Gobble

As I mentioned already on Facebook, we cancelled Thanksgiving due to the pandemic and will instead eat club sandwiches via skype with the children on Saturday. The turkey we had ordered from the organic farmer down the road got a last minute reprieve and, cynical and disillusioned after having said goodbye to life, is presently hitchhiking somewhere with a beach to smoke French cigarettes and write existentialist poetry. Don’t worry, we ordered another one for Christmas, assuming the lockdown is over by then, and in preparation will all self-quarantine 10 days before getting together bc you can’t be too careful.

Anyway the turkey mailed me his first poem this morning, excerpt attached below.

GOBBLE
I

I saw the best fowl of my generation destroyed by farmers, gorged hysterical cackle,
dragging themselves through the angry yard at dawn looking for a trough of corn
angelfeathered hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and gobbling sat up clucking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water barns floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven on order before the holidays and saw the poultry angels staggering on barnyard roofs illuminated,
who passed through plucking sheds with now dead eyes hallucinating nothing, no more Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of carnivorism,
or those like me expelled from the slaughterhouse by some trick of pandemic and quarantine, left to wander
to cower unplucked in rooms in unfamiliar underwear, burning their poetry in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall…

II

What sphinx of cement and metal ax bashed off their heads and ate them up with sauce of cranberry and mashed yams?
Thanksgiving! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Turkeys screaming under the stairways! Turkeys gobblesobbing in flocks! Old poet turkeys pardoned and weeping in the parks!
Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving! Nightmare of Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving the loveless! Mental Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving the heavy judger of turkeys!
Thanksgiving the incomprehensible prison! Thanksgiving the crossbone soulless jailhouse and kitchen of sorrows! Thanksgiving whose heaping platters are judgment! Thanksgiving the vast stone of war! Thanksgiving the stunned governments!
Thanksgiving whose mind is pure machinery! Thanksgiving whose blood is running money! Thanksgiving whose fingers are ten armies! Thanksgiving whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Thanksgiving….

Thanksgiving

I am thankful for my wife and kids and the rest of my family, and all of you, and for this awesome planet of ours, not to mention universe and the sciences, which are really great sciences, the best.

And the arts, seriously.

This year, I am additionally thankful for our new post-fact society, thanks to which I am now extremely handsome and funny, not to mention smart and – surprise! – long legged and adorned with a sixpack and giant schlong. My hair is not thinning, and the hearing aids are a thing of the past.

Now, when strangers see me on the street, they think Most Interesting Man in the World, and not Santa Claus or Kenny Rogers.

Thanks to our post-fact society, I light my cigars with $50 bills and my cigars are from Cuba, my friend, because I am alt-rich or something.

Thanks to our post-fact society, limousines slow down in the street so their passengers can lean out the window and give me high-fives and bouncers give me fist bumps.

Now, global warming is a business opportunity, not terraforming for aliens who swim in acid and breathe carbon.

Now, there’s enough for everyone, as long as they’re not lazy.

Thanks to post-fact society, everything’s great again.

Everything.

Just great. Thanks to whoever invented this!

Thanksgiving 2010

So much to be thankful for.

We had enough food for everyone this year. Every year we worry there won’t be enough, and there’s always too much. The turkey, although smaller than usual, and slightly injured in one spot from trying to escape through a fence (organic), was plenty big and turned out well. I thought the apple pie could have been a little juicier, but it was pretty good. The pumpkin pie looked a little funny but tasted good. Alpha’s corn soup was delicious, as was everything else. Her biscuits were especially fluffy this year. None of the guests got into a fight. The barfing cat barfed twice, but no one noticed. It was nice seeing everyone. I generally do better with smaller groups, though. More than two people and it gets hard for me to follow conversations, and I’m a lousy host repartee-wise, but you can’t have everything. We fired up the theremin and the singing saw after dinner and half of us spent some time jamming, including my cello teacher Alena, and Ute, and her friend Rich, and his daughter Megan, an 11-year old thereminist who also bakes awesome cookies.

Here is a recording Ute made of Megan on the theremin, accompanied by me on the saw:

migmegansawtheremin

Flying squirrels

We have something even better: the kittens can jump onto the kitchen counters now. Thanksgiving is going to be so much fun.