happy thanksgiving! i know, outside of the u.s thanksgiving doesn’t mean that much, but here in the u.s and a it’s a big deal, somewhere between veterans day and christmas.

earlier today pres elect obama and his family went to a homeless shelter in chicago to help out in feeding the needy. he then made an unplanned stop at a local elementary school and spoke to the kids.

one of the things that i truly like about pres elect obama is that he’s more connected to normal life than he is to the life of a career politician. gw bush came from a background of great wealth and privilege and grew up with his dad as the head of the cia and then as v.p. that’s not a criticism, just a statement of fact. obama grew up the only child of a single mom, and until recently was used to walking to his local barber to get his hair cut. you can tell that he still hasn’t made peace with the fact that he can’t just go to the local deli and buy a sandwich and then stop at the bike shop to get his tires filled.

personally i think that this is good and healthy and will serve him and us well. many politicians have been in office so long that they don’t really remember what it was like to be a regular citizen. up until a couple of years ago obama was just a fairly regular joe, and i think that this will really help him when he’s sworn in and becomes president. but i’m rambling. happy thanksgiving everyone, i hope that you spend the day with people you genuinely like and who genuinely like you. here’s a picture of the obama’s at the homeless shelter handing out food.

moby

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