Ah, Thanksgiving… Another holiday reliant solely upon the greed and gluttony of American culture; or at least that’s what it has morphed into over the centuries. Just another opportunity for your family to come over, mooch and help themselves to what little you have to offer. It’s an opportunity to get trapped in a family member’s den (their lair) while you’re subjected to endless stories about the past year of their entire lives.
It’s an event in itself: the siblings who don’t speak to each other save for bitch-fits but just can’t resist the call of turkey, football and alcoholic beverages, all coming together to glare at the parents who have scarred them and sent them running for psychiatric therapy and medication (prescribed and illegal). The distant relatives come over to compare the pittances of your daily existence to the splendor and stupor of their luxurious lifestyles. Look in astonishment and amazement at the black sheep who “made it”! Gather ‘round to chuckle at the one they all had such high hopes and expectations for, who just barely managed to cometo from a drug-induced coma in time for the dinner bell, the washed up junkie who used to be an overachiever and is now little more than an idiot savant. Watch in wonderment how they compare their precious offspring, their brood, their Satan-spawn, with all the pride and joy of the farmers at the county fair. For on Thanksgiving, we are all just pigs at the slop.
What are we giving thanks for, anyway? Material possessions? Memorabilia of a life once replete with the hedonistic pleasures of a culture gone to shit? Financial trappings of a social hierarchy we can never assume to crawl on bleeding knees to the top of ? Certainly not! Have we lost sight of the deeper meaning of life? If you’re nodding or fist-pumping in agreement to my words, then chances are you’re not at a soup kitchen, mission or food bank. Unless you’re using this zine to shield yourself from the cold, you’re probably somewhere warm, with all the appropriate utilities going full-blast.
You know what? We’re over-privileged and spoiled to the core. But we’re alive! And we get to have another day of making fun of the relatives and bitching about the hypocrisy of it all. We get to eat the flesh of the featherless bird that sits in its own juices on a platter in the center of the table, with some strange dressing shoved deep inside its ass (unless, of course, you’re Vegan and doing even weirder shit with tofu and vegetables). And if you’re with me, you get to round out the festivities with a drink in the city that wouldn’t be destroyed – couldn’t be destroyed – not by natural disasters, not by its own hand and not at the hands of governmental corruption. These, my friends, are things to be thankful for.
But what a boring holiday! There are no classic horror movies to anticipate, save the 70-minute low-budget gem, ThanksKilling, a film whose tagline is “Gobble, Gobble, Motherfucker!” and which boasts boobies in the first minute of the film (and what glorious Pilgrim boobies they are, folks). Yes, “Turkie”, the vulgar, psychotic (puppet) Thanksgiving turkey that kills with the enthusiasm and wit of Freddy Krueger makes his way through a who’s-who of vacationing stereotypes, only to return in two more sequels. That’s the best I have to work with. Why, oh why, won’t Eli Roth follow Robert Rodriguez’s lead and make his Grindhouse fake trailer, “Thanksgiving”, into a full-length film?
So let’s let the wine flow like blood and bow our heads in prayer. You can’t choose your family but you sure the hell can choose which venue to drown your sorrows at after the feast.
