america the beautiful

I cried when the fireworks started today, just sitting like a fool on the grass by myself, surrounded by screaming kids and young parents, with our backs dark and our faces flashing colors, crying like the sentimental menstruating old man I am, my tears coming down with renewed vigor each time my body was percussed by the boom.

I was going to spend the day with my books, but I failed at that. After a semi-productive morning, I spent two hours screaming the lyrics to "Two More Bottles of Wine" at the wall in my bedroom (because the sound reflected best with my mouth six inches or less from the wall), went on an hourlong jog and felt so stircrazy and salty and weird and lonely when I got back that I decided on an impulse to try to find fireworks. Before I forget, here's Emmylou Harris doing what she does:

I sat in traffic for twenty minutes and parked my car at a movie theater a mile away from Shoreline Amphitheater and followed the drunk young adults and the sober young parents to a gathering place that was just a gigantic open field of dirt and rocks. The light was dying but I could still tell that we were on Mars. The amphitheater is two white teats right on the edge of saltwater marshes. Google is nearby. There was some pops concert ending in fireworks tonight, but all the smart and frugal mid-Peninsulans knew to just wait in the field of rocks to get just as good a vantage as those people who had paid $25 to sit inside the amphitheater. The field of rocks was as big as Sheep Meadow in Central Park, maybe even as big as Long Meadow in Prospect Park, and most people clustered on the far end of it, near the parking lots. On this side of the field, there was a low rocky berm that a few intrepid people stood upon. I cursed myself for not bringing my camera to capture the image: black silhouettes on Mars against an impossibly large sky that was gold on the bottom and International Klein Blue on the top, California's colors. I knew then that tonight would be another lapse into sentimentality and I immediately texted C.H. in all caps about my love for America.

I walked across the field of rocks and found a park and an empty patch of grass at the near side of it between two different families with howling children, and sat down and waited. I was the only person who didn't come with another. A huge old drunk man next to me wrestled a five year old boy to the ground and I smiled the same smile when the boy shouted, "I'm tapping out!" that I smiled earlier in the afternoon when I watched two black teens in Goth outfits in the Baylands (I know it sounds like I am describing unicorns) grasping each others' forearms and spinning until they fell down.

The fireworks came on after a spell. The waterworks, too. Stephanie called to say good night halfway through and I kept her on the phone for ten minutes describing to her what I saw - "There's a golden shower. A cube. Two cubes. A ring. White streaks with purple and red at the end. This one is just sperm going on all directions. [I got a dirty look from a young parent.] Plain white lines that turn into sparkling. A green planet with a red ring around it" - and she listened silently, or fell asleep, while I spoke. She knows I have an unnatural fondness for multicolored lights. In 2002, on the day that MoMA moved temporarily to Queens, I waited near the Queensboro bridge for the celebratory specialty fireworks and watched as they accidentally spelled "WOWA" over and over again in the sky. It was an archetype, and now fireworks always give me the feeling best described as "WOWA WOWA WOWA."

They did what they were supposed to do. I'm not even going to try here to explain why I was filled with love for America at that moment, because it's such a fucking cliche. Also, in my six weeks of suburban isolation, I have done lots of silent observation and lots of wistful inward smiling and it's boring and predictable and untrustworthy because it is merely a sublimation of this season's feeling of wanderlust into a voracious Whitmanesque love for everything - I love chicken! I love nudity! I love God! I love each and every one of you! - so BLAH BLAH BLAH I love America. If my love for America were a flag, it would be so big it would cover a baseball diamond and require 250 volunteers to unfurl, etc..

N.K. haled me to Santa Clara afterward to accompany her on a dog walk around her perfectly still, brand-new subdivision. One could only hear distant booms and the sound of sprinklers. I tried to explain my love for America to N.K., who has held Israeli, German, and American citizenship, and who immediately pointed out that we are in an endless war and are about to go to war with Iran and implied that I should donate even more money to Barack Obama. I ended up just telling her about C.H.'s Constitution baseball and Constitution poster, and we got distracted and started talking about all the horrific ways she had been spectacularly injured in the last ten years. I had a beer and then waited two hours to become 100% sober for the drive home.

At home, I discovered that C.H. had emailed a godawful ("stirring," she promised) rendition of "America the Beautiful" and by the time I played it through my oceanic feelings had evaporated back into the regular old foggy mist of wist. Then I sat down to write this blogpost and took two wrong turns and read about two things that seized me with terror: a hockey player accidentally getting his carotid artery slashed by a skate spraying blood like a fountain onto the ice, and two women backpackers shot down like deer at their campsite by a hiding man who didn't like to see women kissing. Proceed to those links at your peril; they will imperil your feelings of love. The Pope Clock is telling me that it's 4 a.m. Sorry to leave you with those awful thoughts, but it's bedtime for Bonzo.