Pretty much anything of any interest in culture is going to have seven or eight different meanings jostling around in it, some of them incompatible with each other. It’s how culture works. I think about this while contemplating the racket coming in through the front windows of my new apartment.

We’re on a busy thoroughfare in Bushwick, Brooklyn. On Friday nights, cars cruise this strip with their sound systems cranked up to the max, usually playing reggaeton. Sometimes, the cars are impressive; sometimes not. Sometimes, the sound system is clear and clean; sometimes not. I’ve only ever seen men driving these sonic mobilizers. I rather like it when they pass, even when they rattle the windows and shake the floor. Helps me keep up with the summer hits.

It’s a good example of the ambivalence and ambiguity of culture. The car as sound system can be a way of taking up space for people who don’t have much of it; who live in small, shared apartments; who might not feel welcome in much of the city. There’s something insouciant, defiant, even cheeky about it. But put on a different lens, and it’s something else at the same time: It’s invariably men who feel some entitlement to take up space, to impress their musical tastes upon the neighborhood.

There’s a park nearby. Jenny and I often take books and snacks and hang out there on the weekends. There’s a man who circles the park with a giant speaker on a trolley. He’s cut out the car, and just put the sound on wheels. He has broader musical tastes than the drivers, including some “classic rock” that I had vainly hoped to never hear again. For a good 50 feet around him—in all directions, plus a little more facing forwards—the ambience of the space is his. It must get tiring, pushing this big-ass speaker. I marvel at his persistence.

I was less thrilled by another sonic takeover—the fireworks on the Fourth of July. Here in Bushwick, the commercial-grade kind went off for hours, from several locations. Among other things, it felt like that same taking of tactile, visual, and sonic space—maybe a claiming of an entitlement by people who might, at other times and places, feel this space is not theirs.

“Is it really nationalistic fervor, or just nationalism as an excuse for jizzing the sky with bright, hot metal? Maybe a lot of what passes for patriotism is just that, anyways—an excuse for displays of big dick energy.”

Our apartment has a railroad layout. There were fireworks blasting off outside both the back and the front. There wasn’t anywhere to go where they weren’t so loud. We could retreat to the middle room, but it was hot, and it’s startling when the big ones go off. Jenny and I watched them from the front room for a while: The sudden blasts are less disturbing when you can see them at the same time. It got boring. Like free jazz, fly fishing, or golf, setting off fireworks seems like one of those things that’s much more fun to do than to watch.

We retreat to the middle room again.

M: My theory is that Fourth of July fireworks are popular with men because they make premature ejaculation seem legit. From striking the spark to the big bang is about 10 seconds.

J: If that—

M: Hey, what if we developed a line of fireworks for women? You light them, they smolder, then go off a little, then smolder, go off, smolder, go off, smolder—for as long as you like—then the big bang.

J: What about non-binary fireworks?

M: Same, but in pastels.

The cats liked the fireworks even less than we did. They hid under the bed. There really wasn’t any escaping them. What’s going on here? There’s a tension between the fireworks as taking space, and being taken by a certain kind of space—the space of nationalism, reproducing itself at the neighborhood level. Insisting that the ’hood synchronize itself with this feast of incendiary statehood. It connects the founding fathers, as the big men of history, to the men who think themselves big in the little statelet of this community.

Like all these things, it’s ambiguous. Is it really nationalistic fervor, or just nationalism as an excuse for jizzing the sky with bright, hot metal? Maybe a lot of what passes for patriotism is just that, anyways—an excuse for displays of big dick energy.

“I think of that more recently invented ritual involving fireworks and explosions—the gender reveal party. As if the order of state and family, nation and home, masculine public life ad feminine domesticity, all had to be marked by symbolic violence.”

How does letting off this ordinance, in the name of the founding order of the United States, concord with this disorderly flouting of the city’s noise ordinance? Well, it doesn’t. Order is always contested. Culture is always a whole bunch of incoherent things at once. Culture is ordinary. It’s order and noise.

Who knows? Maybe some of the fireworks enthusiasts are from countries on which the United States is dropping actual bombs, getting a little symbolic revenge. The more popular something is, the more strands there are to what can be invested in it.

The cats aren’t the only ones in our household who get skittish around loud noises. Jenny and I decide to watch a movie with headphones on. We make our own little sonic enclave in and against the random barrage. But what movie to watch? We settle on Groundhog Day—a fantasy about repetition, about do-overs, about trying to get life right. Well sure, it’s that, and a few other things at the same time. For example: It’s a movie about a woman who has to let a man make dumb mistakes again and again, never holding him in the least accountable.

The movie does the trick. Jenny falls asleep when we watch movies. I gently lift the headphones off and turn out the lights. I’d go to sleep, too, but I’m spiraling. What if I wake up tomorrow and it’s the Fourth of July again? And again, and again… What if we keep doing the same things over and never learn anything?

Immanuel Kant famously wrote that “enlightenment requires nothing but freedom.” It’s a word that is compulsory to venerate in the United States, celebrated not so much with festivals of enlightenment so much as lighting shit on fire. I think of that more recently invented ritual involving fireworks and explosions—the gender reveal party. As if the order of state and family, nation and home, masculine public life ad feminine domesticity, all had to be marked by symbolic violence.

That rather flattens things out. Culture is always about several different things at once. Culture is, in part, something we all get to make, through our own actions, in everyday life. Maybe we could be making it otherwise, rather than just repeating the same thing over and over. But perhaps we’d have to start by asking how the exercise of freedom is also coercive, and how a brief flash of light in the night sky is not particularly enlightening.