White 4th of July. Happy 231st.

White Night

I. It is 4:46 pm in St. Petersburg. The 4th of July is almost over, but it hasn't really started in America. For someone it has started; for someone in Brooklyn; it has started for some old Jewish junky listening to Harry Nilsson, beating a rhythmless ballad with a wooden spoon against a dusty monitor. The paper cup half full of sunflower seed shells and cigarette butts. Happy Merry, America --the great soap opera of the world. Even when you forget that everyone is watching, and you are lonely; even when everyone calls you the dumbest thing since square watermelons, (which only you can still stack them); you America are the simulacrum toward which the apparitions of Soviet submarines are still headed. Jody Foster really did pay attention after that great shot; someone should have shot him on the set of that terrible film whose name I have successfully forgotten. America; they keep watching. Kiefer Sutherland for president and his little dog too.
II. In St. Petersburg nobody remembers you much. Sure, Aerosmith is going to play in a swampy stadium after another failed soccer game, and McDonald's has ads hanging over the Livejournal poems about hanging teenage girls from a giant ball made of tampon strings, but really who remembers your birthday? Who will bring you a white box full of soft bed sheets and bath products? It is up to you, you must once again answer the call of duty, put down your addiction, raise up thy pallet, and crawl out a Chinese prison to save the world from the U.S. president.

III. You must jump into the salty Baltic water, and not be afraid of what lurks beneath.