May the writers of M*A*S*H be haunted by the ghost of Dorothea Dix
Believe me, people go buck wild with the fireworks here. Summer is the most rainiest time of year on the Gulf coast, so they're not a fire hazard. And we live outside of the city limits; even if they were illegal here, no one would give a fuck. At least they stopped at a reasonable hour. I went to bed at 11:00 last night and I don't remember being being woken up by fireworks. And I haven't heard any tonight, which is unusual. Usually it takes a day or two for it to peter out.
When I went downstairs to make my lunch a couple hours after dinner, Mom and Phil were watching some heinous 4th of July concert on CNN. It amazes me how no matter how many times I tell them about Spotify, they'll sit through 2 hours of artists they've never heard of to hear like, Old Dominion perform 2 songs.
Machine Gun Kelly was performing when I went down there, and Mom went into her patented old lady fretting about his tattoos. No one under 80 gives a flying fuck about tattoos any more. Like, you can have a Yakuza-style full body tattoo and still get a job as an accountant or whatever. The woman in charge of the purchasing department at work is a nice lady who always wears khakis and boat shoes, has sensible short hair, and full sleeves of tattoos. Literally no one cares. The Silent Generation lives in a version of the world that's been dead and buried for years. (Boomers too, kind of--they got tattoos, but only to rebel against Daddy The Man.) Tattoos, how transgressive! Only longshoremen and ladies of the night have those!
Speaking of crap TV, Phil is always watching M*A*S*H at dinnertime. I know that show was beloved of white liberals in the 1970s who fancied themselves the epitome of progressiveness, but it has not aged well. Loretta Switt was the only permanent female cast member, but there was a constantly rotating cast of nurses for Alan Alda to sexually harass. Ha ha, remember ladies, you may be healthcare workers who volunteered to work in a war zone, but your main utility is as sexual objects!
Barf.
Phil's other favorite thing to watch is endless re-runs of NCIS on Netflix. Or, as David and I like to call it, "What if there was crime... in the Navy??".