Yesterday was Independence Day for America.

It is a day commemorating the moment when America sent an angsty letter to Britain, its mother, saying what a shitty mom it was, how it was leaving home for good. Become independent.

It is a day confounded by how successful America became after separating from its mom. Genetically endowed with imperialist ambitions and a dash of Oedipus complex, it dominated the world with big sticks or purse strings, just like its mother did.

But most people don't think about the history and meaning of the holidays.

It is just a day to fire up the grill, day drink, and go watch a weird parade and the good ol' fireworks. That's it. There are no requisite rituals at all. Probably the only thing that people might feel a mild FOMO for is the fireworks.

I heard a podcast host who was against fireworks. It poses danger, creates fumes, scares dogs, and sounds like a war zone. And the technology really hasn't changed much in the last few decades. "If you've seen one, you've seen them all."

I don't have any strong feelings for fireworks, but I could see his point. They are all basically the same. The only difference is how good your view is. If it's too close or too far, it will be too big or too small, and it will look like shit on your phone camera. And if it's the perfect, it will be crowded as fuck and therefore suck.

So I wasn't all super excited about the fireworks yesterday.

But I couldn't avoid seeing some from a little afar for a little while.

I reflexively took a few shitty videos, even though I planned not to upload them to social media, out of my genuine desire to save my loved ones from watching yet another fireworks video.

Once I realized that I probably won’t ever watch the videos I just took, I stared at it for a bit. My mind wandered off, wondering where it was happening, when I saw it the last time, and what it all meant. Then a big one pops, see the colors, hear the sounds, and let them dissipate into nothing. Just like the fleeting thoughts of my wandering mind.

It looked like all the other ones I saw before.

But it's like watching a fire or the waves. Always the same, never the same.

And it still mesmerizes you as it always has. And it lets you wander in whatever thoughts and feelings you might have, as long as you have some room for awe.

I recently heard Tim Ferriss, a self-styled experimentalist and teacher I follow, talk about spending extended periods out in nature:

I do think we suffer a little bit from awe deficiency disorder... a sort of ADD when we're trapped in the mundane for too long with too much distraction and too many to-do's and too many relationships...

There's no space for awe there. There isn't the room necessary. Awe isn't generally a quick hit you get in the 30 seconds between using two apps. There's more breathing room required for genuine transcendent experience of awe.

In case you feel like you were too distracted to find yourself in awe under the fireworks, this week we venture out to find some awe in our independence and identity.

(◕‿◕)⨓

– ƴΐ⍧ի⍲e⌊ ⅋ yӭ𐦤⚇⍕⍑

Spicy White People

Spicy white people look like white people, the difference is that their ethnic background transcends the English tradition.

Half my family traces their lineage back to the Mayflower, for the last 400 years, they’ve lived in the foothills of the Appalachians. What happened down there in the 18th century, what mix of genes do I hold in my blood? The West Virginians have stories, trials and tribulations, a history, do I reduce it to rubble because modern white people are distinctively lame?

The other half my family comes from a place of exile; European Jews living in Chile. They emigrated to the United States before my father’s generation. I don’t speak their language but their culture has influenced my life, I have gone to Chile to visit family, my grandparents speak with Chilean accents. I don't share much of that culture but because of that history, I’m a “spicy white person.”

What mix of genes do I need to hit the sweet spot? White enough to get favorable treatment by law enforcement, South American enough to earn a modicum of respect from people of color who don’t empathize with purely white people in the dimension of culture. My ancestors were colonizers and they were refugees. They oppressed and they were oppressed. Me? I'm just vibin' man.

Race and ethnicity mean a lot, but sometimes I wish it didn't.

Spicy Korean People

Korean people can be either South Korean or North Korean, but the only difference is that they live in very different countries.

On my dad's side, my grandfather was from northern Korea, which is now the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (which is, confusingly enough, Noth Korea), but my grandmother was from southern Korea, which is now the Republic of Korea. The separation wasn't really a thing until 1953 when America and China decided to pause the fight (it technically never ended).

Before that, Korea was actually Japan, from 1910 until 1945, when America decided to destroy Boston and Chicago equivalents of Japan, so it decided to stop owning Korea. Before that, Korea was a pretty modest little kingdom that got bullied by different ruling families of China and Japan for 5,000 years of recorded history.

That's basically the history of Korea. Its identity is defined by not being China and Japan, mostly because it was too mountainous and useless to conquer. Despite this identity, its culture is still basically a mix of China and Japan. I think the only key difference is captured by what someone told me once: 'Korea is like Latin America of Asia', i.e., we like to eat spicy shit, we like to sing and dance, and we like to overwork.

My namesake family was only in Korea for about 700 years, though. Although this might sound like a lot to Americans, that's not that much for most other countries in the world with several thousand years of history. So it's nice to be confused correctly in foreign countries where everyone statistically correctly assumes that I'm somewhat Chinese. I am indeed somewhat Chinese.

The OG dude of the family was a Chinese diplomat who came over with a Chinese princess who was getting married to a Korean prince (yeah, there's a Wikipedia page). He decided to stay and have kids. I'm his 31st-generation offspring. I know this because each family's eldest son's eldest son's eldest son's family usually keeps track of this and you have to go ask to be updated every few decades.

Which is all very cool. When I learned about this years ago, I felt some sense of pride. A little weight of history. A sense of heritage pulsing through my being.

But it's not like I went to study my ancestors and planned my life around them. My 700-year-old ancestor will only be fascinating once to everyone else. He'll never have a billion-dollar idea, not just because he's never even used a computer before, but because he's dead. He didn't leave me any money, and neither did any of my 2,147,483,647 ancestors (2^31-1). The only thing they did for me was to have a kid who had a kid who had a kid... who had a kid who had me.

As the author of the 20th-century American philosopher Richard Rorty's Wikipedia page wrote:

It is his goal, therefore, to recontextualize the past that led to his historically contingent self, so that the past that defines him will be created by him, rather than creating him.

In other words, I get to write this and imprint it onto the permanence of the interweb. Even if my family heritage ceases to exist, I will be the most rememberable one yet.

History of the American Independence Day

Imagine how much liquor drinking would've happened if Independence Day fell on the Fifth of July, as it did on 1779. Regardless, soldiers received double ration of rum in 1778, even though non-military personnel had to work until 1870, and they weren't even paid until then.

The Best Speech of Independence Day

And the best president was Jed Bartlett.

The Jurisprudence of Pyrotechnics

It is literally illegal to buy fireworks in Massachusetts. Coincidentally, it is also considered one of the most liberal states in the United States, but apparently not with fireworks liberation. Every Masshole on the road has a license plate that says 'The Spirit of America', but they actually illegalized liquor sales on Sundays. You also can't buy liquor at grocery stores, and all bars have to close at 2 AM.

Massachusetts is basically a Puritannical Theocratic Regime masquerading as Liberal Coastal Bourgeoisies.

But it is also possible that they are so uptight because they used to go really hard:

The night before the Fourth was once the focal point of celebrations, marked by raucous gatherings often incorporating bonfires as their centerpiece. In New England, towns competed to build towering pyramids, assembled from barrels and casks. They were lit at nightfall to usher in the celebration. The highest were in Salem, Massachusetts, with pyramids composed of as many as forty tiers of barrels. These made the tallest bonfires ever recorded. The custom flourished in the 19th and 20th centuries and is still practiced in some New England towns.

propaganja_news

• Phillippines celebrate their independence from the United States on the Fourth of July. This was intensionally designed by the U.S. as a psyop on the Pinay people to be pro-America.
• 94% of the people don't spell Phillippines correctly the first time.
• Independence is a fiction of your mind in your work Slack

quantized_quotes

audio.wav

Four Tet, a British electronic musician, seems to be a pun on quartet, but is actually only one person. He is also known as KH, which is not an acronym of Four Tet, but actually the initials for his name, Kieran Hebden. He is a son of South Africa-born Indians and he is slaying the Brits at Glastonbury with absolute bangers. There's some symbolic thing there, but it's mostly just bangers. My dance language is from 10 to 13 minute-ish.

T-Shirt Picks of the Week

Don't piss off old people. The older we get the less life in prison is a deterrent.

prompts.bib

• [1][2][3] woohoo freedom
  /imagine a transdimensional fireworks violent birth of new american diversity
• [4] spicy white redneck and jew couple
  /imagine One South-American-European-Jew and Proto-Anglo-American Appalachian Redneck
• [5] traditional korean tp party for chinese diplomats
  /imagine A historical painting of a Chinese diplomat partying in Korea, in the style of ancient Chinese painting