Two hundred and forty-nine years ago, a scrappy band of colonial misfits decided they’d had absolutely enough of powdered wigs and imperial bootlicking.  July 4, 1776 was more than just a date on their calendar…it was a detonation.  The Declaration of Independence, that feral, ink-stained manifesto of rebellion, was adopted, and the world hasn’t been the same since.

I always taught The Declaration in my composition classes, introducing it as the most punk-rock document every written in the English language, and I managed to break through to even the most jaded, cynical minds in the class.  This wasn’t, after all, some polite memo to King George III.  This wasn’t some bitchy, ineffective hashtag campaign.  Fuck no.  This was a cannonball of words fired across the Atlantic.  Jefferson and his crew composed a symphony of defiance, a literary Fuck You to tyranny.  “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” – those words roar with rebellion against royal oppression.  They’re the kind of words that make you want to grab a musket, ignite a rocket, and scream “Not today, you pathetic, pusillanimous, powdered ponce.”  It was the first and only No Kings Protest, with the first patriots declaring war on an actual king, not some half-assed gathering of effete old ladies in strip-parking lots whining pointlessly to each other because they are afraid of actual American exceptionalism and dominance.

And here we are, centuries later, still riding the shockwaves of that declaration.  The United States of America – flawed, messy, loud, and unapologetically free.  Sure, we’ve stumbled.  We just spent four nightmarish years being sucker-punched by corruption, dragged through the mud by cowards, and gaslit by those who’d rather see us kneel than stand.  Fuck those anti-American cretins.  Most of us haven’t forgotten: our national anthem literally has explosions in it.  Rockets.  Bombs.  The whole damn thing is a pyrotechnic ode to resilience.  The country isn’t perfect, and it never will be.  But perfection was never the point.  The point was the Fight – the relentless, unyielding pursuit of something better.  That’s what July 4th is about.  It’s not just a day for hot dogs and sparklers (though, let’s be honest, those are non-negotiable).  It’s a day to remember that freedom isn’t free, and it sure as hell isn’t quiet.  It’s loud, messy, and sometimes downright chaotic.  But it’s ours.

So, fire up the grill.  Crack a beer, open the Jack.  Set off a firework or twenty.  And remember: this day isn’t just about celebrating what we’ve done – it’s about gearing up for what’s next.  Because the pursuit of happiness?  That’s a full-contact blood sport.

Happy Independence Day, America.  Stay wild.  Stay free.  And never stop roaring.

Now onto some patriotic D.P.S. business.  Fifty years to the day after the Declaration of Independence was adopted, July 4, 1826, America bore witness to what could only be described as history’s most ironic curtain call.  Thomas Jefferson and John Adams – framed in the annals of American lore as two intellectual giants of the Revolution – both passed away within hours of each other. Sure, life and death are full of coincidences, but c’mon…this?  The two men who helped craft the document that declared freedom to a British monarch both bowing out in its golden jubilee?  That’s a plot twist even Hollywood wouldn’t dare.

It’s difficult not to see their dual exits as some sort of cosmic mic-drop.  After all, they were perhaps the two most consequential of the founding fathers.  Adams, the pugnacious, fiery advocate, weaponized words like a Revolutionary Rambo, his essays and speeches rallying colonists with unapologetic vigor.  And then there was Jefferson, whose pen seemed to channel the muses themselves.  His prose in the Declaration – the lofty, idealistic call for unalienable rights – set hearts ablaze while encapsulating the philosophical heartbeat of the Revolution.  Together, they were the Lennon and McCartney of liberty (minus the questionable haircuts).

But here’s the kicker that makes their partnership even richer – they could not have been more different.  Adams was blunt and quick to argue, a man who saw no point in sugarcoating his points.  Jefferson, on the other hand, was measured, deliberate, and notoriously reserved.  While they clashed and feuded (I’m looking at you, Election of 1800, with your spicy, scorched-earth smear campaigns), they eventually reconciled late in life, exchanging letters that mapped out their shared reflections and rivalries.  It was the bromance nobody saw coming.

Then came July 4, 1826 – like a cosmic endnote to their lives and legacies.  Adams, in his final moments, reportedly murmured, “Jefferson survives.”  Except Jefferson didn’t.  He had passed away just hours earlier at Monticello.  Was this last thought a poetic tribute, or a sly dig at their lifelong rivalry?  We’ll never know, but it’s wonderfully on-brand for the man.

Despite their flaws, their legacy endures.  The Declaration of Independence remains not just a historical document but a bold, aspirational blueprint for justice and freedom.  And on that fateful summer day in 1826, it was as if the universe pressed pause to give these architects of the American experiment their due – brilliant, flawed, and forever revolutionary.

On July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau packed his philosophical musings, an unreasonably high tolerance for mosquitos, and (presumably) a decent stash of snacks, and moved to a cabin near Walden Pond.  It wasn’t exactly rugged wilderness – his buddy Ralph Waldo Emerson owned the land – but Thoreau wasn’t aiming for “off-the-grid mountain man.”  This was an experiment, a declaration of independence from knick-knack-filled parlors, neighborly dramas, and what he called the “quiet desperation” of 19th-century life.

The result?  The iconically unhinged “Walden,” part memoir, part manifesto, and entirely a literary smackdown of materialism and societal conformity.  More than just rejecting cluttered closets – he was throwing shade at the very foundations of comfort culture.  Why do humans labor endlessly for stuff they don’t even need?  Why not build a tiny shack (in Emerson’s metaphorical backyard, if you’re lucky enough) and live deliberately?  Walden asks the questions you might ponder while doom-scrolling Amazon listings at 3am.

Self-reliance is the drumbeat of the book, and Thoreau hammered on it with unrelenting confidence.  He chopped wood, grew beans, and arguably did more for the public image of solitude than centuries of hermits combined.  But don’t be fooled by the pastoral vibes – it wasn’t all feel-good “main-character energy” at Walden Pond.  A crucial part of Thoreau’s philosophy was resisting the machine, metaphorically and literally.  His critiques of conformity were a rally cry of individualism and rebellion, two concepts in sore need of renewed attention these days.

And here’s the kicker in that direction – “Walden” doesn’t sit neatly in its 19th-century time capsule.  Over two centuries later, it still shouts from the bookshelves at anyone trying to KonMari their lives or ditch “The Man.”  Thoreau’s treatise on minimalism, nature, and resisting societal nonsense resonates with present day freedom fighters at war with cancel culture, speech codes and pronoun abuse, moronic mask-mandates, government-mandated untested vaccines, and the rest of such anti-American bullshit.  Sure, not everyone’s sprinting to build cabins in the woods, but his message of intentional living?  That’s hitting home, whether you’re in a trendy city loft or your studio backdrop happens to be a perfectly manicured farm on Instagram.

Thoreau declared a personal revolution that July 4th – a one-man independence celebration complete with philosophical fireworks.  His legacy endures not because he nailed the tiny-house aesthetic, but because he challenged his readers to define their lives in a way that was Revolutionary with a capital “R.”

Lastly (though certainly not leastly), on July 4, 1855, Walt Whitman took the literary equivalent of a sledgehammer to the buttoned-up cultural norms of his time and published Leaves of Grass.  It was a full-throated yawp – a deeply democratic, unapologetically sensual celebration of the self, the body, and the soul.

Imagine being a Victorian prude (this won’t be hard for some of you) confronted with this book.  Whitman’s verses were an unaccompanied walk straight into the underbelly of humanity’s desires and contradictions – raw, radical, and drenched in the sweat of a working man’s labor.  He painted a world where the farmer, the legal immigrant, and the mechanic weren’t just background characters but leading actors in the grand theater of democracy.  And his free verse?  It swaggered.  No formal structure, no rigid rhyme schemes – just the rhythm of Whitman’s heart beating unapologetically across the page.

Leaves of Grass didn’t just talk the talk of American independence; it strutted its way into the room, dropped the mic, and winked at the audience.  Whitman’s themes of individuality and unity were inseparable.  He blurred lines between bodies, classes, and even the sacred and profane – arguing that everything and everyone holds divine potential.  It was a throat-punch to the suffocating buttoned-up culture of the era.

And let’s not overlook the audacity of publishing it on Independence Day.  Whitman practically gift-wrapped this literary rebellion and tied it up with a star-spangled bow, shouting, “This is America!”  It was the ultimate power move, a nod to a nation still grappling with its ideals and contradictions, and a promise of what it could become.

Critics were…not thrilled (no shit, right?).  But over time, Leaves of Grass grew into a towering monument of American literature, shaping modern poetry and influencing everyone from Langston Hughes to Allen Ginsberg.  Whitman infused his work with democracy’s messy, joyful, radical spirit.  Today, we can look back and marvel at Whitman’s chutzpah.  He wrote poetry that didn’t tiptoe around convention but stomped all over it with muddy boots.  And in doing so, he gave us verses still capable of making hearts skip beats and reminding us – regardless of how messy, complex, or chaotic life gets – that we contain multitudes.

N.P.: “American Badass” – Kid Rock

Gather ’round, dear readers and existential thrill-seekers, because today we light the candles on a metaphorical cake that will never be eaten, in honor of a man who gave us nightmares we didn’t know we needed.  On July 3, 1883, Franz Kafka was born – screaming, presumably – into a world that he would later pick apart with surgical precision and reassemble into some of the most mind-meltingly bizarre narratives human civilization has had the gall to produce.  Kafka was a wiry stream of dread and genius poured into a human-shaped container.  He was the literary badass who saw modern life for what it really is – bureaucratic purgatory with a side of existential horror.

Yes, Franz Kafka, the grim architect of worlds where people turn into cockroaches and face endless surreal trials without any clear crime or resolution.  He’s the guy who somehow managed to make even paperwork feel like a metaphysical death spiral.  In “The Metamorphosis,” a dude wakes up as a repulsive insect and everyone he loves despises him – tell me that scene doesn’t feel eerily like the Monday morning commute in emotional metaphor form.  Or take The Trial…a paranoid fever dream where the protagonist gets dragged through the legal ringer without so much as a checklist for survival.  Kafka captured exactly what it feels like to exist inside a system designed to crush you for unclear reasons – on this, the man was, to borrow a modern term, criminally underrated in his time.

But we’re not here to wallow in existential despair (or are we, dear reader?).  No, today we’re popping existentialist champagne – whatever that might look like – and celebrating the incredible influence Kafka has had on literature, philosophy, and probably your last five anxiety spirals.  His writing did something so rare and so raw that most of us puny humans spend entire lifetimes running away from it.  He took the gnawing absurdity of life, the suffocating anxiety of being, and the shallow, ridiculous theater of societal norms and slathered it onto the page with the precision who works for Nightmares, Inc.

This kind of writing lasts for a reason.  Maybe it’s because Kafka was one of us.  He was a guy trapped in the meat grinder of reality (though, in his case, it was working a suffocating insurance job in the shadow of his overbearing father).  Everything was set up to squash him like Gregor Samsa under a boot heal.  But instead, he wrote.  He wrote like there was no tomorrow, because he knew there probably wasn’t, and he filled every paragraph with the nervous, raw quality of someone staring directly into the abyss just long enough for the abyss to nervously shift its gaze elsewhere.

And while the world was busy sleeping on him or dismissing his work as the deranged ramblings of a man who probably just needed a stiff drink and a vacation, Kafka was redefining what fiction could be.  He was one of very few in his time who didn’t tell stories to entertain you in the Saturday matinee sense – he dragged you into a psychological whirlpool and dared you to find your way back.  His influence on modern literature is seared into the DNA of anyone who’s ever tried to capture this mess we call existence into words.  Guys like Borges, Camus, and Pynchon…the whole brood of postmodern and existential heavy-hitters owe him a stack of royalties and an apology note scrawled in shaky handwriting.

Did Kafka mean to be this towering figure of angst-riddled brilliance?  Hardly.  The man didn’t even want most of his stuff published.  He told his buddy Max Brod to burn the manuscripts after his death.  Thank God Max ignored the instructions like a responsible literary saboteur.  Because what’s life without Kafka?  Cleaner, maybe.  Simpler, definitely.  But infinitely less true.

And so, as we raise a glass – probably of something unreasonably dark and bitter, because what else would Kafka himself toast with? – we thank him for putting the absurdity of life into a terrifyingly honest mirror.  Happy Birthday, Uncle Franz.  You taught us all that the world is laughing at us, sure…but sometimes, it’s okay to laugh back.

Now go read The Metamorphosis again.  It’s a party.

N.P.: “Going to the Party” – The Allergies, Lyrics Born

Today, dear reader, we pour some out for Ernest Hemingway.  For a name that thunders with such literary gravitas, it’s paradoxical how much of him has been sliced, boiled, and reduced into a series of cliches fed to college freshmen in Intro to Lit.  Hemmingway, the masculine deity of the English sentence, I’m told, lived as though his life were a dare he accepted solely to spite death.  And how did it end?  Death, of course.  Death, in all its clinical indifference, finally called his bluff.  On July 2, 1961, Hemingway shoved two rounds of buckshot into himself in Ketchum, Idaho.  Cue the symphony of gasps, tributes, and reductive eulogies, all neatly packaged for obligatory reverence.  Yet the man, much like the sentences he crafted, wasn’t so easily punctuated.

To get into the meat of Hemingway’s life – this messy, blood-soaked symphony of adventure, genius, and catastrophe – you first have to understand the gravitational force he exerted not just on American literature, but on our entire mythology of what it means to live wildly and write well.  You can’t talk about courage in prose without tipping your hat to the guy who turned language into a knife.  Hemingway wrote as if words had weight – every sentence carved lean, shorn of excess, held up by something primal.  The Old Man and the Sea was a proving ground of grit.  A Farewell to Arms was love set against the erosion of humanity.  He forced readers into the ring with life’s hard knocks, and somehow, we loved him for it.  But there’s an odd hypocrisy in the Hemingway myth.  For all his talk of stoic restraint and quiet courage, his life was a chaos of loud, brazen excess.  This was a guy who chased bulls in Spain, downed daiquiris on the daily in Cuba, and hunted big game as if extinction lists didn’t exist.  Hemingway didn’t just live…he swaggered.  He tore through the trenches of World War I, bled out Hemoglobin’s worth of whiskey, and somehow still had the energy to swear loudly at the inadequacies of hotel service.  It was as if he lived on the belief that to stare death in the face was not enough – you had to step closer until you felt it’s breath.

And yet, the end loomed.  Because genius burns fast, and gods of excess always leave behind a smoldering wreckage.  By the late 1950s, Hemingway’s life turned into its own tragic third act.  Wracked by injuries from plane crashes, riddled with lingering effects of old wounds, and plagued by the ghosts of too many memories – his resilience began to crack.  Depression crept in, and paranoia turned the world into a series of looming shadows.  There’s a particularly cruel irony in knowing how a man who prided himself on the clarity of language underwent electroshock therapy – treatment that dulled not only his memories, but his creative fire.  He who gave the world such piercing prose began to lose his edge, stumbling toward a haze of confusion and pain.

And so when that July morning arrived, it didn’t exactly whisper.  Hemingway closed the book on his own narrative in the way he had always seemed destined to – not quietly, not cutely, but violently definitive.

The lesson I’ve taken from his work, mostly, is something like this: courage is not the absence of fear but the grit to stand firm within its shadow.

He was not a saint.  He was flawed, and sometimes brutal.  But that’s also the point.  Hemingway didn’t live or write to be worshiped.  He did it because he couldn’t do otherwise, and from that compulsiveness sprang something rare, magnetic, and alive.
I think Hemingway would laugh at all the efforts to tidy the loose ends of his story and life.  Because he, of all people, knew there was no clean narrative.  Just the raw beauty of life lived, fought for, and sometimes lost.

N.P.: “Sunroof Diesel Blues” – MY BABY