Birthdays? For countries? In THIS economy?
It's all hanging on by some Threads.
Hi friends!
How’s everyone doing? This was one of the all-time weirdest holiday weeks and having a Tuesday off without its little friend Monday should be illegal. I will say, I did have such a nice day off that by 5pm I had completely forgotten about the concept of work only for it all to come crashing back down again on a Wednesday that felt like a Monday and now I really don’t know what day it is and may never again.
The zeitgeist around the 4th of July this year was somehow more unhinged than ever1. We had the Supreme Court and their recent “decisions” making a certain type of liberal nervous about looking too excited whilst attending a BBQ. We had the All-American classic — people blowing their fingers off with fireworks. We had dogs living through their own personal ‘nam. We had owners medicating these poor, terrified dogs. We had the rise of dog sedatives saying a lot about where we are all at, mentally. We had drones filling in for fireworks and fireworks filling in for the therapy so many desperately need. We had a bag of coke found in the White House and diet coke soon to be declared a carcinogen. No one seemed to know what was going on and it was the hottest day ever recorded here on our ailing planet Earth.
At this point I think we can all agree that having a birthday party for any country, but especially America, is embarrassing. Unless we can track down the exact day supercontinent Pangaea drifted apart, we are randomly ascribing birthdays to landmasses, and honestly, it’s giving rescue dog. As the mythology of America continues to deteriorate, maybe we can just band together and decide to enjoy this holiday for what it is, a chance to let it all hang out and kick off summer with a vacation day, or two, if you’re lucky.
It would be dystopian culture blog malpractice for me to not acknowledge the slowly rotting corpse that is Twitter and the remarkable rise of Threads, a nascent social media platform from the Mark Zuckerberg portfolio that was rushed to market yesterday. By this morning, more than 20 million people had already signed up, which is fucking insane and officially crowns Threads a “thing.”
Elon has been slowly harming Twitter since he bought it, which makes sense since it has long been established that he will be played by Kathy Bates in his biopic. The Zuckerberg portfolio — known for siphoning the best of other social platforms and repackaging it all as their own — saw their chance and swooped in at the exact right time, giving all of us addicted to these demonic apps one more place upon which to lay our eyeballs.
As of sending this newsletter, I am still refusing to join Threads. I have been professionally entangled with social media since 2011 and I just want to grow old in peace. Aging very poorly in an attic somewhere is a painting of my very first profile pic. Will I ever be free? Only time will tell.
SPEAKING OF GROWING OLD! I am extremely excited to share that today we are dropping some official OLD MAN SUMMER hats thanks to the heroic efforts of my brilliant life protege, Alex, who set this whole deal up. You can click here to pre-order yours from a very talented and lovely independent maker.
Can’t wait to wear mine all summer eating hoagies by the pool while some smooth jazz plays on the radio before I take my afternoon nap, awakening to a new level of entitlement I’ve never known before. See you out there!
Less Lessons More Blessin’s™️
Liz
An impressive feat for an “Independence Day” that was first celebrated with more than half a million Black people still enslaved on land where persecuted indigenous people had lived for tens of thousands of years before Europeans “discovered” it. I mean …