A Thrill of Hope, The Weary World Rejoices

The only obvious downside of choosing to post a new blog entry every Thursday is that you're guaranteed to have a conflict with a national holiday a full 1/52nd of the time, annually speaking. Normally what I would do on Thanksgiving is just post some placeholder bullshit, usually featuring a picture or video of an animal doing something human-like, as in for example, say, a turkey in an astronaut suit. This year, however, I decided in a totally proactive and not subconscious way to skip the Thanksgiving half-ass post and wait an extra full week so I could give you, Gentle Reader, the whole-ass you're used to in this space.

I guess what I'm saying is you cannot prove in ANY DEFINITIVE WAY that I just plain ole forgot. I know, going around proving shit is all the rage at the moment. The great advantage of living up to almost every blogging stereotype about isolation and antisocial tendencies is that you need more than one person to constitute a conspiracy. There's no paper trail to discover if the entire enterprise, from conception to execution and even to resolution, takes place entirely inside your own head. In that case, all incrimination is self-incrimination and the Fifth Amendment is a panacea.

From an evidentiary perspective, I'm clean. From an emotional point of view, wherein I've neglected to service the needs of the readership on a day when you might have been MOST DESPERATE for a break to pretend to be absently reading something on your phone to avoid talking to your cousin who won't shut the fuck up about the how much his life has changed since he started using CBD oil, well, of that I'm afraid I'm guilty as hell. I'd love to be able to tell you I can promise it will never happen again, but come on. That's not us. We have a long-standing relationship based on an earned and inherent trust. I would never lie to you. Unless I thought it was funny.

I don't take what we have lightly. I want you to know that. And I didn't miss last week because of anything frivolous or cavalier. I was busy being a compulsive weirdo, insisting on preparing an entire Thanksgiving from scratch* over the course of two and half days, at the end of which I was so delirious with exhausted stress, I actually thought about becoming a vegan. But ha, then I remembered every vegan dish I've ever tried takes twice as many ingredients, many of which are twice as hard find, requiring trips to specialty stores staffed by white people with dreadlocks. A turkey is a lot of work, but at least in the end I know my ungrateful children will eat some of it.

I'm going to make an effort to continue to be here for you. Things have been a little dire over the last several years, we know this. And they got even more serious today when Nancy Pelosi came out with a very serious and stateswoman-like proclamation proclaiming a thing I thought she had already proclaimed like two and a half months ago.

It's a time of great unease and disquiet. The welds and seams holding our democracy together are going to be compressed and pulled, mangled and scratched, clawed at and rent, tested and tested and tested again until it all rattles and shudders into a dissipating and smoking slide of slow rubble or somehow, when the stillness finds us again, we stare again in awe as we realize once again that not only is the whole thing still upright, but our flag was still there.

But almost no matter what we do, the president is going to be some old-ass white person, north of 70, and probably a billionaire. We're going to need each other then. And you know I'm going to be here for you, ready at a moment's notice to provide you what you need: pictures of ducks where people clothes.

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*I'll die before I crack a can of cream of mushroom soup, goddammit.