{Me Against Thanksgiving:} 3 Days to Self-Destruction

Wednesday – Thanksgiving Eve

Magic is in the air. If anyone foolishly prepared pies or other desserts this early, they are to be eaten immediately, possibly while on the toilet to celebrate the cycle of life in harvest time.

You watch news reports of get-away traffic and laugh at the TV. If you’re in said traffic, you know the world is laughing at you and wonder if it’s legal to urinate out of a window below a certain speed.

If you have to cook and have discipline, you begin now, while resenting the freedom of those that don’t have to cook. If you don’t have to cook and someone is cooking around you, silently cling to your belief regarding how much better of a job you’d do with literally every dish they prepare, but you allow them to keep cooking so they can feel important. Really, they should be thanking you. Hope they remember that in the prayers tomorrow.

Thursday – Thanksgiving Day

If you have to cook and didn’t cook yesterday, welcome to Hell. Picture your cats going crazy for a late serving of their food, except the cats speak English, voted for the wrong guy, and the can of Fancy Feast takes 4 hours to bake. Wish for one superpower. Not speed cooking: The ability to give aneurisms to anyone that asks when the food is ready. Was that a Stephen King book? Probably.

If you aren’t the cook, not only curse them for not making the food as well as you absolutely would have, but also despise their sloth for being late with the food. It’s one thing they can’t be as good a cook as you, but late as well? America!

The closest our secular society comes to religious law is a legal mandate that you watch the Macy’s Day Thanksgiving Parade followed by three NFL games. It used to be only two games, but the NFL is as disgusting a glutton as you, so you’re now stuck with a third game that you have to watch by law or ICE will break into your house and shoot you.

Once the food is served, you convince yourself you’re a master of plate assemblage, despite the fact you can’t make a proper bowl at Chipotle. (Two meats simultaneously? Grow up, Louis XIV.) Time is spent crafting perfect bites, with the perfect assemblage of turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and cranberry can-poop in each.

You all pretend turkey is good. Despite the fact that 90 percent of this country can only eat chicken when it’s fried, winged, or nuggeted, we put on airs that a far grosser bird (wild turkeys are terrifying beasts that would peck out your testicles with the enthusiasm of an autistic stamping a bingo board) is delicious via a basic roast. It’s the biggest lie this country tells itself on this day, and we manage to collectively look the other way on the whole killing Injuns thing.

Don’t forget to celebrate the glory of our melting pot by throwing some of your ethnicity’s dishes in the mix. (Does anyone actually do this? I’m Greek, and I don’t get any baklava or shots of Windex or any other foods with seven vowels in their name: We just eat mac and cheese and watch Madea movies. Which, combined with my underrepresenation in Hollywood, suggests I’m black.)

Eat beyond all pleasure. Eat to a point even the most obese among us feel sated. And that’s not a fun place to be. It’s what a serial killer must feel when he’s standing over the corpse of a victim, except you’re also doing calorie math and have heartburn.

Stay indoors. Don’t let capitalism win and fall for that Black-Friday-on-a-Thursday nonsense. I’m not saying I’m a good man: I sold Chris Farley that last speedball. But I never go out to shop on Thanksgiving, both to give people a day off and because my blood sugar is so messed up I’m probably legally drunk. And that pretty much puts me somewhere in the middle of the 12 Apostles in the eyes of Christ. You people that go out to shop on Thanksgiving? He sees you as lower than the executives that poisoned that Erin Brockovich town.

Friday – Day After Thanksgiving

(Don’t call it Black Friday. That’s a slave name.)

You take three trucker-sized shits within 90 minutes of waking up. It’s a food hangover: You swear to God you’ll never eat that much again, and 30 minutes later you’re brushing your teeth with a pice of pumpkin pie while inserting stuffing suppositories. Hair of the dog that bit you.

Clog the toilet. Call the plumber. Avoid eye contact.

If you have to shop, do it during normal business hours like a human being. Like I said above, you’ll feel you’re on higher moral ground than Gandhi. Which you are, cause that dude used to bang his grandnephew’s wife (true story). If any employees make eye contact with you, crack a smile of pure benevolence and nod. You’re part of the solution. They should let you prima nocta their spouse.

Feel guilty because you still have 40 pounds of food left and are craving anything other than turkey, but there are kids starving in Africa and not eating your leftovers is pretty much feeding pieces of bread to ducks, except the ducks are vultures and the bread is them. Cave and order Chinese 20 minutes later, but still feel bad about it.

Stare at yourself naked in a mirror, thinking that you used to mock Harvey Kietel’s nude form in Bad Lieutenant and now you’d kill to be that in shape. Think about going to the gym. Don’t go, but think about it.

Clog the toilet again. Call the plumber using a fake voice and an alias. Wear sunglasses and a baseball cap when they arrive.