens, and those goats your brother fed match-box cars, watermelon rinds, and practically the kitchen sink to.

So anyways, sparing any additional nostalgic gallavanting, I'm now on the 2nd floor of a 3-decker. The monsoon that has been the New England summer of 2009 is finally evolving into some variation of normalcy, including the humidity, the heat, and thunderstorms. Coupled with the phenomenon known as heat lightning - something that can be extremely anticlimactic when all you want is for an awful clap of thunder and pouring rain to follow a bright bolt streaking across the sky, and instead... silence.

As I'm sure every city has its own collection, Worcester has an impressive clique of tactless, disrespectful, grease monkeys that like to charge their crappy, jacked-up Hondas down Chandler at 2a.m. in some attempt to drag-race. While their muffler-lacking, imported piles of aluminum junk shift from 1st to 5th in impressive speeds somewhere between tortoise and hare, car alarms go off and join in the nocturne serenade.

And...because the night is not yet complete, the sound of clinking bottles and clattering cans pierce the din as the homeless crawl out of whatever box or gutter they're refuging in and sort out whatever they might find that will collectively in $.5 deposit form fund whatever addiction haunts them.

It's a wonder that I was only lying awake for an hour...although somehow on most nights, I'm usually able to sleep through it all. I blame the lightning.