What Independence Day means to ME: as all the imported hockey giants and expat photographers living in the castle section of Scotland denounce America as a slaughterhouse and a whakteen sludge of animation gone awry and t&a and those television shows where seemingly everyone is fat and ugly and dumb and sans shame, I say the US of A is still better than lots of other places. Exhaustion sets in when thinking of the social inequality here and elsewhere but it's still a lot better here for most people than not. And you can drift around much further. This country is like twenty of the average country combined, and it acts it, too. Maine is a different country from Ohio which is a universe away from New Orleans. And Texas is unto itself: don't mess with Texas. We have choices, most of us, some of us, geographically. The money is ugly, the coffee is getting better, women's rights are faltering, the flag could be snappier, the voting process needs desperate rehabbing, but overall, commercially & cinematically speaking, we kick ass. And in the rock & roll realm no other country can touch us/US. And, in that amplified state of mind, I think of buying up in Canada at the loonie store a Canadian flag and a US flag and how my beau thinks me so utterly corny for having a patriotic streak but it makes me nearly welled up in tears holding a $1 plastic flag. Wars, and horror, and history, and earnestness, and that I can drive to Canada and buy a facsimile from a wire bucket for only one dollar. And I wondered today, as I hung the flag up on my backyard fence, if the VietNam Vet, Frank, across the street, was watching me doing this, if he would be enpained if I dropped it, if his chain smoking impulse would be triggered, or if his encapsulated decompressing debriefing would fly again from his mind, his lips, his quivering eyebrow. God Bless Your Underwear. I'd rather be living here than loads of other places. Amen and Sayonara.