Last night was a great night; there were fireworks in downtown Augusta that I watched from an old cathedral style Methodist church’s parking lot right next door to my old Post-Civil War/Victorian style apartment. After transcribing the 4 one minute recordings I made on my cell phone to my journal and now onto the blog for you (all 2 or 3 of you ;), it is needless to say that I was not in a normal state of mind, but you will see for yourself:
I
“Fireworks create dandelions…roses, and orchids of light. And spiders drift across the sky, the remnants of beautiful explosions. The spiders are pale grey on a deep black and they grow with the light, proportionally. I love the spiders, the light in the sky. Even with all this…there’s still…life goes on behind me. Sirens blare and cars drive by. Truly is an awesome sight, to see the bugs of light, fly high, on and on…”
II
“We got fireworks; we got fire…The blasts of explosion after explosion. Bullet wounds of light. The sound trails behind (the light), as if to be a tortoise and a hare. Spider webs in front of me as if it was strewn from the clouds above of artificial smoke. Still the bugs continue to grow in three dimensional arrays, …(mumbling)…look like the spider, and the web, and the forest, palm trees, and evergreens. So beautiful, but still life goes…”
III
“There is a car parked behind me where a couple sits. Ugh, I feel embarrassed talking, satisfying at the same time. (Fireworks loudly go off in the background, and here I yell over them into the phone) An array, or a volley! A volley of fire after fire. Now it’s like clouds. Stratusphere, stratus clouds. Not cumulus, stratus…or maybe cumuloningus, I think…cumuloningus…nimbus. And now the light forms planets and stars, warping them from trillions of light years away for our viewing on Earth. This is my last recording for now, the Sun is appearing, (…mumbling…) the artificial Sun.”
IV
“Creativity always comes in a flash of light. Yeah it does… Smiling bugs fluttering across the night sky, away from their brothers and sisters, to form shapes and inspire humans. Children, and adults. It’s phlatonic…photonic happiness. That’s what it is… A chemical reaction, a series…”
16th Street 
Whitney said,
May 20, 2008 at 4:37 am
I always thought of fireworks as leaving smoke-spiders just after they’re gone, too. Were you close enough to feel the boom in your chest? Terrifying and electrifying at once. . . that you can feel sound, or for that matter hear visions, by flawed logical extensions.
I’m jealous of the oldness of your apartment, as you describe it.
Josh Farrow said,
May 20, 2008 at 1:11 pm
I live only two or three blocks away from the bridge where the fireworks were being set off so I could certainly feel those booms and hear visions by flawed logical extensions. I really like that, “hear visions by flawed logical extensions.” It took me a couple seconds to even understand what you were getting at. Humans…subconsciously always trying to make sense of things even if on a higher level we understand the flaw in that instinctual logic. Anyway, the fireworks, they’re always terrifying at first, I think that’s also just instinct. Then curiosity and wonder and trance takes over…ah fireworks.
About the apartment: here’s an only mildly embarrassing video of my mother walking through it giving a tour. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=SrUTxgb9OA0 (absolutely no idea how she accidentally put it on the UK youtube, making a new account first and everything, love her..)
I have no idea when this house was built, I wish I did. There are homes around here in Olde Town Augusta built in the 1860’s (Woodrow Wilson’s boyhood home) that look like they could have been built this century because they’ve been restored so well. My apartment isn’t necessarily one of those but it is still very nicely restored. I’d guess it was originally constructed in the early 1900’s.