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11/21/01
Thanksgiving Blows (Part 1)...

A few weeks ago, we had one of our Austin online journalers meeting. This is the time when those of us who live in Austin and have online journals get together to talk about how fabulous our readers are (not to mention incredibly smart and stunningly attractive).

At the last meeting we had a few Sundays ago, we were talking about journal projects we liked, and I brought up Sars' 24 Vines in 24 Hours, in which she and a few guests answered questions in her advice column, posting one question/answer every hour for 24 hours. I mentioned that I loved the idea of posting entries like that, or maybe doing a project where you play with the idea of what an entry is and when it's posted.

Mmm, tasty cartoon.

About an hour later, we had all committed to doing a group project, a Thanksgiving Day story told in seven parts (because there were seven of us there, coincidentally) from seven different points of view.

The first part follows, with links on the bottom to the next part of the story and index of entries in the left sidebar to other sites that make up this story.

Hope you like it. And come back Friday. There will be a surprise entry to get you over your post-turkey blues.

 

The thing of it is, I didn't even want to be here.

And when I say "here," I don't mean at my daughter's house or even at a
Thanksgiving dinner. I mean here on earth, alive and walking the face of it.

Man alive. Me, I mean.

But here I am, surviving yet another brush with sweet, emancipating death,
just hours after the turkey blew up and sprayed everyone with The Anthrax, after the baby drove us all nuts for hours and after the whole lesbian affair shenanigans. I wish I was senile (or dead, that's a sweet thought) enough to have forgotten it all already, but who am I kidding? My brain has just enough hate for the rest of me to stay alert through it all. Through every painful knot of arthritis, through every inane babble by my dumb-fuck son-in-law and his brood.

My goodness. If I'd known I was going to live this long, I would have laid down on a grenade or something, so that at least I could go out a hero.

Not that I was ever in a war. I'm just saying.

I love my family, I really do. Even the bastards. But my daughter doesn't seem to understand that time has reverted to the way it was when I was a little kid. It stretches, elastic-like, and even a few hours can elongate and reach until it feels like I'm on that couch that the little evil bitch cat has torn up for weeks. I get up, and my bones tell me that they haven't moved in months. My son-in-law opens his yap and my last remaining years leave me.

Bless her heart, my mijita, my daughter wanted to make it nice. She was acting funny, like a goose with another bird's feather up its ass, to be sure, but her heart was definitely working overtime to make the family happy. She'd worked up the turkey (the pre-Anthrax turkey, I have to say in her defense). My fool grandson, Odom, was running roughshod all over the house, playing his video games loudly and his music even louder than that ear-crushing din, and it wore me out just to watch him jumping around like a goddamned rabbit with its ears chopped off.

In between naps, I was trying to talk to my granddaughter Carlita, but every time she started talking about her research and her lab work, I found my body reacting with heavy-lidded sleepiness and an overwhelming need to relieve its bladder. One of those times, I even made it up to the restroom.

Then there was the baby. I don't like babies. I never have. The first baby I ever had (bless my dead gay son) was what trapped me in marriage (this was back in my heyday, remember), and stole away the very lifeblood from me. So, naturally, I've got a little bitterness in my heart where babies are concerned.

This one, Connie, they call it, looks just like a big lump of Spam with eyes. She's pink and her caca smells like canned meat. I don't want to touch that baby, let alone feed it, but I'm not nearly as bitter about my daughter as I was about that first freedom-stealing son, so I usually do what she asks. I lifted up the baby from her high chair and she threw up her strained yams, right onto my head. I put her back down and promised myself never to pick up a baby again. Especially babies who look like lumps of Spam.

But about The Anthrax. Say what you will about that powder, but damned if that wasn't the best turkey I've ever eaten in my life. Juicy and lean, plump, but firm. It was like the women I used to be with before that first baby ruined my goddamned life.

The Haz-Mat team came in a few hours after the turkey exploded. It's a really long story, and I wanted to tell it to you, all of it, but I'm already sleepy.

They haven't told us anything yet, but I know what I'm praying for just as soon as I start nodding off here.

Please, God. Let me have The Anthrax. My goodness, that would be so sweet.

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