The Three-Cigarette Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a tricky holiday for me, thanks to an unfortunate combination of familial tensions and irregular periods of estrangement that I refer to as “Affection Eclipses”. While my friends race to the parental bosom to suckle at the tryptophan-soaked teat of unconditional love, I usually try to figure out who is being prevented from doing that, and hope someone slaps together a ragtag band of holiday orphans. We’d gather at someone’s apartment and cook up some semblance of traditional family-time mealtime. Although I’m always aware of a certain weirdness in these settings. Like we are going through some motions in a completely inappropriate setting. “Move the Guitar Hero cords out of the way, I’m trying to set the turkey down!” I get these periods of existential crisis. I want to say: Guys, this is like trying to celebrate the fourth of July on the moon. I feel like I’m in a cargo cult. Or LARPing. This seasonal beer tastes like nutmeg and self-delusion. And so forth.

There are also anxieties related to how far we’re taking the reenactment. For instance: are we going around to say what we’re thankful for? I try to prepare something beforehand in case I get drunk too rapidly and accidentally say something lousy with COLD TRUTH. “Wonderful friends,” I’ll imagine intoning, while my eyes glisten with benevolent grace. “We have each other and that is truly God’s greatest blessing.”

Perhaps predictably, the most likely way for me to spend Thanksgiving is alone. I go through stages when reconciling with this that are similar to the stages of grief. Denial: “I’m sure something will happen.” Anger: “This is a bullshit holiday! Why are we celebrating the genocide of an entire race of indigenous people? Thanksgiving disgusts me!” Bargaining: “How about I just peer into somebody’s window and pretend I’m inside?” Depression: “Clearly nobody in the entire world cares about me and thus I must be a completely worthless person.” Acceptance: “I am ronin! The lone wolf! Wind-whipped; stoic on my frozen crag high above the city; my eyes stony; my heart cold!”

After consuming about two pounds of roasted vegetables (a culinary tour-de-force, btw) I decided to celebrate being dead inside by riding my new bicycle around Portland. It took me several hours to work up to this, since I had heard repeatedly on the radio that hundreds of people die in drunk driving related accidents every Thanksgiving. I stood at my window for a long time trying to figure out whether or not the city was empty. Finally I decided it was, and proceeded to whip through the fog with immense enjoyment. There weren’t many cars out, but I assumed everyone was absolutely plastered and skittishly dipped down sidestreets and onto walkways.

This whole time I was sort of trying to assess what was open. When I realized the movie theater was (god, of COURSE! Thanksgiving is like the biggest movie day of the year. People can’t stand their families without a giant screen to focus on) and that No Country for Old Men was starting, it seemed too good to be true. IT WAS.

Caution: what follows is an acerbic rant penned immediately following the attempted movie viewing. If you are offended, perhaps you should take a look at your life!

So I was at this movie, and no matter how hard I tried to get into it, increasingly realizing WHAT A GREAT MOVIE, Thanksgiving brought every annoying person out of the godforsaken woodwork. Worst of all was this apparently drunk, extremely stupid, gray-haired couple sitting one row in front of me to the right. They talked without pause. They talked so much that when I first sat down, I wondered if someone was narrating for a blind person. Then they started dropping their beer bottles every few seconds and going “AW SHIT” or “FUCK THERE IT GOES AGAIN” in the most heinous accents. I can’t even describe their accents because they transcended the Maine accent. It was a linguistic anomaly which I have previously only seen actors do: a Generic Hick Voice. An unplaceable amalgamation of every stereotype of rural speech heard in the USA.

Now, I am not going to ruin this movie because you probably haven’t seen it yet and it’s just so great. But it’s in the Fargo vein of Coen brothers movies, so there’s a lot of quietude. The dialogue is great, and clever, and it’s hard to really get into that sort of “world” when some toothless old harpy is yammering on, dropping such bon mots as “If I woulda foun’ that money I WOULDA SPENT IT GO SPEND IT HA HA HA HE’S-A GOIN TO SPEN’ IT HAWWW HAW HAW” and then her gentleman companion who was wearing what may have been a maternity coat appreciatively “HYUK HYUK HYUK”-ed.

At one point he got up to go to the bathroom and couldn’t find the aisle, which he was sitting adjacent to? So he kind of wove along the edge with his arm stretched out, which worked as long as nobody was sitting anywhere else in his path. Within one row he had clotheslined someone and then literally fell on top of the next person, mumbling “‘Scuse me!”

I feel like some kind of prissy anus for being this way, but I really can’t deal with loud/annoying people in movie theaters. There ARE times when it’s acceptable to be a jackass in a movie theater. Like, if the movie is way dumb and people make jokes, or it’s a cult movie where people get really into it and say the lines, that is fine with me! But if I’m trying to ABSORB a film that is pretty high quality, to a degree where perhaps I am reminded that ‘film’ is an “artistic genre” and not just a time-sink, I don’t want a couple of dimwitted hayseeds idiotically flapping their repugnant gums and distracting me from what I just paid five to eleven bucks for.

So this whole thing enraged me and then I kept thinking “OK Alana just cool it, if they get to you THEY WIN! So fight the good fight and ignore them like everyone else” but then I thought “Wait! Why should everyone extend their tolerance to these trash cans of skin? They certainly aren’t extending any tolerance to everyone else’s desire to quietly enjoy a movie!” So I went out, in a contained state of wrath, and sicked the staff on them. It was amazing how fast the theater staff reacted. (Sudden realization: I must have looked like a maniac?) They were falling all over themselves to bring down the hammer of shushing. Three different people came up to clarify with me who was the offending party. I said “Some loud hicks down on the right side,” and then “The ones with gray hair wearing giant fur coats”. Then some guy with a broom and dustpan was like “Yeah I found ‘em drinking and carrying on like you said. People want to do that, they should do it at home,” to which I replied “My feelings exactly!” They then supplied me with a rain check ticket, which I shall redeem later with the air of a squeaky wheel, recently greased.

The next show wasn’t for over an hour and I needed a break anyway so I resumed riding around town. But the rage was not going away! I wondered if I was possibly using that situation to express anger related to other things, but then decided that I just wanted some cigarettes. So at this point I was riding around in the fog on my awesome old French roadbike smoking and hating everyone. It was glorious. Like Sartre, with better glasses.

So now I am home, continuing my This American Life marathon which has proceeded with few interruptions for five days. I did not get run over. This is probably because those drunken inbreds could not possibly identify me, since I am not a race car driver or scratch ticket. Otherwise I would have been looking over my shoulder for some ass-driven cart with enraged hillbillies threatening to throw their shared tooth at yours truly. “Don’t waste your tooth, you leather-faced peckerwoods,” I would’ve yelled, “You might need it later to gnaw open a can of creamed corn which you will hopefully put in the microwave THUS INCINERATING YOUR TRAILER SWAMP WITH A SEARING GOUT OF BALL LIGHTNING”