Buns

So, um, I am really upset by the Feds being deployed to my city this weekend plus also the current police situation in Chicago overall. I wanted to draw about it without going too dark so instead of people I used bunnies.

Before Times, summertime

I want to build a drip castle on a saltwater beach as the sun goes down in the sky. I want to get yelled at for jumping on the bed and singing at the summer rental apartment. I want to change out of my bathing suit and into street clothes in the backseat of my mom’s car in the beach parking lot. I want to sit in front of the window unit air conditioning at my grandparents’ house, eating M and Ms and watching cartoons on broadcast TV.

I want to go home and cry myself to sleep for getting kicked out of summer camp for bad behavior.

I want to be at the new summer camp in 1982, sitting on my top bunk listening to the pop station on someone’s transistor radio play songs by the Motels and Fleetwood Mac and Paul McCartney eleventy billion times. I want to be at acting camp, enjoying the thrill of getting to hang out with the cool kids once in a while. I want to be at an outdoor arena on the hottest day of summer with my friends who are already in college, and scream my lungs out at like four different bands.

I want to eat cereal in the central air conditioning while watching black-and-white new wave videos on the local television station. I want to dress up in my mother’s clothes, head out in the sweltering heat to take the bus from the suburbs to my Center City temp job, and I want to meet my grandmother there for lunch and eat the cold packed food she brought for us. I want to resent my mom and her fiancee for scheduling their civil service wedding on the same day as my new boyfriend was supposed to take me to the outdoor David Bowie concert*.

I want to wander the neighborhoods of Boston alone during a heat wave on my days off from my internship. I want to sail through the streets of Chicago’s near West Side on my 20 year old bike** and stop and cool off in an open fire hydrant.

I want to eat brunch on the patio at 3pm with a hangover. I want to go to Maxwell Street on a sticky early Sunday and drag myself around among the tables of toilets and tube socks and 16mm cameras and buy jewelry in which to hide my drugs. I want to escape into the icy cold of a discount movie theater and see something like “New Jack City” or “Point Break” before going to work a cocktail waitress shift. I want to keep menthol cigarettes in my freezer like how people buy Popsicles for savoring on super-warm days.

I want to go and get me some straight job in a building where the artificial environment is cranked so high in August I have to bring a secondhand blazer to work and wear it over my shoulders. I want to take Metra to a ginormous high-end suburban house where my friend is dogsitting because she invites all us city folks to come over for swimming. I want to sleep on the floor of my roommate’s bedroom in a third-floor apartment where she has a window AC unit and I don’t have one in mine.

I want to be seven months’ pregnant with a land speed of three miles an hour in the humidity and wear a bra when I sleep because otherwise my sweaty boobs stick to my huge midsection. I want to wrap my ten month old in a clean diaper and swaddling gown and tuck her to sleep in a climate-controlled crib, and go in the other room to watch Hurricane Katrina footage and cry over moms there just like me who can’t do that for their babies. I want to laugh and look embarrassed as my four year old takes off all of her clothes in the park spray thingy. I want to help my nine year old rinse off her feet after going to the city’s only inland beach which luckily happens to be two blocks from our new apartment. I want to wait in line for the water slide at the public pool with her again and again and again. I want to drop my teenager at the special recreation summer day camp she loves so much, then drive back home and pick the yellow leaves from the vegetables in my garden. I want to watch a movie in the park with my family at dusk while bats start to fly about overhead.

I want to know if these are forever gone. I want to want to wait until next summer to take all of the regular things for granted.

*Imagine how pissed I would have been had I known that was going to be my last chance ever to see Bowie live.

**My current bike is over 20 years old, so, truthfully not a problem to do this now if I really want