Jive Turkeys

Among national holidays, Thanksgiving was always my favorite. Great TV, no obligatory gift-giving and no heavy-handed religious themes. Just friends, food and family at Grandma's house, arguably the best place on Earth for any seven-year-old lucky enough to have grown up down the street from the old gal.

As has been the case for several decades, I won't be visiting grandma's house this Thanksgiving. Grandma lives in an assisted care home now, so her scene is less Norman Rockwell and more Norman Bates. Holiday spirits used to flow from me like the brandy in mom's egg nog. Now they squeeze out like canned cranberry sauce: soft and sweet when you get to it, but always surrounded by armor to preserve freshness.

As an adult I've hosted Thanksgivings for fellow loners, been taken in by gracious souls when the mood to cook didn't strike me, and crashed family gatherings as a total stranger. The former celebrations had their appeal, but the latter have been especially memorable.

One such soiree was Thanksgiving in Berkeley with my friend Holden Hume, his father, and Mr. Hume's nephew Colin. The venue was an artist's flat in the Bay Area's gentrified industrial ghetto. The crowd was an eclectic mix of waifs, strays, hippies, homosexuals and renaissance men. One gregarious fellow insisted on regaling gatherers with every booze-soaked story of his sordid life. That loud drunk was me. I've told Holden as much on many occasions, but I'll say it again: that Thanksgiving was the best of my adult life. Thanks, Norman, for making my San Francisco visits so memorable.

Jive Turkeys

Going Raunch

In the tempest that's been swirling inside the media teapot around Sarah Palin's book "Going Rogue," most talking heads have completely taken their eye off the ball that matters most. I'm talking about how much all the men (and half the women) in my demographic secretly dream of balling the GOP VP nominee.

Seriously, she's hot.

I'm not talking about the kind of lovemaking feminist filmmakers write into screenplays for cougars like Angela Bassett or Michelle Pfieffer. I'm talking about rough, blood-boiling sex. Fantasy date rape stuff. In a word, fucking.

Here's how it would go down…

…I knocked on the door of her tour bus around six o'clock in the evening. She answered wearing a bathrobe with her hair in a towel, obviously fresh from a shower. Her husband was at an NRA convention in Juneau, so she was alone. I set down my pizza box and she guided me to the bear skin rug that was draped over the sofa. She told me to get myself a Dr. Pepper, which I did. There was a knock at the door and she got up, pulling her robe together and covering her breasts as she walked over to answer it. It was her book editor. Sarah closed the door behind her and the ex-governor and her friend sat on the couch beside me. Without saying a word, the book editor pulled a joint from her messenger bag and proceeded to get Sarah very high. "I love Alaska," Sarah choked back between puffs, "but our weed's got nothing on the stuff from Arnold's Golden State of California!"

As I entered her she whispered that I couldn't come inside her. Given her age and obvious fertility, she couldn't risk giving birth to another mildly retarded baby. I told her to relax, then rammed it into her back door. This caught the author and liberal-media whipping girl off guard, and she put up a fight. That's when my own animal instincts kicked in…

Sarah was living out some fantasies of her own that evening, because with every powerful thrust she screamed "Fuck me, Olbermann!" into the pillow she clung to her sobbing face. It was a scene right out of Penthouse Forum, and it was happening to me: an unemployed copywriter-cum-pizza-boy. When she climaxed I screamed, "Thank you, John McCain—thank you for thrusting this backwater beauty queen and illiterate gun-toting maniac onto the world stage!"

Not a groundbreaking scene by modern hotel-porn standards, but you get the idea. Somebody needs to pour the meat to this chick fast and often, if for no other reason than to keep her away from the keyboard. If Sarah Palin is allowed to deliver one more steaming pile of shit to the NY Times Bestsellers List, Keith Olbermann's head is going to explode on basic cable.

Going Raunch

Harley-Davidson and The Carmichael Lynch Mob

Harley-Davidson and The Carmichael Lynch Mob

Write Makes Might

For venting spleens, exposing demons and bearing souls, nothing works like words. Don't believe me? Mince yours and see where you get. My money's on nowhere. Which is why I have always written more than most readers have time to digest or need to know. They call it TMI… I call it 411.

I'm a recent but reluctant convert to a method of communication that's commonplace with teens, 'tweens and geeks:

Texting :-)

I say "reluctant" because the volume and viscosity of my standard missives has historically been of the "dog choking" variety. Today I sent a text that was 70 words long—"War and Peace" in the land of LOL.

If email has compromised my capitalization, texting is destined to turn my spelling into mush. Not because I don't have time to do it right—simply because my sausage fingers are too blunt for accuracy on iPhone's glass keyboard. But that's an excuse.

The truth is, I simply can't keep up. By the time I make one point I can live with, my BFF is XOX TTYS B4 I can blink.

WTF?

I railed against cellmageddon years ago—now I'm part of the flick.

I mean "flock."

fyvk.

I mean "fuck."

Write Makes Might

Whammo!

"Girls are like Slinkys. Even when you're too old to play with them, they're still fun to push down the stairs."

- Dr. Robert

Whammo!

Sounds Ecclectic

80 gig iPods are overrated. I went on an iTunes bender a few weeks ago, but after giving my new music a hot lap, I still hit the same mixes: "Girl Singers," "Jazz," "Electronic," shit that's been in the mix for three decades. "Stuck in a rut," I think they call it. Well, my deepest ruts include these, and I refuse to apologize for any of it:

DEVO:



KATE BUSH:



COLTRANE & DAVIS:



ORBITAL:

Sounds Ecclectic

Food for Thought

I'm waging a one-man war on "coolifs," "yeahbuts" and "excepts," as in,

"It would be cool if somebody…"

"… Yeah but I would have done it like this…"

Or last but not least,

"I like everything you did except…"

Know what I think would be cool? Instead of coming up with ideas for other people to execute, the people who share these opinions should screw up the gumption to do it better themselves. Then when somebody comes up to them and says,

"Yeah but I would have done it like this…"

The person who did all the work can punch his critic in the dick and say,

"I like everything about you except your inability to offer assistance or constructive criticism. That's why I punched you in the dick. Sorry if my reaction to your stupid comment offended you."

Food for Thought