The DadBall Era: Thanks For Nothing
The whims and wishes of kids are at the center of every holiday. Every. Single. One. Except Thanksgiving, of course—bless its little biscuit-clogged heart. It is the absolute BEST. Thanksgiving isn’t coming down that chimney or making cards for classmates and it’s certainly not dressing up as Shrek this year, or any other year. No, Thanksgiving is busy relaxing, smoking its Pall Mall menthols and sipping its Scotch-‘n-gravy on the davenport, and it will be for quite some time. Thanksgiving doesn’t care about the whims or kids OR its congestive heart failure!
Put this in your TikTok, kiddos: This is MY time. MY holiday. MY WEEK, and it begins right now. I’m in charge. There will be no presents waiting for you under the Char-Broil oil-less turkey fryer. There will be no stockings to be filled—and if there were, they’d be filled with slingshots and jars of apple butter (“WITH 400% MORE CODEINE!”), because it’s about to get old-timey as hell in here. Because it is necessary. It is necessary for my sanity.
That means no phones until Friday night. Maybe Saturday morning. You being on your phones all day and night is annoying as hell, and I’m not exactly sure why. There is a world beyond that liquid retina HD screen in your hands. In fact, there will be a much larger HD screen above the fireplace showing Planes, Trains & Automobiles on repeat and also the Maui Invitational on ESPN. Watch that screen for once! We can even quote-unquote “TALK” to each other about whatever it is we’re seeing.
[gets OK, Boomer’d into the sun]
No phones OR iPads, which means no Instagram—and good riddance! We don’t need to see little Cayleiygh’s trip to the Provence of Marseille to dine on roasted pheasant & gâteau basque and other such fancy nonsense. Why feel like fingerless-glove-wearing hobos when we don’t have to? We will dine like royalty ourselves, m’lady, on two metric tons of leftover ham and King’s Hawaiian Rolls … all in the Provence of our pajamas. IN YOUR FACE, CAYLEIYGH.
No Twitter either, sport. That goes for me as well. It can wait. Australia will still be a charred-out hellscape come Monday, Venice will still be headed toward the bottom of the sea. The news will still be grim, as it always is, and cherry picking the Constitution will still be very on-brand for those who’ve always enjoyed cherry picking the Bible. IN YOUR FACE, DEMOCRACY!
While we’re at it, no mail. Leave it be for now, out in the mailbox on the street. Only ominous shit comes via the United States Postal Service these days. Bills and summonses and so forth. Bollocks to that.
And finally, no Black Friday plans. None. Not for any anti-capitalism-related reasons, but rather because it’s a lurking, constant reminder of what’s to come following the calm bliss of Thanksgiving—a subtle, “Tell-Tale Heart”-like ringing in the ears foreshadowing the impending chaos of December. The stress … the pressure to keep up with the Cayleiyghs AND the Joneses …the return to “normal,” when we’re back to the grind and being buried in our phones, filled with angst and anxiety, scrolling through the fabulous travels of others via Instagram and the always awful news cycles of Twitter.
Thanksgiving is many things, but stressful is not supposed to be one of them. (Not anymore, that is.) This is MY week, kids! My ONE goddamn week. Put down your phones, fetch me my gravy Thermos and pull up a spot on the sofa—we’re going to be here for a bit.
