It is Thanksgiving all across these United States, but it wasn't until last weekend that I really felt it. I can read a calendar, and the season's usual logistic and chore requirements were all right there where I could see them, but knowing that a favorite holiday is coming and actually feeling it are different things. For Thanksgiving, which I love dearly, that realization manifests as a sort of exhausted gratitude, or maybe just grateful exhaustion. The way Thanksgiving season plays out, which is generally as a procession of low, short days stacking up across gray weeks dwindling fast into winter, punctuated by some emails from my mother with the subject line "Brussels Sprout," is familiar enough. But the experience of washing ashore on this little island in time in which all that stuff somehow feels good always seems to come out of nowhere, and always arrives as a relief.
When I finally felt it last weekend, on a half-desperate long-weekend trip to Connecticut with my wife, it was as an absence. We were walking up a trail next to a waterfall on a day when the sun never really came out, without any other real plan in mind beyond a dinner reservation five or so hours later, and enjoying ourselves in doing all that, but the difference was that we were just doing that. The other stuff, the noise of work and anxiety and obligation, had dimmed. I could feel that we were very nearly there.
And now here we are: it is Thanksgiving, and there is a new episode of the pod that fits within the proud tradition of pre-holiday episodes that are sunnier, sillier, and shorter than the usual. In this one, I talk about my time spent on the Drew Magary Heritage Trail in Connecticut, and my unexpected encounter with an exhibition of Rob Zombie's paintings at an art gallery there, and Drew and I talked about the thrill and mystery of (non-Rob Zombie) art and our respective Connecticut Romantic Histories and the dumb lessons we took from them. I talked about eighth grade me making the decision to prioritize watching Penny Marshall's A League Of Their Own over a summer camp makeout session.
And then, per tradition, we moved on to the Thanksgiving material. Drew is nearly as big a freak for the holiday as I am, and while this conversation veered about—there's a long digression that includes intense actors giving absurd comedic performances and a nice bit of Titus Welliver lore from Drew—it kept returning to cooking and eating. I talked about handling the green part of the Thanksgiving table and leaving the brown-and-orange fare to my parents; Drew laid out some disturbing turkey hijinks that led, unfortunately, to the words "turkey speculum" being said into a podcast mic. I celebrated bringing the classic high-leverage reliever mentality to being a Thanksgiving guest, Drew talked about college kids complaining about college food, and we both doffed our caps to the call-your-own-omelet revolution of the 1990s.
After the break, we were joined by Mack, an Accomplice-level Defector subscriber who both won and (crucially) accepted the opportunity to join us for a Funbag round. We talked about pies and the collaborative/communal approach to eating too much, and then jumped into the 'bag. A question about the role of suits in contemporary life led us to cheer Nelly's Sweat/Suit opus and jeer suits as a metonym for shitty conservative grievance politics; there was also quite a bit of time devoted to mourning the golden age of basketball coaches wearing suits, and sometimes sweating through them. We also discussed best practices in mushroom care and relationship maintenance. A third question, on the best accents to do poorly, led to some fairly horrid voice work. I talked about the auspicious feeling of flipping to a favorite moment from a favorite movie; Mack discussed the ditty-driven approach to being a husband; Drew debuted a very sturdy Krusty The Clown groan. We ended absurdly: remembering a blog post in which a bunch of Defector staffers reading an overwrought Rep. Clay Higgins tweet in Benoit Blanc voices and debating the existence mid-Atlantic accents. It was silly, of course, but that's the season. The everyday is waiting just over the horizon, but for the moment, we're on Island Time.
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