Fireworks ahead — Proceed with caution

Marc
4 min readJul 21, 2014

Some things Einstein thankfully never considered

“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley.”

Plan A: Drive to the local 4th of July fête celebrated annually by residents, suffocated like everything these days in an avalanche of social sharing and bookended by an unmemorable pyrotechnic display. An AADD hypermedia advertisers paradise.

Plan B: Mull over in agonizing detail the minutia of possibilities on the way to the fireworks — suburban traffic bottlenecks, where to park, where to eat, how to avoid awkward conversations with awkward people — excuses that invariably lead to the absurdist algorithm: { not going somewhere >= going somewhere <= not going somewhere… }. As anti-patterns go this is as close to a stoner mantra as any.

“Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.”

The beauty of any object is it’s plasticity. Mere observation changes the conditions by which an object is observed and consequently measured. An object occupies a point in space-time but beyond that it’s observed position within space-time is entirely dependent on the observer. Abstracting out a bit more, any qualitative spatial analysis of points in space invariably carries with it the voyeuristic distractions of historic markers. Take a lake house, our loci for example, with a long running land easement border dispute. Prickly neighbor files complaint over shrub removal. Or consider a college athletic field turned yearly patriotic launching pad yet once upon a time accommodated thousands of bare feet to sit silently with a revered Yogi. Om. Both points in space can be mapped in the praxis of coordinate Y and time X but beyond that are as divergent as two roads in a yellow wood.

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

So we try to base our choices on options. Without options we are largely left with deterministic outcomes. The result of these outcomes are lessons imprinted on the subconscious. Conditioned responses. Mine are stored like some weird folk survival almanac. “Don’t shit where you eat”, “Wear clean underwear to the airport”, “When in doubt follow the herd”. The last one, the trap we all fall prey to, intrinsically linked to fight or flight backed up by safety in numbers, is on everyones list. Do the math. We are mammals after all.

“Wear a short enough skirt and the party comes to you”

Standing out from the crowd — heroic or counter-intuitive? A frictionless world is the groupthink world. Like a well worn path it only gets smoother and smooth is by definition the Newtonian universe. However, since our Plan A required a quick decision, with the elements of a tired navigator and other people, the decider brain screamed for a completely absurd solution. A solution without which our immediate space-time dilemma begins to look unsolvable and chaotic. Finding a worm hole under the best of circumstances, let alone on a busy holiday weekend, is a known unknowable unknown.

“Beam me up Scotty!”

Sitting on a deck bathed in twilight, looking out over a lake whose waters have changed from inviting blue to impenetrable black, voices once masked by daylight distraction and wind, now heard with clarity, we witness small roman candles and bottle rockets launched then detonate at the tree line. A charming display. The demo ticky-tacky but well synchronized. Who are we to fucking complain?

“Is that all there is?”

Then, just as the sun has dipped below the western ridge, the mosquitos fully involved in their macabre dance (little did we know we were just an appetizer), as the light faded to darkness more fireworks, larger fireworks, could be seen in three distinct locations around the lake, not in unison but asynchronously with long pauses filtered by shouts and cheers and small strange rockets we aptly named “screamers”. This went on for TWO HOURS.

Toward the end someone in close proximity sent up a fusillade over the lake at a low angle of trajectory. The sound impressive and the visuals quite arresting but as sensory tests go the experience proved fireworks are best seen from a distance. As slowly as this event developed, surprising and much welcomed, at a designated hour it abruptly stopped. Why?

Communication takes many forms and how we use space to communicate has the unmistakeable imprint of human engineering and design, the tendency to fill a big space with a ‘big bang’ and shatter our perception of space-time. Perhaps this is why the organized, paternalistic effort to celebrate American independence with a grand fireworks display so often falls short of our expectations. Like a bad novel, bigger is not always better, taking up shelf real estate for all the wrong reasons. Individual initiative, on the other hand, however serendipitous, diminutive and improvisational provide a more intimate context for interpreting a holiday that has quite frankly lost meaning with the passage of time and the weekend-long sales marketing cluster-fuck.

Disclaimer: The inherent risks associated with using explosives to communicate the abstract ideas of human liberty leaves this polemic at an impasse. Logic and reason dictate that professional licensing and government regulation of fireworks cap potential liabilities. Leaving such things as storage and use of fireworks to amateurs, like anything, can have unintended and sometimes fatal consequences. Flame on.

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Marc

Putting procrastination above completion one deadline at a time.