1.     Pissing Boy Decals. You’ve likely seen the badly drawn boy pissing on a Chevrolet sign/Polaris snowmobile/state of Wisconsin. Given their prevalence on the back of pick-up trucks in places like Mankato and Lakeville these will be one of the first “finds” on digs multiple eons in the future. Researchers will believe the boy was some religious deity.

2.     Crock Pots. After receiving a crock pot from your mother for your birthday, you will toss it (inside the package) deep into a cupboard in your apartment that won’t get opened for another 2,000 years. Bonus find: researchers will discover how many hours roast beef should be on low-heat for great 4^th of July hoagies.

3.     A Last Call With Carson Daly DVD. Most DVDs will have been melted in the nuclear holocaust that will eat up most of the next century, but some media will remain. From this DVD, researchers will be able to discern that Americans were interested in dog-grooming habits of mildly successful sitcom stars, yellow/fish-shaped snack foods, and underweight women with large breasts.

4.     Foosball Tables. Archaeologists will be confused by this find. They will think that other humans were miniaturized (possibly by “ray” guns), skewered, and then forced to compete for their life by kicking a plastic ball around a table. Some rogue researchers will forward a theory about something similar called “beer pong,” but they will lack the scholarly standing to substantiate such perverse claims.

5.     Earth-Toned Capris. For a brief period in 2005, American women rushed into outlet malls to purchase earth-toned capris from boutiques with three female names. The result was a low-point for just-pre-menopausal fashion. Researchers will fill children’s textbooks in the year 4500 with pictures of Oprah and Nancy Reagan (inexplicably) wearing brown capris.

6.     Gas Station Condom Machines. Researchers will (like many of us on lonely nights on the interstate) think that cartoon goats with red eyes are fertility symbols for American males.

7.     A Single Bottle of Goober Grape. Convenient generalizations in the future that Americans were slobbish/greedy/uncreative, etc…will be deftly beaten back when researchers discover that some blazing, hellcat intellectual devised a way to combine peanut butter and jelly into the same mutha-fucking jar. Whoa!

8.     The Severed Head of Shania Twain. Defying even the best futuristic guesses, researchers will assume her beautiful, severed, Canadian head is what the barbaric foosball rituals in the U.S. had been all about. Moreover, country music will never be discovered. The “music” sections in historical textbooks will only talk about Tupac and an obscure post-hardcore band from Lansing, Michigan who only had like four fans on MySpace and achieved local infamy by opening up for a Pantera tribute band.

9.     Godfather’s Pizza Franchises. In what will be one of the year 4554’s biggest academic blunders, the New World Order will assume Godfather’s Pizzas were sanctified mausoleums filled with hundreds of thousands of bodies killed during the Great Hungry, Hungry Hippo Conflict of 1992.

10.  A Bent-Over Woman Lawn Fixture. Like the cave drawings of buffalo and deer becoming the thing of Paleozoic art installations, this lasting image of the American citizen will be revered as High Art and auctioned off at some futuristic gallery, where patrons will dine on “imitation” beer brats and take shots of period-era Jag Bombs.

Happy early 4th of July.

– Dunstan McGill