A Journal of the Vague Year // by Daniel DaFoe

The sermon for Jul. 04, 2003 is: confounding the lice

11:50 p.m. Independence day in the United States, like Christmas, Boxing Day and the occasional millennium, is one of those High Holy Days in this country wherein the citizenry feels dutibound to Whoop It Up, American-Style: traditionally, this means explosions of many sorts, from the heavenly to the intestinal-libidinal: fireworks fly and squeal, internal combustion engines roar from lawnmowers, sex toys and automobiles, and when the evening falls with curtains of silvery sparks and gouts of sulfur gas flames, the celebrants below gush ooooh, aaaah, and rip off a portion of oxen from the roast flank hoisted in their left hand; with their other hand, they raise their firearms in salute of their independence, and, like generations of Americans before and after, blast the otherworldly beauty descending upon them into slivers of comprehensible flame. We like fire in this country: we burn our food into ashen yumminess, we subject ourselves to the sun's radioactive alchemy to contract stylish cancers, we breathe in the smoke of a billion furnaces, we rub the dust of a billion crematoria off our leathery skins, we do this of our own will: this is what we celebrate today: the still bright spangled stars of burning America.

I began today in a suitably apocalyptic mood, which I shall relate to you in a poem:

waking up at a stupid rave on independence day

Churning and grooving in the echoing vista,
The DJ's stopped paying attention to the beatcounter.
Things fall apart. The vicodin will not hold,
Dull trance is seeping into the mould.
The idiotic beat is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of bright sharing is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Is realising we're down to one yellow lozenge of old ecstacy.


Surely some revelation is at hand.
Surely peaking again is at hand.
To peak again! No sooner are those words out
Than a vast image from Norman Rockwell
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the Library of Congress,
A shape with stovetop hat and furious eyes of a virgin,
Beard white and clothes sparkling like Liberace,
Is wagging its slow finger; all round it reel
The indistinct scurrying figures of the secret police.
The darkness falls again; but now I know
That two hundred drowsy years of philosophic rule
Have been betrayed to daylight by the governance of teetotallers.
And what rough beast, complete with engine and gun,
Staggers towards Bethlehem to throw up?

Um. Where did all this invective come from? All I wanted to record here was the strange loneliness I felt, estranged inside my little house as I heard the country around me ooooh and aaah at the thundering sky; I missed Valerie; I realised that I met Stephanie this day last year; all I did was buy DVDs, "Gangs of New York," and "Little Big Man," which I'm watching now: fitting 4th of July moobies, don't you think? And sometime earlier tonight, in an effort to confound the lice that I am convinced I have after foolishly checking out WebMD today, I shaved my beard; and sometime after that, I set all the little tissues I had wadded into my many shaving cuts on fire when finally I did decide to go out and check out the unearthly beauty above me and smoke a pack or two of cigarettes. Sing it with me, folksingers! -- Ahhhh'mm proud ta be an Americin--- in de land o' de whee an shaved --

the Funny Show

agriculture poem

my life in the ghost of Bush

time-lapsed (part 1)

unreconciled

Images are taken without permission from the fine and trusting folks at Folk Arts of Poland; please purchase something from them. Background music stolen without permission from Epitonic, Basta Music, and just about everywhere else my unscrupulous hands could grab something. No rights reserved.