POST TURKEY DAY PEEVISHNESS

Folks have been asking me whether I had a good holiday.
It’s an odd question.
I haven’t had a real Thanksgiving since 1983, the year before my finances went into a eight year long tailspin. That was the last time I had a turkey dinner with all the trimmings among friends. By the summer of 1984 things had spiraled out of control, and I started losing my Berkeley associates.

[You may have noticed before that I am not fond of Berkeley? Now you know ONE of the reasons.]

For several years afterwards, Thanksgiving was the usual solitary sandwich and a shot of Bourbon customary among free-floating bachelors.

Even after Savage Kitten moved in with me in 1994 (we had been secret lovers for four years by that time), a real Thanksgiving was not in the cards. Because she never told her parents or siblings about our relationship, she would obediently truck on over to the family home by herself on Thursday to hear how her unmarried brothers should produce grandkids BY NEXT YEAR, and how as a worthless girl-child she ought to get hitched to a real-estate owning financially stable Toishanese professional as soon as possible.
Which, when she came home later that evening, I would hear also.

Had I been the wished-for real-estate owning financially stable Toishanese professional, it is still not likely that I would have ever been invited to these family events.
If Savage Kitten had married me she would have been someone else’s family, and her nasty old harridan mom would never have cottoned to me anyhow, as the frightful old fruitbat wouldn’t have had the chance to personally vet of me, OR inform me in great and blistering detail what a horrid awful disobedient worthless girl her daughter was. Though undoubtedly far too good for me, even if everyone was sort-of grateful that I was charitably marrying the nasty little hussy.
And "goodbye to both of you".

[If the venomous old sow could have known that her daughter decided this past summer that the relationship with the White Devil no longer worked for her and dumped me, it would've given the sadistic old prune great pleasure. That's just one of the many reasons why I am overjoyed that the vicious old crocodile has suffered several strokes and is now permanently non compos mentis.]

As you may have gathered from Wednesday's little screed, I am not particularly fond of Turkey. Possibly that's sour-grapes.
But Roast Duck is much nicer, and in years past, when Savage Kitten and I were still a couple, I would cook up a duck with all the trimmings for our own Thanksgiving celebration on Black Friday.
For obvious reasons that will not happen this afternoon.

Yesterday, before heading over to the family manse, Savage Kitten left dinner for me in the fridge.
It was very kind of her to do so - I wasn't counting on eating bugger-all on Thanksgiving, seeing as the day usually gives me a black mood and a lack of appetite.
Then she went off to "enjoy" several hours with her kin, and some of the worst Chinese food she has ever had. As well as the "stimulating" conversation of middle-aged engineers, plus sisters-in-law whom she thinks of as not being fully developed women - perfect Cantonese wives, in other words.

So no, I did not have a 'good thanksgiving'.
But I had a far better thanksgiving than my ex.
Other than watching a drunken fist-fight between a bar-owner and a patron, it was quiet and uneventful.

I'll have to take her out to dinner sometime soon. She deserves a good meal in unobjectionable company.


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