Thanksgiving

Thursday November 27, 2025

It’s Desmond’s first Thanksgiving. It will probably be his quietest, but who can see the future?

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Or, it has been in the past. The holiday has been in flux since a new generation came into the picture, and I really don’t know if we’ll be one of those families with a big, intergenerational Thanksgiving or not. For several years before the cousins went from childless to childed adults, 20 or so of us would gather each year for a delightfully low-lift (for me, at least) weekend at my Aunt and Uncle’s house on the Cape. Over the 35 years I’ve been in the picture, there have been plenty of fights, petty conflicts, awful dishes, and horrible things said, but typically between predictable combatants who have become more manageable (and, perhaps, wiser) in time. But far more, there has been fun, games, laughs, good dishes, and a Carnival Cruise quantity of booze. We haven’t really gotten together like that in a few years, and with the exception of an outstanding one in Charleston last year and the worst of my life two years ago, they’ve mostly been unremarkable since COVID.

This year will be a dull one, but that doesn’t mean bad. We had visits from Ali Fishbein, my dad, and Amy this week, my mom’s coming for dinner on Monday, and my SIL Liza is doing us the kindness of stepping away from her two kangaroos to babysit Des tomorrow while Lindsay and I go out together for the first time since he was born. (We’re going to Wood + Fire in downtown Melrose; thanks, Mandi and Schuyler Stevens, for the gift card!) We ordered a prepared Thanksgiving dinner from Rising Eagle in town and will simply enjoy the peace and quiet today. One day soon, we’ll have kids’ tables, Cape Codders, and new introductions to Greek stuffing (which is very much not for me, sorry, Stace). For now, quiet moments are precious, even if I struggle to appreciate them in their time. I’m thankful for my healthy little family and the village that’s shown us its abundance.

There’s something green in there, which I hate, but all in all, not a bad sandwich.

One Food: Thanksgiving Leftover Sandwich

If I see a Thanksgiving sandwich on a menu, I’ll almost always get it, but it never matches the DIY on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Cranberry sauce, stuffing, mashed potatoes, mac n’ cheese, gravy, and turkey on sourdough… this is the worst thing about not having a big Thanksgiving. We’re stuck without leftovers.

One Song: Durry - idk i just work here

Instagram doesn’t send me music very often, and when it does, I usually see the same 15 seconds of the same song repackaged four different ways because that’s how Gen Z bands do social media AND I HATE IT. However, this week, Reels served up a song by People R Ugly (“Outside Freestyle”) that intrigued me, so I took a Lindsay tip, and played their radio on Spotify.

It pains me to admit that Gen Z’s little pop-punk wave is really friggin’ good. I listened for a few hours last weekend as I cleaned the dryer vent and cooked and added probably 75% of the songs I heard to my regular playlists. This was one of my favorites — a lot of bands in this genre are Blink-182 or Sum 41 clones. These guys are a little more Motion City Soundtrack or Say Anything… I like that.

One Hack: YouTube

I’m almost embarrassed to say it because it’s so obvious, but YouTube is an unbelievable DIY resource. I was using a fucking metal straw and a vacuum to try to clean the dryer vent guard for like 45 minutes before I finally YouTubed how to remove the damn thing. There are no screws, it doesn’t just lift off, and I’m so jaded from everything else the dipshit flippers did to this house, I just assumed they installed it wrong and drilled it in or something. Two minutes on YouTube, I learned how to remove it with a screwdriver, and the whole thing was clean five minutes after that. Always check YouTube before starting any home project.

One Hollywood: Pluribus, Apple TV+

Lindsay and I started watching Vince Gilligan’s (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul) new show on Apple TV+ this week. It’s gotten Severance levels of critical acclaim so far, but to be honest, I don’t see it. It’s good, and we’re both enjoying it, but I feel like it’s being praised on the merits of creator and concept rather than actual content.

It is, admittedly, an amazing concept: Everyone in the world is suddenly overtaken by a benevolent frequency (or something like that, the “what” is intentionally vague) that makes everyone part of a single, cooperative, happy entity. Carol (Rhea Seehorn) is one of the only people on Earth seemingly immune to the transition, but the entity is happy to let her live her life while they figure out how to incorporate her and the others.

Seeing a hive mind played out in live action is entertaining as hell, but the characters are (kinda understandably) shallow and every time the show flirts with a truly provocative idea, it pulls back before getting into any real meat. It doesn’t help that Carol seems to have no real motivations or personality traits. Her stated goal is to “save the world,” but she makes barely any intelligent reasoning towards how to do that or even why she should want to, as is pointed out by one of the better (yet criminally under-developed) secondary characters. Her only motivation seems to be vengeance. Her only character trait is misery. And even that we don’t really understand four episodes in. Why is she such a miserable bastard? And why is she the most worthy protagonist of this world? (There’s probably a thinkpiece as to why white, American smut writer is the protagonist when there are five more interesting unaffected people introduced in the first episode, but it probably boils down to “Made in America.”)

I don’t want to be part of a hive mind, but this show seems to argue the world is objectively better off that way. That’s a fascinating premise to build from. I’m pretty unimpressed with how little they’ve done.

Reading is great because it pisses you off.

One Book: “Poverty, by America” by Matthew Desmond

I hear a lot these days about patriotism, especially from members of older generations. It’s an interesting word, because it’s both obviously specific and extraordinarily vague. For many who came of age after World War II, I imagine their patriotic fervor was informed by a sense of humanitarian pride. We defeated the Nazis. We ended the Holocaust. Our individuality and ingenuity empowered the greatest middle class the world has ever seen and uplifted millions out of the Great Depression. We make the world better for humanity.

We do propaganda so well in this country, most Americans still believe that. When those patriotic vibes were strongest, we were somehow able to overlook or excuse Jim Crow, Japanese concentration camps, McCarthyism, Blacks being purposely excluded from the G.I. Bill, and, you know, the genocide of people we caricature in Thanksgiving plays as tribute for saving our hopeless asses in our hour of need. Everyone is conveniently against these things now, but that alone is to be sufficient. To look closer, and examine the enduring legacies of injustice is Critical Race Theory, and that is Unpatriotic.

I disagree.

“Poverty, by America” is a good read for anyone who wants to feel incredibly fucking angry, complicit, and helpless about being an American. (Now you can’t wait to read it!)

The U.S. is the richest country in the world, and yet there are more Americans below the poverty line than there are Australians on the planet. The number is likely much higher because the incarcerated, institutionalized, and homeless are not counted in this census, and Mollie Orshansky’s poverty line is an unscientific, assumption-riddled nonsense tool that doesn’t differentiate between the money one must earn to afford food and what they must earn to afford literally anything else. (This is a pretty big problem since real wages have grown about 35% since 1985 while housing costs have risen about 400% and cost of living 200%.)

No, poverty isn’t a necessary condition of society. Fucking Vietnam, the country we and the Soviet Union tore apart 60 years ago, has gone from a 58% poverty rate in 1993 to about 4% in 2022. Why? Because it doesn’t hate its own people as a national pastime. The conditions that create poverty are largely controllable and both Democratic and Republican administrations have actively contributed to, if not exacerbated, issues to keep people poor. (Reagan destroyed collective bargaining, Obama created too-big-to-fail Capitalism.) We could end poverty. The despicable truth is that we don’t want to. Remember that when you’re doing your Black Friday shopping — we’re all complicit in 80-hour, $800 work weeks. Today’s prevailing form of patriotism is the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Then again, I’m an Oberlin grad who Oberlin grads hate, so I can’t blame you for not caring at all what I think about anything. I’m the village idiot. Go watch some football this weekend and lock me outside in the cold. Happy Thanksgiving!