8:13 p.m. - 2002-12-14
3 kinds of pie!
As holidays go, Thanksgiving's just a baby. It hasn't been around long enough to pick up the sort of weird peripheral baggage that accompanies other holidays. There's no ghosts of pagan tradition attempting to assert themselves via some awkwardly contrived, Roman-Christian synthesis, no guilt-inducing moral code for parents, lovers, or society to enforce, and, unless you're a cranberry rancher or stuffing magnate, no overt commercial implications (excepting of course it's chronological role as x-mass shopping launchpad). Plus Thanksgiving's fundamental message, that food is a good thing to have...like who's gonna argue? Certainly not the homeless guys sprawled out on the front lawn of Hollywood High school, sleeping off their mission-turkey dinners under blue Cali skies (beautiful sleeping vagabond, do you smell like pee when you dream?). Or the scary tourettes-guy from the corner who I'd always given wide berth to on account of he like, growls and bites at his tongue (and looks like he might bite at yours). He approached me on Thanksgiving and instead of screaming "Fuckinfuckshit" (his pet name name for me) calmly stroked his stuffing-flecked beard and asked whether I'd caught the televised Paul MacCartney concert the night before. Food works wonders.
Especially when city and church officials conspire to lace it with antidepressants.
So yeah anyway, at the risk of praising some sexist double-standard, any holiday where my chores consist of watching football, drinking beer, saying "You ladies really outdid yourself this year!" or "Three kinds of pie, holy smokes!" and then maybe washing some dishes- that's a damn good holiday in my book.
...I dogsat for some folks thanksgiving weekend; some folks who recently made the jump from hardcore punk rockers to like, yuppie parents. On what grounds do I tag someone with that appellation, "yuppie"? On the grounds that their residence evinced signs of advanced yuppie consumerism...coffee table books on "Tiki Culture" and nude photography, kitsch lamps and vintage lunch boxes displayed like sculpture, original paintings by weak local artists (And look, I'm not passing judgement. As a nascent designer, I truck in the realm of useless shit myself; so my revulsion is probably rooted in self-loathing...the act of bringing more gratuitous "things" into a world chock full of gratuitous things- not a very noble calling now is it?). Anyway, I probably would have just played with the pit bulls and crashed out and never noted this couple's shift to a yuppie-style consumer lifestyle had I not used their shower one morning. Had I not been confronted by a menu of bathing accoutrements that included Peppermint Rosemary Herbal Salt Scrub w/Green Tea and Celtic Sea Salt, Grapefruit Peppermint Exhilarating Sugar Scrub, 'Juniper, Dandelion and Burdock Root Cellular Detox Bath, Organic Lavender Shower Gel, Lemon Verbena Clarifying Gel, and Calming Sandalwood and Orange Bath Salts, but no sign of like, you know...soap. Like where the hell was the soap, man. My monkey ass needed washing, not clarifying. Not sugaring or salting. I felt like Sly Stallone in Demolition Man, not knowing how to use the three seashells and shit. Sheesh.
On the movie tip: I'm going to the premiere of Lord of The Rings:Two Towers tonight, so check me on E! tomorrow. I'll be the skinny white dude in chain mail pushing up on Liv Tyler.
'Cause I'm D&D like that.
