The Day After the After Party

Last night, I went uptown to check out the postgame victory celebrations. Almost the entire city was partying their way up to Broad Street alongside me. I was in the first wave, which included many families and children. The scene was crowded and noisy but upbeat and without much drunken tough-guy nonsense. However, to be frank, I could live without hearing anyone yell, “Go, Birds!” for a while. After 20 minutes or so on Broad, I wandered off to ramble around the nearby neighborhoods for a couple hours, checking out the bedlam, before heading home to call it a night.

This morning, the city was in reasonably good shape. There was a lot of trash, vomit, half-assed graffiti, and a handful of broken shop windows, but nothing wildly out of control. My fellow Philadelphians were somehow back to the usual sneering and generally unpleasant dispositions despite being draped head to toe in Eagles attire. It’s become a very unfriendly city over the years. It’s not overtly hostile, per se, but it’s definitely an unwelcoming place anymore. I doubt I even register as a curmudgeon by Philly standards at this point. There are many great people in the city, for sure, but a disproportionate number of perpetually cranky and uptight suburbanites live here now, too. It’s all the worst vibes of the cul-de-sac, only with traffic and rats, too.

Hopefully, they’ll cheer the hell up in time for the parade on Friday. In the meantime, I’m coming down with a sore throat and need a nap. One of my neighbors tells me they’re recovering from strep throat. I always assumed strep was transmitted through close, intimate contact, but according to Healthline,¹ you can pick it up from infected surfaces like doorknobs. Wish me luck!

Footnotes

1. Mention of any brand names or products on this blog is unsolicited and uncompensated and does not represent my personal endorsement of a company or its products unless otherwise noted. I believe most of the web, and search engines in particular, are irreparably broken owing to the efforts of SEO specialists, digital marketing agencies, hackers,² propagandists, and the very search engine companies themselves.³ The only effective remedy is for us all to go back to telling each other where we got our information and ideas from and providing word-of-mouth recommendations. ↩

2. The bad kind, with skateboards. ↩

3. Yeah, yeah, they’ve all used AI to make matters so much worse, but that’s not an interesting discussion in and of itself, so much as it is a popular complaint. Complaining, as it turns out, isn’t an effective means of solving problems, although I grant it may convince the costumer service representative to issue you a coupon code if you torment them enough. ↩