Well, I’m one day deep into my seventeenth rotation around the sun! Adulthood has never felt so close.

The day before my birthday (two days ago), I was taken on a (successful) record shopping excursion to celebrate. Afterwards, on a whim, we stopped at a farmers market not too far away just to see what was happening. What we saw was a hellish site: endless vendors of new bootleg merchandise (colorful phone cases; flimsy accessories wrapped in thin plastic bags and piled into “$3 each” bins; mechanical squeaking toy dogs with Terminator eyes); a disturbing variety of Confederate flags and Trump 2024 trucker hats; county fair style foodstuffs contrasted by unvaccinated Amish girls peddling homegrown produce. The outdoor venue—I didn’t dare venture inside any of its buildings, including the “small animal auction”—was populated by an unmasked crowd facing the heat for the chance to consume, consume, consume before the barbecue weekend kicked in. I cautiously bought one item: a stand hawking five dollar bootleg music posters happened to have a reprint of an old DEVO concert poster (from Hawaii, of all places) in surprisingly good quality. Considering the essence of their theory of de-evolution wafting around me at that moment, it seemed fitting to rescue it from its dusty prison.

The whole experience reminded me a lot of today’s holiday. From birth, I have been told that America is the world’s melting pot, a place where people of all cultures can gather and become one in perfect harmony. I would later learn of this hypothesis’s futility on a fractured planet with such a stark divide between those who get fair treatment and those who are not allowed. Yet what I saw on Friday reminded me somewhat of such a utopian ideal. All present at that market, whether merchant or consumer, dark skinned or pasty, young or old, obese or twig thin, wheelchair bound or able bodied, vaccinated or not, were equal. Everyone was allowed to indulge. And I cannot recall seeing a single mask at that gathering, giving everyone a chance of contracting something. It was as if the COVID-19 pandemic was done away with in a flash, allowing these ugly Americans to shamelessly expose their collective selfishness with even more pride than before. “Who cares if COVID remains a mean mistress to some; if I can’t consume and obtain, I am nothing.” Simultaneously, while the toll of death and destruction from this summer’s heat wave continues to rise, these same goons don their No More Bullshit baseball hats and declare that humanity’s collective decimation of Earth is nothing but a hoax. The sales slashes, on the other hand, are real. The land of freedom for some, not all; the home of a primarily brainwashed and complacent populous. Lovely.

I got the chance to breathe the day of my gestation completion anniversary, whupping my 5K time in the morning and partaking in an exquisite birthday dinner that afternoon. It was nice to have a break from being constantly reminded of your mortality and actually feel kind of special. I’m a human being with consciousness and an ego. I worry about the state of the world a good amount. But I also like good food.

I do feel a bit older, though I’ve felt internally older than my actual age for a while now. Having to persevere through the world’s worst for seventeen years callouses you like that. Yet just like Frankenstein’s monster, learning about our world and how it functions from the perspective of an outsider often wears me down to primal emotions of sadness, anxiety, anger. It’s a dwarfing gangliness that is near impossible to permanently eradicate. But it’s refreshing to take a walk on a lighter, more fulfilling side every once and a while.