Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

turkey daze

I knew it was going to be a good Thanksgiving, when I heard Firesign Theatre’s Temporarily Humboldt County on the Internet radio this morning. Then I went upstairs and washed the dishes, prior to making coffee, and listened to the drunken couple in a shabby van out on the street arguing incoherently with one another. This was around 10 AM, my second wind. I, having seemingly grown older recently, was up and down all last night, and I remained up for a couple of hours at around 5, before going back to bed around 7. I did some work, closing some bugs while logged in remotely to the company’s network. I read a little on the open source Smalltalk implementation known as Squeak, and I wondered what other folks were doing. Sleeping, Jim, sleeping. Many of my foreign-born colleagues asked me this truncated week past what I (or we) would be doing, and I had fun tellling them about my friend Stephen’s Chinese restaurant where he roasted turkey like he roasted duck or pork in huge vertical ovens. He experimented one year with mashed potatoes and gravy, but he’s regressed to Chinese tender veggies and tofu. The older I get and the smaller my family gets, the more I find myself wondering during these interminably American holidays—at least the Fourth of July is easy to identify—what’s the, uh, big deal? You’re not a kid anymore, and there’s really no hope of gifts great or bad. I mean I didn’t have a traditional American Thanskgiving until I was well into my 30s. What? You mean not everybody is having ravioli and roast chicken today? But, for some reason, Xmas is the worst of these phony patriot act holidays. The effort expended by every media to get me to go out and spend my hard-earned buck on the latest whim du jour. Well, at least I got a nice book in the mail yesterday: A. Saenz-Badillos. 1993. History of the Hebrew Language. No TV station ever tried to force historical-comparative linguistics down my throat like sliced and dried out turkey breast.