Lifestyle

Melting pot or just melting plastic?

The Fourth of July is an odd holiday. You eat and drink goodies generally invented and perfected in other countries–the hamburger providing the lone exception to a list which included guacamole, salsa, tortilla chips, bratwurst, sauerkraut, tabouleh, rice, beer, sangria, rum, vodka, chocolate and cake–while peacefully celebrating the birth of your country by blowing up gunpowder in creative formations.

Still, that’s not the full extent of the oddity in a day that might have finally and forever rendered “odd” and “fun” synonymous in my worldview. Photographic proof, as follows:

You are looking at a German child’s toy (probably manufactured in Japan) that was delivered via Swiss-chocolate egg, and placed by a Lebanese-Mexican man who had just returned from Brazil and South Africa onto the overcooked surface of a Johnsonville Bratwurst roasting on a US-manufactured grill. This melting-pot toy–and several other plastic toys that were eventually subjected to melting experiments on the aforementioned grill–merely prefigured other equally odd events, which included the playing of Michael Jackson’s Bad in LP format and suicide drills up and down a very wet, slippery hill placed in an almost-but-not-quite-ideal location for firework watching.

I suppose if I hadn’t woken up to the following flag-flying, court-house-shining-in-the-sun view, the rest of the day wouldn’t have seemed so striking by comparison:

Life wouldn’t be any fun if it were predictable, no?

Today, the beginning of the editing process and, with a bit of luck (and a lot of solid writing), the end of the Icarus shawl.

© 2008 hapagirl.