a foreign national's guide to the traditional american thanksgiving feast

Well, international readers of BSC, thanksgiving is upon us and as always it’s this time of year when depressed American losers such as myself sit around and listen to everyone carrying on and on about what they’re thankful for. In just two short days, we’ll all come together and stuff ourselves full of shitty foods that we seem to recognize aren’t that good 364 days of the year. The object (and I’m not making this up) is to make yourself so full that you become hugely uncomfortable and eventually pass out in the vapor of your own gluttonous sloth. A true thanksgiving victory is only achieved if, after your nap, you go back and pack more food into yourself. The farting gets pretty atrocious, honestly.

The food, it should be noted, is not only unhealthy but also prepared in such a way that encourages rabid gluttony. This is particularly interesting because the ACTUAL items being prepared (let’s just go with the basics: turkey, potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans and cranberries) are extremely healthy (the exception being potatoes which are neither healthy nor bad for you in their natural state…like brandy). HOWEVER, these items, once thanksgivinged become some of the most deviant monuments to slothful corpulence ever assembled on one table. Let’s examine, eh?

The turkey: Turkey (no skin!) is one of the healthiest meats out there. It’s lean, it’s packed with protein, it’s gross so you can’t eat too much of it. It’s practically a superfood. On thanksgiving this cannot stand, so what do we do? Well, we stuff an entire turkey with a mixture of bread, eggs and meat and then smear butter all over the skin so the skin itself becomes crispy and even MORE deliciously bad for us (Some Americans, not content to stuff the turkey with such mundane items actually stuff the turkey with a duck that’s been stuffed with a hen that’s been stuffed with ham [I am not making this up]) . We cover the turkey with various fatty drools (gravy!) and shovel it down by the bucketful. But hey, if you’re gonna go crazy on something on thanksgiving, make it turkey. It’s still healthier than everything else on the table and it won’t be as awkward as going crazy on your creepy uncle that used to make you shower with him.

Potatoes: Potatoes are so often made into unhealthy treats that it’s tempting to suggest that the potato itself is unhealthy. It’s not. It just tastes terrible unless you smear it with grease and butter and lard. On thanksgiving, America has taken it a step further by not only mixing potatoes with insane amounts of heavy cream and butter, but also liquefying the mixture into a smooth consistency that could be consumed with a straw. There is nothing as completely emblematic of the fallacy of the healthy American diet as a gigantic pile of buttery mashed potatoes covered in gravy being greedily inhaled through a straw by an obese four year old boy. I don’t know if that happens (it probably does) but it’s not a stretch to imagine it, is it? That means we’re doomed.

Sweet Potatoes: These are a real genuine superfood. Good thing we cover them with butter, sugar, honey, cinnamon and a fucking LAYER OF MARSHMELLOWS before we serve them. Yes, this shit is delicious. It’s the best vegetable preparation ever. But when this is the healthiest thing on the table, it’s a lot like looking around at your new roommates and deciding to share a room with the rapist because he seems the most sane and at least he seems to shower every once in a while.

Green Beans: We put the green beans into a casserole dish. We cover the greenbeans with cream of mushroom soup (cream, mushrooms). We cover that with some indeterminate little deep fried crispy things that can’t possibly have anything to do with the natural world. This is technically eating greenbeans. It’s also technically picking around greenbeans to eat mouthfuls of heavy cream-soaked little crispy things.

Cranberries: another ‘superfood’ (I hate that term by the way. Broccoli used to just be something you should eat because it’s a green vegetable. Now, we spend so many meals eating flaming hot cheetos and twix bars and shit that the natural benefits of a regular old vegetable have been somehow elevated to super human. Nice. [I love flaming hot cheetos and twix by the way]). However, you won’t really recognize your little buddy the round, berry-esque cranberry on the thanksgiving table. No. In fact, all that’s left of the cranberry is a gelatinous mass that is shaped exactly like the tin can it came in and sliced into discs. This is another one of those items that could be readily consumed with a straw if you felt that lifting and lowering the fork was too much work.

Of course, after all this come the pies. Pies are SUPPOSED to be bad for you, so I’m not gonna really waste time admonishing everyone for having pies. Pies are okay. My wife makes a pumpkin cheesecake that will melt your dick right off. It’s so spectacularly good. One slice contains the annual caloric intake of a typical Darfurian too, so it’s PACKED with energy. In fact, if you don’t go run like, seventeen miles (or hectares or whatever) right after you have a slice, you can actually sit there and watch your dick disappear into your expanding abdomen.

Well, that’s all, internationals! I hope this little breakdown was enlightening. You all have a happy, regular old ho-hum Thursday while we here in America prove, once again, that as long as we’re the fattest we are the best. USA! USA!

xoxoxoxox

Everybody wants to go to heaven but no one wants to die

Hey kids, grownups, mongaloids, geniuses and assorted perverts. It’s Monday. This weekend was crazy…I don’t even know if I can really go for it today. I need to go buy a mullet wig and I need to go to the gym and ride my bike and celebrate being alive a little. That’s what I think we should all kind of do. There’s a lot of dying going on these days and, well, frankly it’s a bummer. I mean, there’s no way to really wrap your head around dying, and as a result it’s fucking scary as shit. It’s the same reason that you get terrified when you try to imagine an infinite universe. “What’s after the planets? What’s after the black space?” Uh, sorry kid. There’s no answer to that. Just kind of keeps going. Yipes.
I always used to imagine that the universe ended with scribble lines that gave way to a white background, where whoever made the whole thing eventually just got tired of coloring everything black and just gave up. Ultimately this was unsatisfying, because the next question, “well, what comes after the white space” was even more unnerving, because yeah, what the fuck comes after that?
I read some Stephen king book when I was a kid and its whole theory was that the entire universe was contained in a molecule in a single blade of grass in some larger universe, a la the Russian Nesting Doll model. This is, for some very inexplicable reason, comforting to me, although I don’t know why. For the record, that’s not really what I think is actually going on, but I don’t mind the idea. Something about it is less terrifyingly infinite than the other way, where shit just kind of spreads and spreads forever. I remember in uh…was it calculus? I dunno, it’s been years since I took math classes, they discussed various kinds of infinities and it was pretty nutty. There’s the one that just goes on, linearly, but then there’s also the one that comes from halving a unit over and over again. So within infinity there’s like, infinite infinities, man. Woah. Uh…dave’s not here, man. I mean, I’m not trying to figure it all out tonight, I just want to hang out with your daughter, ya know?
Okay, so yeah. Point being, there’s a comfort in knowledge and a deep, deep fundamental terror that comes from not knowing. This is, one could logically conclude, why people in small towns tend to be so much more distrustful of foreign countries and foreign people than people who deal with heterogeneous culture on a day to day basis. This isn’t just an American thing either. It’s pretty across the board. Shit’s strange? Oh, that’s just another word for terrifying. Don’t get me started on hummus, homos, Hondurans, Hindus etc. That shit is all potentially pants-crapingly frightening, but death, death is pretty fucking unknowable to everyone, at least everyone who’s alive, and therefore, it’s pretty fucking scary on a whole other level.
But, here’s the deal. You die. And when you do, unless you’re Nikki Sixx, you don’t get to come back and fix all the shit you fucked up, or do all the stuff that you didn’t get around to. When I was a kid, I always thought I’d be everything. I was positive I’d be a rock star, astronaut, cop, Marine, pro athlete, author, actor, comedian, etc. At some point, I realized, nope. You’re not gonna be all that stuff. You, in fact, won’t ever be any of those things unless you pick one and really go for it. Even then, I’m learning now, there’s a good chance that “astronaut” turns out to be “busboy” and ‘pro athlete’ turns out to be ‘CPA’…Life’s brutal. Life’s brutal and the fucking reward is death. Wow. Where do I sign up? Sigh.
Point being, this morning, Michael Jackson (just for example) didn’t wake up. Not only did he not get to go buy a bunch of gigantic golden faberge eggs at barneys, but he didn’t get to drink a cup of coffee and call his mom and tell her he loves her or walk around and enjoy the weather or any of that shit. He’s dead. You, me, we’re alive. That’s pretty huge and man, I don’t want to sound like some sort of cheesy hallmark card or something, but in the end, that’s kind of all you’ve got. One life, one time to do the shit that you want to do in the brief spaces between all the bullshit and people pissing on you and stuffing you into uncomfortable positions and telling you to go fuck yourself. Then it’s done. And yeah, I see where it’d be tempting to pretend that afterwards you get to go to heaven and be an astronaut and hang out with Miles Davis and eat all the cupcakes you want and still have great abs, but come on…it’s never really about that shit anyway. I mean, I just know it’s the small things that really get me by. A little boning, a funny joke, a beer, some dog deciding it likes me, a good song, a delicious burrito…yeah. Um…I dunno. I don’t feel like I’m gonna stick the landing today, prose wise, so uh…get out there and live? Sounds pretty lame. But look, that’s your choice. The alternative sucks balls, man.