Baby, you're a firework
July the 4th be with you
Welcome to my 46th installment of PillowTown. There have now been as many P-Towns as there are US Presidents. This week the blog is entering her Biden Era. We’re not doing a whole lot, and there’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but we’re mildly patriotic and we’ve got cool aviator sunglasses.
Did you guys see that photo of the ocean being on fire? It really made me want to separate my mixed metals from my hard plastics. It actually inspired me to submit a packet to SNL, a task that I will likely not start until the day before it’s due. I figure, if the world is really ending, I may as well shoot for the stars before they all melt. Idk how science works.
I’m not going to talk about SNL today. I’m here to discuss traditions and history and big concepts and hard things. I’m here to shed light on the unknowable. You are Lewis and Clark and I am Sacagawea. Come along on this journey with me and don’t drink the water without a filter.
This past weekend was the 4th of July. For those of you unfamiliar, the 4th of July is an American holiday that celebrates the meat industry. Joey Chestnut ate 76 hotdogs in 10 minutes this weekend, breaking the previous record set by me which was 2.5 hotdogs in 45 minutes on my first day working on a food truck. Every year, there are fireworks. And every year, my reaction to them is kind of like when I see a spider I thought I had killed in my room, “ok, you’re here again.” Fireworks made me think of a Rosh Hashanah sermon my Rabbi gave like 10 years ago. He discussed the importance of stagnant traditions. Every year, the foods we eat and the songs we sing and the prayers we don’t understand are the same. But every year, we approach them as different people.
So back to fireworks. I’m sure when I saw my first fireworks display, it blew my mind. I’m sure it was so cool and I was awestruck. Now, I look up at something that was once wonderful to me, and I don’t have an emotional response. Part of this makes me sad. I don’t want to become a person who isn’t as easily impressed by things. But the reality is that when you grow up, you start to lose a lot of wonder. I kind of know how things work now and that makes it less fun. I pulled back the curtain on a lot of things and my life and there’s no wizard, just a dude in a hat. When I saw fireworks as a kid I just had no idea how they got there and it was magic to me. I now know it’s a heavily funded NYPD-backed operation and that sometimes they are so loud they scare bees to DEATH. Sorry, I hate to be a buzzkill.
We still need to make time to do silly things, and have our family dinners, and lift 13 year olds and their parents up in chairs, even if we now find these things silly. For 20 minutes on Sunday, my friends and I watched things explode in the sky. And nobody was awestruck. But for 20 minutes, we were not doing anything else. We talked about which ones we like more, the zig zags, the weeping willows, the colorful ones, the loudest ones. We saw a lot of neighbors standing on their own rooftops, and I wondered what they were talking about. We saw one neighbor sitting on her couch the whole time, uninterested in the display.
No matter how your relationship to these annual events changes, it’s important to show up for them, for no deep reason. It’s important to make time for “things” that sort of don’t matter. There is always time to watch an 8 minute YouTube video on how to crochet. There’s always time to save some pasta water to emulsify your sauce. There’s always time to give a friend a call who you’ve been meaning to catch up with. And I do mean this. I think everyone has 20 minutes every day, no matter the day, to do some combination of these kinds of things. I’m trying to take myself less seriously. It’s a waste of my time to check how many calories are in a bag of chips because one day, when I’m old and wrinkled, I’ll have a bunch of tiny emotional grandchildren to worry about, not my body fat percentage. And when I’m old and sun-kissed and out of touch, I’ll remember the nights I stayed up late with my friends and the people I love and not the nights I went to bed early to be well rested for my tech sales job. Because I never did that. Too busy bombing at open mics.
We have to make every day worth showing up for. AND I DO NOT MEAN THAT IN THE CAPITALISM PRODUCTIVITY WAY. I mean in the Lululemon tote bag Target decoration “do one thing a day that scares you” way. I’ve told every boy I ever had a crush on that I had feelings for them. I’ve actually never held in a feeling in my life. I’ve been hurt a lot, I’ve experienced rejection and ghosting and firing and lactose intolerance. But I don’t regret a single job or date or ice cream cone. Just more material for my haters. Also, I hope you always feel empowered to tell people around you how you feel, because the truth comes out eventually. And I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean. Because that place is huge and it’s currently on fire.
There’s no time for toxic relationships. There’s no time for unhealthy cleanse diets. There’s no time for Spotify with ads. However you spent your weekend, that’s none of my business. But I hope you enjoyed some time sitting. Some processed meat or maybe a tofu dog. And I hope you danced. Because the ocean is on fire and we’re too late to fix it. So grab a Bud Light Lime-A-Rita and grab your loved ones and watch the silly things explode in the sky. The climate is changing and so are we. God Save the Queen.