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Thanksgiving Turkey Posting Date: Oct 12 2008 8:35PM Turkeys aren’t what they used to be. When I was a lad, times were hard and so were turkeys. Looked like pigeons, smelled like beef. Back then, you knew you had a good turkey if it ran around for a bit after you cut its head off with an axe. You wanted a turkey with a little fight in it.
Nowadays? Turkeys are soft as a sixth-grader.
The good thing about your modern turkey is it’s practically made of steroids and antibiotics and all the nanotechnology you can eat. These suckers are BIG. White meat for miles. Sweet baby Jesus, they got turkeys like Volkswagens and they come in flavours. Saw one turkey the other day said it was cranberry infused. I nearly wet myself, I was so happy. Then I did wet myself, but that was unrelated to the turkey. You’re a baby, you’re in diapers: you’re an old man, you’re in diapers. Life’s a kick in the head that just keep getting worse because eventually, you can’t remember if you put your pants on.
Sometimes, I think the only thing that makes life worth living is the superhuman turkeys they have now, with their seventeen miles of white meat, breasts like a Saskatchewan summer.
I’ll tell you though, once you get one of those superhuman turkeys in you with the seventeen miles of white meat, you just can’t help but take your pants off. That’s the best part of Thanksgiving nowadays. Back when, you finished your turkey, you went rummaging around in the garden hoping to find a few perennial bulbs you could eat, just so you wouldn’t go hungry. Like I said, turkeys were small.
Now, Lord love a duck, you finish eating and it feels like your spleen’s about to burst out your ears, that’s how much turkey is inside you, all full of the sweet, blessed goodness of artificial size enhancers and drugs and whatnot. Feels like you could make a turkey juice fountain if just lay down on your back and poked hard on your belly button.
In a situation like that, a man has to loosen his pants or die. Those are your choices. And I’ll tell you sure as God made little green apples and Catholic school girls, nothing feels better than letting your belt go, unzipping as much as you dare and letting your gloriously full belly expand to its natural girth like a billowing tent in a gale-force wind, oh, God love me.
And speaking of wind, oh baby, when the zephyrs swirl in there all doped up on tryptophan and turkey steroids, swirling around on a soupy mess o’ brussel sprouts and butter-soaked mashed potatoes like the very clouds of heaven themselves, take me right now Saint Peter, but not before I find some relief.
Then, with a sound like a combination of the sweet peels of church bells and the terrible clamoring of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, it leaves the billowy tent of my abdomen for the great, blessed freedom of the living room, startling babies and animals and sending my grandchildren scurrying like roaches in the Las Vegas sun.
And right then, at that very moment and with God as my witness, I give thanks. Sweet baby of all that is holy and right with the world, I give thanks until the turkey-gas fog settles and the sweet, sweet light of the sun burns holes in the overcast sky of pessimism. I get down on my knees and give thanks – or least I would if I could, but I can’t, not without two spotters and one of them pull-up bars that they installed in my bathtub so I wouldn’t die trying to wash my gnarled feet.
It’s a good thing, once a year at least, to give thanks for the magnificent glories of this kick-in-the-head life of ours. As long as a man can eat more turkey in one sitting than the entire province of Manitoba saw during the Great Depression, and then survive the intestinal after-effects without ripping something or killing a favourite relative, then I have all the reason in the world to celebrate Thanksgiving. |
