Holidays that aren’t on Mondays or Fridays usually kind of suck. At least for those of us who weren’t able to take the preceding (or following) day off. Being on call this week, I fall into that category, so not only did I have to work yesterday (though I did it from home, which kinda took the edge off a bit), but I’m on call today (and, in fact, I’ve gotten one call so far that I had to deal with, and now I’ll be worried all night about what else might happen) so I couldn’t really do much of anything even if I was still the kind of person who actually did things. So I feel relatively fortunate that I don’t have any friends or plans to grill up some burgers and drink beer today. Mostly my plans involve wasting time going to Home Depot for shit they claimed to have in stock but didn’t, and then cobbling something else together that didn’t work either. So, yeah, so far so good. Later, I guess I’ll do some laundry and then of course get my lunch ready so I can go back to work tomorrow (where I have to attend a stupid meeting).

So, anyway, I’ve seen a bunch of the typical flag-waving, proud to be an American type sentiments expressed around the Internets (the US parts of it, anyway) today. I hope I’m not being a commie pinko blame America firster or anything, but, I gotta say, I’m not feeling a lot of pride. The US certainly has a list of great achievements (and plenty of things that we typically like to kind of overlook – like that whole Native American genocide thing, and slavery, and treatment of women, and, well, I won’t get into all that right now) in our relatively short history, but I can’t think of much we’ve done that’s admirable lately.

Frankly, if you look at where we are and where we appear to be headed, I’d have to say it’s all pretty depressing. I can’t think of anything to be proud of. Oh, there are individuals who are pretty admirable and inspiring, for sure. But as a whole? Let’s just say America aint the same America we at least used to pretend we were when I was growing up. Now we can’t even pretend to be anything but a fat, ignorant, greedy, mean-spirited, nihilistic wasteland. In fact, I think those are exactly the things that those flag-waving “patriots” out there take pride in.

And most of all, they’re proud that they elected their King.

Then again, maybe I’m just grumpy because I didn’t get much of a day off.