A Modest Proposal

July 5th should be a national holiday.

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Photo by Camylla Battani on Unsplash

Once upon a time long ago, when I already had a signed contract with Ryan Perry to start FilmDrunk, but was still working my crappy day job as a copywriter for a porny social media company, there was an end date in sight but I hadn’t told any of my bosses yet. I was planning to sort of half ass it there and keep collecting a paycheck even though I was already checked out. July 4th fell that year, like it did this year, smack dab in the middle of the week.

Where July 4th in San Francisco is almost always foggy, with a fireworks show above the Bay that’s all but invisible to anyone more than a few hundred yards away, that year it was gorgeously sunny and unseasonably hot. The weather seemed to fit my mood: after years of existential angst, professional stagnation, and quarter-life crisis, it finally looked like I had scored a job doing something sort of creative and comedy-related, which had long been my modest goal. A few weeks earlier I had actually hit rock bottom and interviewed for a job in software sales. (I didn’t get it, and it’s hard to overstate how bad a salesman I would’ve been).

That was all but forgotten with a signed contract, a plane ticket to New York to start an MFA program at Columbia the following month, and a beautiful summer day that actually felt like summer. My friend Melissa threw a huge party on the roof of her apartment building, complete with a balloon arch and hundred-some-gallon kiddie pool that almost collapsed the roof and got the cops called long before the cold air started blowing in off the Bay. We were about as 20-something as 20-somethings could be.

The next day I was, as you can imagine, devastatingly hung over. But I was still scheduled to work a full eight-hour shift an hour away in Palo Alto, writing 50 different variations on Christmas-themed banner ads for a swinger website. I mean, it beat digging ditches, but still felt like too heavy a lift on a five-alarm hangover. And anyway, what would’ve been the point? I was already leaving.

I still had at least a week’s worth of PTO built up at that point (“paid time off,” the then-new concept that collapsed going to the lake and having pneumonia into a single, all-purpose category of not being at work), so I did what I still imagine any sane person would do in my situation: I called in sick. Of fucking course I called in “sick.”

Probably my boss could hear the sarcastiquotes in my voice. When I returned to work the following day, she fired me. I think the phrase “absenteeism” was invoked. Even though I was already somewhere else mentally and it probably showed in my performance, it really ground my gears getting fired for essentially taking advantage of a “perk” that was supposedly part of the arrangment when I’d signed on. (“Onboarding” was not yet a word at that point, nor was “telecommuting”).

I was living in a $700-a-month apartment with two insane alcoholic chefs I’d met on Craigslist at the time, and when I thought about the water cooler that had been sitting empty since I’d moved in (none of us wanted to pay to have the actual water delivered, an were too lazy to get rid of the cooler), and I looked around the office with its wall of recently-delivered five-gallon water jugs populating a rack on the wall, I knew what to do. I slung one over my shoulder and walked out of there, smiling the whole way home with a full jug in the passenger seat. It was another beautiful day.

All of which brings me to my point: July 5th should be a national holiday (ditto the day after the Super Bowl). I might even go so far as to say that it would be better to have July 5th as a holiday instead of July 4th.

July 4th is a day when love of country and tradition demands us to be outside, with our families, grilling hot dogs, drinking watery beer, and shooting off fireworks. It’s one of the longest, hottest days of the year and fireworks aren’t worth a shit until the sun goes down. So it’s basically expected to get drunk, bake in the sun, and then gather together outdoors until at least mid-evening.

And then we’re all supposed to get up and go to work the next day, sunburned, hungover, and mosquitto-bitten? Fuck that shit. We’re busy trying to find our lost pets that got spooked by the pyrotechnics.

It sucks, doesn’t it? In the spirit of compromise, I would even be willing to work until two or three pm on July 4th, if we could have the reasonable expectation to get a day of rest the following day. Why hasn’t anyone proposed this? It feels like the ultimate layup. In a polarized nation where we can’t even agree on which geriatric date rapist we want to be our figurehead, this feels like something we could all agree upon. We don’t get siestas. We don’t get free health or child care, four or six-week vacations standard or 35-hour work weeks. Like the entertainment industry, it feels like the one thing we actually do well anymore is to crow about how great we are. And how are we supposed to do that if we have to get up and go to work the next day?

I’m sick of this. It’s time to come together. It’s time to heal. It’s time to make July 5th a national holiday.