happy thanksgiving.


November 23, 2007

let's just ignore the dead birds and genocide and enjoy that there's a holiday devoted to gratitude.
so here's me letting you know how i spent my thanksgiving.
it might seem a bit self-serving(surprise), but if you read on you'll see that it's not.
see, i had been asked to volunteer at a soup-kitchen today, so in the interest of being altruistic and potentially making up for a multitude of mundane sins(death by 1,000 cuts)i agreed to quasi-anonymously help out at a soup kitchen.
i saw the email. it said, 'see you at 6:30'.
6:30. thanksgiving dinner time. right?
that's a good time to eat thanksgiving dinner. dinner time. sun's down, time to eat.
again, right?
wrong.
6:30, meaning: in the a.m.
funny how the same three numbers can mean such different things to different people.
6:30 to me only has possible meaning in the following ways:
as:
a-a time for being asleep
b-a time for still being awake from the night before
c-a time that is followed by the happy letters 'p.m'

to my great chagrin it never occured to me that '6:30' might mean:
d-a time in which to begin work getting ready to serve breakfast to homeless people on thanksgiving.
so, mea culpa, because of assumptions and ignorance i slept through the allotted time in which i was scheduled to do noble service on thanksgiving.
yup, while others were preparing food for the homeless i was happily sleeping, dreaming of 6:30 in the p.m, when i thought/dreamed/dreampt that i would be lending my humble efforts to feed the homeless on this most food oriented of days.
i woke up at the sane/reasonable/civilized hour of 11 a.m. i had breakfast.
i went for a walk. i worked on some music. i read some crappy fiction. and i checked my email.
and i saw that i had been expected to show up at the homeless shelter at 6:30 in the a.m.
and i felt like a dirtbag for having been happily asleep when i should've been working at the shelter.
now i'm not looking for absolution, but was i crazy to assume that '6:30' as it applied to food and thanksgiving might've possibly meant '6:30 pm'?
ok, maybe i'm looking for a degree of absolution and/or assuagement.
but wallowing in guilt(as i've been doing all day)is fruitless, so let's move on.
i then went over to a friends house at 8pm and played with babies and talked to adults and drank coffee and then went to mars bar and drank some beer and tried to convince a homeless person(who looked well-fed, thankfully)that i wasn't working for the cia.
for some reason he was convinced that i was a cia employee.
maybe it was that shifty 'i know something that i'm not telling you' cia look that i seem to have when confronted by well-fed homeless people in the mars bar at 2 a.m.
the mars bar, that on it's own should be the subject of an entire update/blog.
it's kind of the last bastion of the new york that i knew and loved when i first started coming here in the 80's.
and i'm amazed and thrilled that it still exists. i go there a lot, always filled with gratitude that it hasn't been torn down.
and cheap domestic beer is the best guilt assuager i've ever encountered.
so, happy thanksgiving.
moby