The Land Of The Free And The Home Of The Brave

The wife wanted to go to my old stomping grounds yesterday for their Fourth of July celebration at a water front park.
The plan was to get there a bit earlier than the rest of the Sheeple so we could grab a spot with a Barbeque pit that was advertised on their website.

Long story short, it turned into a logistical fucking nightmare.
First off, this shindig was at a large public marina with enough parking for hundreds of cars.
But no.

The boat ramp was right smack dab next to the music stage and it was open. They wouldn't let you park there. You had to park about five hundred yards away and then take a hay ride on a trailer to get in. The trailer cut right in front of and dropped you off right next to trucks loading and unloading boats on the ramp.

Not knowing this, we had packed all kinds of shit for a picnic and fishing outing.

All of that had to be hauled out of the car, carried about eighty feet and deposited on this trailer full of people.

When they dropped us off, we had no idea what was where and had to do a scouting foray to find a place to carry all our gear to.

This is when we find out that the advertised Barbeque pits (plural) is actually one fucking barbeque pit for what I would estimate later to be close to a thousand people and was of course, taken.
We had the charcoal, the lighter fluid and my case full of BBQ items but no fucking barbeque.

Remember now, this is the Fourth of July in a small town. By the way, just for fun I find out my debit card shit the bed earlier, the magnetic strip somehow has a huge gouge in it from something I stuck in my back pocket, most likely a crescent wrench.

I tell the wife that I will go try and find a small disposable grill at Safeway.
It is to laugh.
Not a chance. There was a small SEARS outlet open though and by golly they had a full size grill, on sale,for 40 bucks.

Of course the stupid kid who got stuck working had no clue how to just punch in the numbers on my card. I found a ten spot I didn't remember having and between that, the twenty I knew about and the cash my wife had, I had enough to get the damn thing.

This is after we just spent 80 bucks at Walmart getting the rest of the shit.

Now the fun part.
I am in her car. A small, Ford Focus that brought four people, a large cooler, two fishing poles, two tackle boxes blankets and a fucking watermelon to this park.

The only place this grill fit was across the back seat so in it goes and off we go back to the no parking hell zone.

I got lucky and found a spot on the main drag and packed that dirty fucker all the way in.

The wife ain't happy.
What a surprise.

We go round and round because we would have had to set all that up in a different spot from where we had already packed all our shit to and then would miss a good viewing spot for the fireworks later, plus, now I have to figure out how I am going to get the damn thing home.

She now decides to scrap the barbeque idea all together and just buy some burgers from a vendor there.

If you knew me, you would rightly guess that about this point, I am right at the point of no return and the results are not going to be pretty.

Instead, I just say fuck it, whatever, I don't give a fuck.

So we finally eat.

Now the boy wants to go fishing. I got him his very first fishing license just about an hour ago.

This should be a no brainer. Got the poles, the worms, the licenses and the gear.

We head out to go fishing. It's a fucking marina.
There are docks everywhere.

Nope.

Can't fucking fish off the docks in the marina.

Fine, I'll just go on the other side to the bank where I have fished at least a dozen times in the past.

Nope, can't do that either, they have closed that access to the public for this fucking shindig.

I am now rapidly approaching nuclear meltdown.

Some guy that works for the Port there must have seen the murder in my eyes when he told me that because he volunteered that he wouldn't see us just this one day if we went farther upriver and went past a no trespassing sign about a hundred yards away and ducked over the bank.

Fine. I thanked him and over the bank we went.


Didn't even get a bite.

I don't care, I went fishing and got away from the madness for a while.

We head back and the kid disappears, 16 years old and lots of girls around, I know what he is up to but the wife can't cut the apron strings and keeps fretting because he isn't right there where she can keep tabs on his narrow ass.

Then a guy I work with calls me on the phone.
Him and some other co workers are going to come down and want to know where we are at.

Double plus mother fucking bonus points, I can tell on the phone, the dude is half drunk.

Here, we go.

Sure as shit, a bunch of them show up and some of them can barely stand up.

Thank God it was starting to get dark finally.

Of course they want to sit right next to us but luckily it had gotten fairly packed by the time they got there so they had to fall down a few yards away.

I visited with them for a bit but since I don't drink anymore the charm left that scene rather quickly.

Six and a half hours after we left the house, the music had been going for over an hour and they are finally going to get with the program. The fireworks barge is sitting out front in the river, they sing the pledge of allegiance, never heard that before and then they start singing the Star Spangled banner.

The whole time this is going on I am quietly reflecting to myself on the shape this country is in while I am looking around and just how pitiful it is to see all these people who couldn't give a flying fuck if the NSA is reading their Emails or recording their phone calls, or all the other abuses our government is heaping on us and here they are just singing away.

I couldn't do it.
I couldn't even mouth the words. I was busy choking on the irony of the whole scene. Let's all pretend all is right in our world for a couple of hours on one day out of the year.

When they got to the part about the land of the free and the home of the brave? The bile started rising.There I was, surrounded by blissfully ignorant idiots, my fellow citizens. No fucking clue, I could see it in their vacant eyes.

Mercifully they all finally shut up, the lights went out and the fireworks started.

Twenty two minutes later the show was over and people were heading out in droves like Lemmings headed to the cliffs.
I let a bunch of them get ahead of me and started packing shit up.

I had taken the fucking grill back to the car earlier to save myself that hassle, there was still plenty to lug across a parking lot longer than a foot ball field as it was. The cooler doesn't have wheels and I had to hoist the fucker up on my shoulder and muscle it the whole way.

Finally got to the little car, pulled the grill out of the back seat, crammed everything I could into the trunk, had the wife and the boy get in the back seat while her oldest son who is autistic piled in the front and then crammed that fucking brand new grill right back in over the top of them and drove home to find several freaked out cats and the neighborhood fireworks show going full blast.

The land of the free and the home of the brave my aching ass. More clueless idiots literally watching their money go up in smoke for mere seconds of entertainment.

I'm taking the day off.
I think I might go fishing Sunday too.

A guy has to know his limits and I just red lined mine.