September 9, part three: journal entry (7 minutes)

It's overcast today. A storm is coming. The air smells like dirt. I sat at the top of my stairs and watched the college kids drink beer and make a huge spaghetti dinner. It was quite an event. The blond one with the unbecoming handlebar moustache seems to be the alpha dog. The Jewish kid (he wears a yarmulke) is the omega. The other six -- four boys and four girls total, fall into a not-so-clearly defined pecking order. They made the sauce from scratch -- Blondie must've brought his grandmother's recipe to school with him; he carried it around instructing the others to chop veggies, cook hamburger, boil pasta, garlic-butter long loaves of bread and make a salad. There's a huge burnt-orange ice chest on the deck just outside of the kitchen with a seemingly never-ending supply of beer. They threw vegetables at each other and for a while got into a beer-spewing fight which started when the chubby guy laughed beer onto his chubby girlfriend, and came to an end on the deck and in the back yard with cans of beer being shaken and aimed at one another. The whole operation came to a halt as the participants (all of the guys and the two rowdier girls) cleaned themselves up, the girls out of sight in the interior of the house and the boys hosing themselves and each other off on the near side of the deck, ending up shirtless and wet-shorted. That was my favorite part of the show. And when the dinner preparations resumed and I was sure there was nothing more to see (new shirts were donned), I made myself a PBJ sandwich and finished eating it just as they were setting up the card tables and folding chairs and getting ready to sit down for their meal.