July 5, the day you spend your morning in the backyard picking ammo casings out of the dog’s water dish. The day you suspend yourself over a foul, hard-partied toilet bowl because you ingested too much red, white and blue nonsense the night before. The day you find Uncle Terry’s ripped WAMZ shirt hanging on your Peruvian Apple cactus after Uncle Terry had popped it off to fight your cousin Pino who shot Terry in the side of the face with a bottle rocket, but Uncle Terry is all talk and crumbly walk, so he didn’t do a goddamn thing but look dumber than he already is.
It’s the day you have to nudge a bland acquaintance, who passed out on your couch watching Russ Meyer movies, with a broom handle to wake them up and get them the fuck out of your domain. It’s the day, no matter where you are in life, that sucks, because it’s the day you realize you ain’t all that great. Every year over and over it’s the same sad story with the same, slamming-of-the-steel door ending, you’re a dummy living in the country with the highest percentage of dummies per capita in the known universe, but — hey, you’re in good company, ‘cause I’m right there with ya ignoring whatever bullshit you feed yourself just to get through the day as you, in turn, ignore mine.
Hell buddy, I’ve stood on a collapsing patio surrounded by elderly folk sitting in wrought-iron rocking chairs and holding clear umbrellas, as a steady summer rain came down, waiting for Big Joe and Lil Joe to finish up with the dishes so the $50 firework display could get under way, as I thought about cramming as many Black Cats into my mouth as I could fit and lighting them busters off, just blow that hell hole right off my face and live out my remaining years with no mouth to speak of, thus taking all secrets to the grave and sparing the world the constant stream of verbal diarrhea that comes pouring out of my dumb skull constantly.
I’ve sat on a fiberglass Eames chair at a flag-draped kitchen table, as speedboat enthusiasts snorted Hulk-stomped coke off a purple plastic plate, sharing space with coagulated potato salad. I mean, have you ever spent the Fourth of July in a basement shooting pool on a table with no legs, everyone playing on their knees, trying to look cool, using too much chalk and drinking jugs of Carlo Rossi? Because I have. And I’m here to tell ya, it’s the perfect way to spend Independence Day, miserable and born in the wrong as you try to force on the fun within this fraudulent celebration, that smells of flash powder and hot dog water, as the one hit wonder sounds of Francis Scott Key goes plummeting into the ground with the help of Roseanne Barr (still my personal favorite spin on the National Anthem).
I mean, do you even know what America is bro?
It’s a dirty diaper submerged on the bottom of an above-ground swimming pool — that’s what America is! It’s placing a bobble-head Donald Trump on your mantel in between White Jesus and Elvis Aaron Presley. It’s raising your Keystone tall boy high into the air and saluting Mitch McConnell, for it is not every day you bear witness to a demon rising from a puddle of puked up Tuna Helper to become the longest serving senator in Kentucky history! We’ve been forcing the nation to look at that soured-rag-mug since 1985, and it’s gonna be the last face a whole lot of people see once Trumpcare is crashed into law like a Ford Pinto into a propane tank — and that, baby, is madness you can’t make up!
So my fellow Americans, proud together in our ignorance and cruelty, and together ignorant in our cruel pride — please, let us sit back and suffer this hangover together, because we deserve it, we have earned it, so let us own it as we continue to embarrass ourselves on the world stage for all to gawk and jeer because in the wretched words of Randy Meissner we’re more than prepared to “Take it to the limit, one more time.”
P.S.
E-40 > The Eagles