Welcome back, you straight-edge rebels! Last week, we measured twice and created once. Did you creatively reuse a ruler to tap out a soundtrack or build a bridge between two stacks of books? Perhaps you randomly underlined a borrowed book without permission. However you ruled your creative kingdom, I hope it reminded you that even a straight line can lead somewhere unexpected.
This week, we put down the ruler and pick up something much harder to measure: the sights, smells, and sounds of the Fourth of July.
And not just any Fourth of July. This one lands on America’s 250th birthday, which means our nation has officially reached the age where it should start stretching before getting out of bed. Two hundred and fifty years is a lot of history and argument.
Maybe that’s why this year’s smells include the usual summer suspects—sunscreen, chlorinated pools, barbecue smoke, fireworks haze—and also, in honor of the semi quincentennial, let’s add birthday cake icing and melting candle wax. That is a load of candles. That is also a serious fire safety concern; it’s not shooting-fireworks-from-a-dry-hillside concerning, but still.
The Fourth of July has always been a multisensory stew. It is not our humble holiday. It arrives wearing American flag-themed everything. There are flags on porches, flags on T-shirts, flags on paper plates, flags on swim trunks, flags on cupcakes, flags on trucks, and flags printed on things that make you wonder “how” but never “why.”
Then come the lights spectacular. Creativity is encouraged. Burning down a palm tree is not. For a few bright minutes, the sky becomes a shared screen we all look up to watch together. Fireworks shooting high above Mt. Rubidoux. Laser and drone shows drawing temporary constellations in the sky.
Sparklers make every kid feel like a wizard and every adult feel nostalgic. I can’t see one without remembering my childhood in Chino and the alley behind our house catching fire; someone (we refused to tattle on Erick) launched several sparklers over our fence at a block party. Related fact: Chino still permits “safe and sane” personal fireworks use in 2026!
And the sounds? They put any earplug on the market to the test. “Fireworks season” commences July 1 and, in some neighborhoods, continues until Labor Day. Grills sizzle. Soccer balls get kicked too hard into another yard. Someone rustles around in an ice chest for a really cold one. Kids laugh, splash, shriek, fight, recover, and splash again.
As America celebrates 250 years of becoming, hoping, revising, and lighting things up, let’s take a few minutes to celebrate our own sensory independence. You don’t need a studio. You don’t need permission. You need a few minutes and maybe a squirt of mustard on one or more of these star-spangled nudges:
Scentennial Suggestion: Build an imaginary fragrance from the scents around you: sunscreen, barbecue smoke, chlorine, watermelon juice, warm asphalt, grilled onions. Write the description as if you are selling it at a pop-up street market. What is it called? Liberty No. 250? Eau de Hot Dog Burp? Founding Mother’s Aftershave? Who wears it, and what revolution are they starting?
Backtrack: Record or simply listen to the day’s sounds: flipflops on concrete, ice shifting in a cooler, a grill lid closing, kids at a splash pad, a volleyball bouncing away. Turn those sounds into a rhythm, poem, or voice memo.
Flag Field Notes: Look for all the red, white, and blue around you. Clothing, decorations, lawn chairs, glowing bracelets. Sketch or photograph a color study of the day. Don’t draw the flag itself unless you want to. Draw the way the colors travel through the crowd, across a picnic table, or over a neighborhood street.
Sparks: Use your body to draw fireworks in the air. Move your arms like rockets, fountains, spirals, bursts, and slow-falling sparks. Use ribbon, a flashlight, a glow stick, or just your hands. Make a 30-second movement piece called Things That Light Up and Disappear. Perform it for yourself or a friend. Post it then delete it to create drama in your digital day.
The Fourth of July is joyful, loud, sticky, bright, and beautiful all at once. That makes it a pretty good metaphor for creativity, and maybe our culture too.
At 250 years old, America is still improvising. Still inventing the past and the present and arguing about the future. Still asking who gets to be seen, celebrated, and included in the picture. Artists have always helped us ask and answer these democratic questions.
Celebrate safely, celebrate creatively, and give thanks for all the revolutionaries—political, artistic, personal, and backyard barbecue-adjacent—who remind us that freedom is not only something we inherit.
It is something we practice.
This column was written with help from ChatGPT, which has never smelled sunscreen or eaten a hot dog in a flag shirt, but remains honored to help light a few creative fuses.
