I sprint to my computer, hands covered in ketchup and dusted in sulfur.

“Why did I start this tradition the day before Independence Day?” I ask myself, colored smoke pouring from my lungs. I wipe my fingers on early-naughts gray GAP USA 2004 t-shirt and get to typing, the keys coated in an uneven film of hot dog water. Look at what I wrote this year:

The Stories

• Maryland, My Maryland ( Maryland, United States) – The state of Maryland never joined the Confederacy, but for 82 years its state song was an anti-Lincoln diss track set to the tune of ‘O Tannenbaum’.
• Cold as Dickens (London, United Kingdom – Holiday season fetishists like myself have the image of Dickensian London snowblasted into our minds. But winters in the city apparently once nicknamed “Big Smoke” are notably less frosty than Tiny Tim would have us believe. This one’s a journey through the Little Ice Age, a four hundred year period when things were a little bit colder, with a stop-off in the year without summer, or, an Indonesian volcano’s journey to absolutely ravage white boy summer.
• The Last Emperor of Africa (Central African Republic) – The latest in my series of entirely-too-long surveys of long-dead modern monarchs. This time, the African Napoleon enthusiast and military radio tutor who built a gilded eagle throne and flew way too close to the sun.

Grapevine’s Atlas, Complete