THE BIRD

Tomorrow is when many people traditionally sit down to eat something nasty. It's a day for reflecting on your sins and being grateful that the good lord didn't smite you down as you richly deserved, but let you live out another year of your sin-filled existence, in hopes that somehow you would become a better person. Should've smited, if you ask me.

Be properly appreciative, you depraved person!
Here, eat a dried dead bird!

Both my mother and my grandmother grew up with servants, and didn't start cooking till in their thirties. During a time a time when food was supposed to be nutritious, unthreatening, and reflect a sober Protestant world-view. Good cooking was something effete dissipated Frenchmen and Italians did. In my early teens I read the entire Larousse Gastronomique, and started visiting ex-colonials ....... which kind of changed me. And of course I've loved sambal trasi ever since I discovered that it made ghastly meatloaf edible.

Or to put it differently, good food has spices and is juicy.


My dad cooked the holiday meals every year. Consequently, it wasn't till I returned to the States that I realized that meatloaf can be good, and turkey far too often isn't. And having been a resident of a single room occupancy hotel for several years during my twenties, I have sort of gotten used to not celebrating Thanksgiving.

Even when Savage Kitten and I were a couple after that, because of her queer family situation I did not have Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving, but sometimes the next day we'd have roast duck. That all ended over a dozen years ago. No Thanksgiving since.

In other words I'm not vested in turkey with all the trimmings, a football game, and an overfed stupor while some members of a "family" go out and fight over expensive electronics down at the mall with the big box.

A celebration of Anglo Puritans down in Plymouth is not something a Dutch American with ancestry in New Amsterdam can really find himself in. We never should have tolerated you English dissidents, or your insane disapproval of everything outside your narrow world and your burning of people accused of witchcraft, or your horrifying personal habits.

By the way: Pumpkin pie, and cranberries, are incredibly nasty.

Tomorrow is a good day for Chinese food.
With lots of hotsauce.



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