Earth Day! What a celebration! Everyone’s eating salads with apples and brie. Apples and brie come from the earth! Everyone’s riding bicycles! No, wait, there’s another day for that. Plus, riding bicycles isn’t particularly safe. I know from experience[1]
Regardless, people are eating salads today—lots of them. Warm spinach salads with goat cheese and candied walnuts. People are also doing yoga. Bikram. Sweat out the toxins, Americans! Citizens and denizens are getting in their cars and driving to do yoga because they want to celebrate Earth Day. People are shouting on the internet, “Every day is Earth Day!” But this is a lie. Tomorrow is not Earth Day and people will have forgotten that today was. Tomorrow there will be no remnants. No one forgets to take down the Earth Day lights and tree.
Personally, I am busying celebrating Earth Day by not going outside. Soak up the oxygen, comrades! Have my share. I’ll be inside, for fear of earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, sunburns, windburn, hypothermia, acid rain and other hazards that come from the world outside. If I were a braver man or owned more products from R.E.I. I’d be right there with you—in Patagonia neoprene.
Today, I give science a rest. I put a way my petri dish, pack up my vintage Hook microscope and I don’t even bother to hypothesize why there is no Internet Day. No, I will not think about the internet. “Everyday is Internet Day!” I will boil water and drop an egg in it. This is how Gwyneth Paltrow poaches her eggs. At some point I will add spinach because when I was five and drew pictures of the earth, it was blue and green. Spinach is green. For the time being the poles (represented by poached eggs) are white. The sky is blue. I look up and out and I’m having an Earth Day.
Esteemed comrades: in light of the holiday, build a sled out of banana peels. Make shoes out of an aloe vera plant. Dye your hair with goji berries. Feed your horse asparagus. Name your dog Solar Eclipse. Drink electrolyte-rich bottled water out of your reusable canister. Turn broccoli into a mandolin. Read something by Whitman and quote it out of context. Tell your progeny that the future is theirs so they must not use plastic products with the number six engraved on the bottom.
Watch the sun and wait for it to tell you to walk into the sea. As you trudge through the rising tide, remember that Whitman quote and disregard it. Shout something that you think sounds like something Thoreau might’ve said, but you can’t be sure. When the lifeguard starts calling you back to shore, bat an arm at him and tell him to go to hell. If he says anything, ask him how many months out of the year he works. If they send a pontoon boat after you, remember that quote—the one Thoreau should’ve said, but probably didn’t. Shout it! Then dive my son! Dive deep into the depths of our mother earth’s bosom. Dive until you’ve nuzzled yourself between plankton and tectonic plates. Then and only then will you have properly celebrated Earth Day.
Now you’re free to have that arugula and chevre salad. Wash it down with a shot of wheat grass and wash the shot of wheat grass down with two ounces of fresh squeezed orange juice. You deserve it! Happy Earth Day!
[1] It was a beautiful fall afternoon. I was riding my bicycle on the sidewalk, which is illegal. A monster truck neglected to stop at a strip mall entrance. My beach cruiser (Eleanor was her name R.I.P.) took the brunt of the collision. On my knees and elbows, like a wounded war hero, I crawled back to the sidewalk and demanded an ambulance. An hour later I was blissfully high on morphine, which made the whole thing worth it.
Exchanging Pleasantries 
Is everyday still Earth Day?
(crickets…)