Why Thanksgiving Exhausts Me

I love my relatives and friends, and I am grateful to have them, but I prefer not visiting them on Thanksgiving.  I don’t need to get into that old ass argument about what the holiday really means, because really who gives a fuck.  Everybody wants food, and everybody wants a holiday.  Period.  So it’s not going away, despite periodic bleatings of ‘protest’ – something about the Native Americans giving the gift of corn to the white man, who pays him back disproportionately in mass murder.

Thanksgiving exhausts me.  You wind up traveling fifty-hundred hours to grandma’s house, over the river and through the woods.  You get there and it’s hot as hell from all the burners going, and this makes me sluggish, as the winter boots, socks and sweater that I wore to keep me warm on the way are totally superfluous at this point.

The worst part of it is the food.  You can’t tell by looking at me, but I don’t really like food.  I’m still waiting for those food pills of the future from the Jetsons to be invented.  Food has too many demands.  I hate having to stop what I’m doing to eat it, and I don’t like making a big deal out of shopping, planning meals, cooking, washing dishes — I am a good baker though, and that’s because I like cake.  It’s probably politically incorrect for me to say this but I don’t give a shit – generally, I’m afraid of food.

A hot house filled with the olfactory overload of food — jammed to the gills with all this stuff we don’t need to be eating, gives me complex feelings.  Really on Thanksgiving, under the guise of celebrating gratitude, we’re really celebrating gluttony.  Thanksgiving is a ‘heavy’ holiday — the demands of travel, the heat of the burners and oven filling the house, the exhaustion from watching the host bust their ass sweating and carrying all those trays, the claustrophobia you get from the excess of food filling every crack and crevice, having to help the host clear the table and wash dishes — having to rush back home again because the next day I usually have to go to work; and finally, going to bed with a bloated gut.

In conclusion, I hope that this post doesn’t cause my loved ones to disinvite me to Thanksgiving dinner.

Hey there honey…

On Thanksgiving I saw my grandma at the Hebrew Home for the Aged at Riverdale.  It was lunchtime.  She sat with her assigned table mates, Bobby and Matt.  Bobby calls everybody honey.  He uses the word like people use salt:  “Hey there honey!  Haven’t seen you in a while honey!  Happy Thanksgiving there honey,” he says.

Matt’s a small man who speaks softly.  He was asleep in his chair wearing his white disposable bib when I came.  When I sat down, he woke up.

“Ohhh!  Good to see you!  You look great!”  He said.

“Yeah, you look great there honey,” says Bobby.

Bobby told us that the cook there is Italian.  “Yeah, they make the spaghetti here downstairs honey.  They make it there.  The cook’s Italian.  They make it good there honey.”

Today the attendants served the seniors turkey dinner.  But Bobby always talks about  spaghetti.

I’ve chatted with Bobby and Matt before.  I found out that Bobby used to be an undertaker’s assistant.  He worked for his uncle and says he never got paid.  “No he didn’t pay me honey, no.”

Behind us at another table was the woman who takes her shoes off and puts her feet up on the table.  Today she had taken her shirt off, so she sat there topless, no bra.  Her feet were on the table as usual.

“Hey honey put some clothes on there honey!”  Bobby said.

“Oh that woman’s crazy,” grandma said, making a shooing motion.

“Leave her alone,” said Matt, looking back again.  Then Matt told me, “I wonder if I went over there and told her to stand on the table if she’d do a dance for me.”

“Ahahahaha!  You mean like a stripper?” I said.  Matt cracks me up with these bits.  Matt laughed too.  The old woman, she didn’t look bad.

Purloined

 

Today I thought I’d eat a turkey, cranberry, and stuffing sandwich and watch Thankskilling on Netflix.  Not only do I love Eva Halloween for keeping Halloween alive all year, I also love her for introducing me to this movie.  Even if I don’t like it – I love the idea of watching it on Thanksgiving.  This doesn’t mean I’m not grateful for stuff.

But I might get to hang out with my dear friend and her mom instead.  I’m grateful for that.  She came to the rescue five years ago on X-mas when I had nothing going on.  While not a fan of Thanksgiving and X-mas, I do usually visit relatives.

Five years ago on X-mas I went to this friend’s house and had the X-mas of the century.  It involved Bloody Marys.  Stupid me topped those off with antihistamine because of my allergy to the dog and had to be ‘walked’ home.  At least I remembered it all – oh wait – no I didn’t.  “Did you like the gift that I bought for you?”  I asked the next day.  “I opened it in front of you.  Don’t you remember?”  She said.

For the next fifty years, with a little help from my friends, I’m going to piece together all of the events, incidents, and ‘interludes’ that alcohol viciously purloined from me.

 

Euthanasia Mobiles

 

Once this has been totally legalized, these would be a great idea.  The mobiles could be painted in bright designs, to take the stigma out of euthanasia – inside the mobile could be a party atmosphere.  We could have some with pictures of beautiful women and men surrounded by clouds, hands out, beckoning, calling those thinking of suicide to ‘come, come’, ‘you can do it.  I did!’  The truck could have a theme too, like an ice cream truck.  It’d be rolling down the street playing Blue Oyster Cult’s ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’.   The slogan would be ‘Come, let’s just put you out of all of that ‘ol misery.’

You see my biggest fear is that I’d shoot myself in the head, miss the important artery and wind up being a vegetable.  Or I’d hang myself, the rope breaks right where my brain’s been starved to the point of no return, and I’d be the drooling idiot nauseating the entire family at Thanksgiving dinner.  Auntie Barbie would have to feed me.  For some reason she’s the only one that I’d take to without writhing in protest since I’d be unable to talk.  My sister would be mad and would shove the fork into my mouth with the intent of stabbing me I’m sure.  My brother, well, he’d say, ‘She did this to herself.  Let her starve to death!”  I wouldn’t even be able to laugh at the irony of that.  Auntie Barbie’s the most sensitive of all of my mother’s sisters plus she’s a nurse.  The food would roll out of my mouth back onto my plate in a heap of mush.  Everyone’d try to be evolved about it but in reality, they’d think it was gross.  Auntie Barbie would roll her eyes at them and keep feeding me, martyr that she is.  She’d tell them that God spared me from death for some reason because he had some special purpose for me then she’d prop up my bobbling head and wipe excess saliva from the side of my mouth.  But regardless, some of my relatives, ever so quietly in the back of their head would still wish that I hadn’t missed my shot.  If you think about it, after all this was a goal that I’d sought that I hadn’t been able to achieve.  But oh well.

So you see, the mobiles would eliminate the possibility of this kind of an error.  They’d be staffed with the finest experts in the medical community.  And the mobiles would be great because they’d come right to your door.  All you’d have to do is call 1-800-U Kill Me and they’d be there lickedy split.  Because face it, most people thinking of killing themselves are too depressed to drive or to take the bus anywhere to some kind of a euthanasia center.  The mobiles would even encourage more people to kill themselves perhaps.  People who normally wouldn’t consider such a thing would entertain the idea now because it would be so darned convenient.  We could rid ourselves of all types of nuisances who need only a nudge to go through with it; the self-pitying depressives that suck the lives out of us, the ones who go around blaming others for their misfortunes; people who call you ten times a day because they can’t figure it out for themselves – you know, those people David Byrne talks about in ‘Psycho Killer’, the ones who start a conversation they can’t even finish, the ones who talk a lot, but aren’t saying anything.  What about those miserable gossips who can’t find any value in their own lives?  And then there are the ones whose looks you don’t like; people who stink; people who look at you funny; people who let their car alarms go off while they’re standing right there; people you see everyday who don’t say hello; people who don’t deserve the good fortune they’re receiving while you haven’t gotten shit that you’ve asked for…okay, okay – so I’ve gone a little off track with this last group, but you get my drift about the other ones, don’t you?