Indepoopence Day

It’s taken me 35 years to realize that July 5th is the most American day of the year. By now the firework smoke has mostly cleared; it’s risen into the troposphere and left behind a veil to remember it with, a funeral shroud of smog rings around the the random skylines across Los Angeles until it burns off in the lunchtime sun. The air clears and settles you remember this country is still the way it was on July 3rd, before we could spend 24 hours celebrating ourselves and the Great Experiment we were born into. We can pretend this place is something special while watching a video of Mark Zuckerberg wake-boarding in a tuxedo on Lake Tahoe while gripping an American flag; one of the warring lords of this husk of a nation, triumphant and slutty with a fresh hair transplant and taut bubble ass he’s worked to the brim in one of his many home gyms inside one of his many compounds adorned with secret service and bunkers. He knows he’s going underground soon, so why not get hot contextually speaking before that. Let us behold your cool tween hair a scientist in Turkey grew and your feet one last time.

Yesterday really felt like the Last Fourth of July. Aside from the obvious circumstances currently wrapping its shaky, senile hands around the throat of our nation, it feels like America is drunk-walking home from a barbecue at dusk. America is fumbling through her huge handbag for her keys before getting into her apartment without closing the front door. America is stomp-walking into the kitchen, to the fridge, where she heats up two-day-old pasta and eats it on the kitchen floor. America then showers and gives herself a blowout. Twenty minutes later, America has passed out in bed wearing the bizarre outfit she assembled to go out to the bars later. Excuse my doom-drama. I’m sure there will be a Fourth of July next year, but yesterday things just felt overcooked and weird.

July 4th in L.A. is always weird, though. There are firework shows happening in every part of the city. There is no cohesion. It’s not like New York, where the barges fire their best into the skies above the Hudson and East Rivers, and you can hear the applause and awe across the rooftops around you. The fireworks in LA do not compliment each other. They don’t acknowledge. It looks like how it feels to drive in traffic here. Everyone only looks up from their phones long enough to cut into your lane in front of you. The lonely vastness of this place is made more lonely, more terrible and more beautiful. The cum spurts of explosions —interrupted by LAPD helicopters — trickle into the sky from downtown to Century City, to the ocean and LAX. At a certain point in the night, you stop seeing the flashes and sparkles and just hear them, reverberating off of the rolling hills that divide the city and the Valley. Ping-ponging indefinitely. It sounds like war. I remembered the strange, one-off booms at night during the summer of 2020, when we were all fairly certain the police were the source. Sonic punishment for the protests, keeping the city on edge.

Last night, my husband and I sat on our balcony with our dog who looked wronged and contemptuous of the noise. We drank non-alcoholic beers and smoked cigarettes, watching reckless fireworks shot from a house party in the hills nearby. We watched our neighbor’s drone they fly once in a while. The drone with its terrible whir and flashing green and red lights, rose in front of us as we stared at it blankly, then zoomed above our building for the remainder of our time outside. The only time I wish I owned a gun is when this drone appears. I would shoot it down and smile as it fell silently onto the piss-soaked sidewalk below.

I’ve seen other drones around since COVID began; police drones blinking in silence as they surveil the worsening conditions of the neighborhood. Other drones that Netflix uses for exterior shots of Selling Sunset, which occasionally films in our building. The show’s central teeny twin real estate moguls converted the top floor of our building into two giant, sad penthouse units —banking on the building’s supernatural top floor views, despite its location. The units have sat un-purchased for nearly two years. A true LA story. That’s Tinseltown, baby! I’ve seen one or both Oppenheim Twins before in the lobby of our building, talking at the guy who works the front desk, probably about a zoning thing, or something else the front desk guy doesn’t need to know for his job. I couldn’t tell which twin it was, obviously. Sometimes I think there only is one Oppenheim twin playing both. Fooling us all. Hehe!

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Speaking of Hehe, most Hehe News of the summer season is keeping me distracted from the fall of our Republic. The most Hehe News of the summer, and maybe the year, involves poop and Gwyneth Paltrow. You see, the most American thing one can do is be gay and make friends with every famous white woman in the country. The other most American thing one can do is be gay and a guest. One does not need another home when one is gay and friends with famous white women. One can simply be a guest, and a gay guest at that. The other, other most American thing one can do aside from being a gay guest of a famous white woman, is to shit all over the guest room of that famous white woman’s home in the Hamptons and then leave without telling her, only for that famous white woman to find out later from her housekeeper, who came upon the ghastly scene, the scene that was left for said housekeeper to clean. It is then also the most American thing to be a famous white woman and have a home in the Hamptons and a guest room in that Hamptons that a gay guest geyser-diarrhea’d all over and then left for the housekeepers to clean. The most American thing is to then repeat this story to every other famous woman you know, and have that story disperse like firecracker embers floating down in the hot night air. It becomes an American fable, repeated in whispers and text threads, until weeks later, on the eve of American Independence, a newspaper owned by a British Viscount breaks the story for all to see. There is nothing more American than that.