July 4th, 2024

July 4th commenced early this morning, between midnight and 3 a.m. Fire crackers, cherry bombs, a kind of choppy rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner up and down The Avenues. Already awake, I couldn't help but hear it and hearing it, I’m made part of a celebration I really want no part of.

Trash cans are out along my stretch of 10th Avenue in what I like to think of as a show of communal togetherness. Most of us are asleep, though perhaps one of two of us have found refuge in an empty trashcan ala Beckett. Sonic-like booms and newly-barking dogs in the near distance keep the party going.

The first reaction, the duty of any person with good sense, is laughter. I listen to my laughter and hear in it a sense of wonder, wondering if my laughter isn’t, after all, a byproduct of outrage, the complicated calculus similar to the calculus S. Freud made when analyzing his patient’s jokes and comparing them to the dreamwork of an unconscious mind.

But these are my fellow citizens! Oblivious to fire-season, heat domes, and common sense. Who among them are lighting these fuse(s)? Is it the spark of patriotism I hear up and down The Avenues? A love of country and of countrymen and women? Or some deeper, inexplicable disturbance that’s being celebrated with gunpowder and the high-fives of juveniles in a nearby skateboard park?

The irregular explosive sounds wake something in me. What is it? Disgust bordering on anger. Bafflement and sadness. The acknowledgment that an unrecognizable country exists within the 7 x 7 mile borders of San Francisco, and that I must co-exist with my neighbors.

Everything about this country now seems to be both inconclusive and combative. The best I can do is live up to Keats’ notion of ‘negative capability’ and try to survive in the poet’s realm of uncertainty and wonder.

I have just now classified fireworks as a conflict of souls. Goodnight for the time being.