It’s 4:00am, and like every patriot, I’m thinking about flags. I once tried to make my own flag. Like great leaders of men I fashioned it out of aluminum foil and paper bags, but it wasn’t right. I tried burlap and sticks, but still, not inspiring. I realized that it is, in fact, a flag’s design that makes it so special, a symbol of great things, or genocide, or whatever.
Where do these designs come from. I once opened a fortune cookie that said “11, 17, 25, 46, 78” on the back. Maybe this was the answer to some complicated algorithm that is plaguing someone else, and I just got the wrong fortune cookie. Damn fortune cookies. I looked at it and used the old trick I learned from grandpa about how to make it funny, “11, 17, 25, 46, 78…IN BED!” I hated grandpa.
Now Grandma though, Grandma knew how to make a flag. Unfortunately we disagreed on the relevance of the 80’s, and I was left without answers. So now I come to you dear readers, thought listeners, life-questioners, where does flag design inspiration come from? Why are states represented by stars? Why does a colony equal a stripe? Why does Uganda have a giant rooster in the middle of their flag of yellow, black and red stripes. I’m sure all of these questions have answers, but the encyclopedia is big, and I am but a small man.
I think my flag will represent my state of mind. Let’s see, right now I’m tired and a bit hungry, disgruntled at the world as always, and a bit pensive. The colors of fatigue and hungry are clearly blue. Don’t ask why; I said “clearly,” so that means if it’s not clear to you then you’re stupid and need to buy the Cliff’s Notes to my thought. The disgruntledness will be represented by angry red arrows of death fire, and the pensiveness will be an orange circle, like a spark. Put ’em together and you’ve basically got random carpet swatches with angry red death fire and “Here Comes the Sun” popping up somewhere in the mix. That’s not cool. Instead I want diagonal aqua and velvet stripes with a picture of Dom Deluise in the middle; I also want velvet to be a color. This flag won’t mean anything but it looks bad-ass. That’s probably how the French got their flag. I bet it originally had some eclairs and Jerry Lewis on a jet black background. Then they realized that they were horrible people and had to change the thing that represented who they really were, so they put three colors that represented… Jerry Lewis.
I will fly my flag proudly and wake up every morning to salute everything that I believe in wholeheartedly and passionately, everything that I want to live and die for…the color aqua.