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It is Independence Day in America. 250 years! I sit in my bedroom on a street in Crystal City, MO. A place that despite the noise of traffic (most days) and a bad neighbor, is a place I am still proud of, because of the dedication and determination it took to get me here.

Rewind to July 4, 2025 – I stood on the back deck of my parents home, I do not speak with my mother, my father passed on, but she was away in Mexico, so I asked if I could stay at her house until I arranged for an extended stay hotel in Arnold. So, I stood in the night, smoking non-filters, listening to the pops and bangs of fireworks overhead. Orange and purple illuminations through the tree branch shadows. The bill of my cadet hat being littered with burnt gunpowder and cardboard firework shavings. I was never in Viet Nam, but imagine there are some similarities here.

Little did I know, that after paying for a week at an extended stay hotel in Arnold, I would be on the street in Festus/Crystal City for the remaining months of 2025. I secured this apartment Dec 22, 2025. The heatwave, the nights slept in the cemetery (my one true home on this planet, I think – Sacred Hearts), the freebie bottled water, the packing an repacking and rearranging of items, food, supplies, deciding where I would sleep, bathe, use the bathroom, sit and stay comfortable during the day – not the first thing running through my mind as the debris fell from the moonlit sky above in the safety of “upper-subdivision” Imperial.

Now, with this apartment secured, a historic district of old Crystal City, and views that are truly the best in this entire town – overlooking a valley and football field, a mile or more of grasslands beyond that, and then a dense wood line hiding the Mississippi River – I feel lucky to have gotten here.

The fireworks start soon – stretching from South and North of here and surely from the Illinois side of things, too.

I have a corncob of cigarette tobacco, brew coffee, waiting for the temperature to drop too cool this place down a bit more. And gaze over the town and streets I walk/ed at night, fearless and exploratory, surviving when and where I could, squinting distant to contemplate the next new adventure.

××× ttyl