A 13-pound Flightless Bird

So normally Thursday is pretty solid day to choose as your regular writing/publishing day. It's a nice, soft landing place in the late-center of the week. It's far enough from the start of the week that it's outside the irritating anxiety bubble of gearing up for the grind, but it's not Friday or a weekend where the self-imposed tasking doesn't come at the cost of anything truly recreationally important in how I structure my downtime. The only real regular clash is with a generally shitty football game, although even that is unpredictable these days. But these are extraordinary times.

When I started it, it seemed really unlikely that there would be one day a year with a holiday clash, but I have to say, since 2008 at least, Thanksgiving has landed on a Thursday every single time. Should be statistically impossible, but here we are. I'm holding out hope that one of these years my luck will turn around and I'll be able to come at this thing in late November without the complication of being knocked unconscious by gluttony. But 2020 being what it is, of course this was not going to be the year. It just keeps taking and taking.

OK, so I forgot to post last week. For the up-to-four of you still reading from time to time, I'm certain it was alarming, but I'm at the point in this stage of my human development where sometimes even the soothing balm of compulsive regularity can be subsumed by the needs of the moment. I know! No one was more shocked than I was.

But the kids are no longer the kids. Two of them are moved out and the third one is in his last year of high school, right on that cusp, the inexorable compulsory benchmark of culturally-arrived-at independence. I've chosen not to see this slow-motion transition-whiplash as being cast off into the wind-up phase, the denouement third act ending with the tragic end of Our Protagonist. I mean, that is clearly and obviously what it is, but again, I have chosen not to see it that way. Instead I'm looking at the moments as moments, things to exist in actively, and interactively, at the expense of almost everything else. Including, one Thursday out of half a thousand Thursdays, typey-type-typing out some first-draft thoughts about culture and/or politics, punctuated with the occasional dick joke.

Rest assured, it wasn't all that easy. The drowsing spell of tryptophan and milk-fat did a lot of the heavy lifting, I admit. But it's been a fucked-up couple of weeks with a lot of crazy shit that has been unimaginable within the confines of the conventional wisdom of my whole, whole life.

But by December now, really: what else is new?

For the record, on Thanksgiving there were only four of us here, three boys and myself. Nobody got COVID. Just a little fatter, maybe. And one year closer to everything being irredeemably different.