I wish I could bottle Thanksgiving Weekend and take sips from it all year.

Here's a random observation that I just wanted to get down before I forget: I was watching A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving last night, and I noticed something that never occurred to me before in the dozen other times I've seen it in my life. Near the end of the show in the final sequence, Snoopy and Woodstock prepare their own Thanksgiving meal and enjoy it outside Snoopy's dog house. I guess it's meant to be some sort of funny denouement to the episode, playing on the fact that the meal Snoopy had just previously served to Charlie Brown and his friends consisted of popcorn, toast, pretzel sticks and jelly beans. And then there's the dog and bird, enjoying a true feast. It is damn funny, actually. In previous years, I let the little joke distract me from the somewhat horrifying thing taking place on the screen. But last night, for some reason, I was able to forget the context and see the reality: little Woodstock gleefully eating a turkey, prepared and cooked by his friend, a dog. I'm not exactly certain what about that whole scenario freaks me out so much. It's not very much unlike those Pizza Hut commercials a couple years ago which featured Miss Piggy salivating over pizzas topped with bacon and sausage. But this was even more heinous, watching this bird being served the food by his canine friend, as if Woodstock and Snoopy's relationship had evolved to some sinister level, having the effect on the bird's mind that cancelled out any obligation whatsoever to his own species, including the promise not to cook and eat them. Maybe I'm just thinking too much about the whole thing. I'll stop now.

In other news, I'm house/petsitting for some friends. I was going through their CD collection today, and for the most part it's pretty slim pickings for such a music snob like me, but I did find a copy of Sensual World by Kate Bush. It's not a CD I own, for one reason: it contains the song This Woman's Work. It's been years since I've heard that song, but I had no doubt that no amount of time could dull the effect that that song has on me. Just for old time's sake, and maybe as a bit of a test, I turned off the TV, dimmed the lights, put the CD in their stereo, forwarded to track 10 and sat on the couch. It was just me and their cute dog sitting there, and I could swear that even little Annie felt the very air of the room change as that first piano chord struck and Kate's voice emited her first achingly beautiful "oooh-ooooh." We sat there and listened to the entire song; mine and the dog's eyes meeting momentarily near the middle, as if we were checking on each other and also perhaps giving a little support. Her sweet glance was in vain however, and when the climax of the song hit, I did as I always do and wept like a baby. Damn you Kate Bush and your gut wrenchingly beautiful song.

Two days off in a row and I still have two more days to sleep in. Someone a long time ago really knew what the hell they were doing when they put Thanksgiving on a Thursday. I'm guessing it was some indian, or maybe a pilgrim. Makes me want to thank them by going to a casino, or eating some oatmeal. Actually, I might be thinking of quakers with that last thing. Well, whatever.

This might be the golden age of standing up for things. Everyone has an opinion on everything, and there are more outlets than ever through which they can make those opinions known, loud and clear. The TV media seem to be clamoring for standpoints and soundbites to the point now that they’ll give almost anyone some airtime if that person has something unique to say, or at least looks pretty while saying it. We’ve become a society constantly on the lookout for something to ruminate upon and form an opinion about, the more extreme the better. No wrongdoing or irritation, no matter how slight, can go on without acknowledgment and having some attention drawn to it. No underrepresented segment of a population, or even an individual with a bone to pick, has any excuse for not being heard. After all, this is the age of the almighty blog.

Well, now that I’ve succumbed to this new age myself, I think it’s about time that I take a stand. I’m irritated by a lot of things, quite honestly, and I think I’ve finally built enough gumption concerning one particular thing be passionate enough to plant my feet and shout my feelings on it from the mountaintop.

I refuse to bag my own groceries.

I work eight hours a day, forty hours a week in order to earn the money to go to a grocery store, select what I want to buy, put it down on that movey-thingy, and have someone ring it up. Now, let me be clear: no matter how much my purchases begin to pile up on the other side, and if I happen to have chosen a checkout aisle that doesn’t currently have someone standing there waiting to retrieve my groceries and bag them, I will not be guilted into bagging them myself. Not by the checkout person, not by the people in line behind me who doubtlessly will have to wait a little longer, and not by anyone who happens to be with me. It’s something I simply refuse to do.

I’ve long been conscious of the fact that a grocery store will usually have fewer baggers on hand than open checkout lanes, causing a sort of musical-chairs situation. The baggers go where needed the most at any given time. That’s perfectly fine. What usually happens is a bagger will eventually notice my things piling up and come over to assist. But sometimes that doesn’t happen, and it’s left to the checkout person to bag them him or herself. That’s an unfortunate outcome, but not anything that would even come close to making me feel obligated to help.

I’m sure there will be those that find my views on the subject disagreeable and maybe even infuriating. “Where does he get off thinking he’s above bagging his own groceries?” they might ask. “Doesn’t he realize how hard those grocery baggers work for such little pay? Don’t they deserve all the help we can give them?” I will say that I do feel bad for them. And I do appreciate the job that they do. But we all have jobs to do, and while what I’m about to say may not be popular, it’s true: they should have done better in school if they didn’t want to bag groceries for a living. There, I said it, and I stand by it.

If any news outlets would like to press me any further on my potentially incendiary comments, please contact me at the email address I provided on my profile.

It’s a beautiful day. I just took a walk during lunch and stopped in at a few stores. I’m not even going to pretend to be angry about the fact that they were all playing Christmas music over their speakers and had decorations up on November 10th. Yes, it’s all so commercial and begins earlier every year. But I love it.

Not trying to jinx it, but for no particular reason, I’ve been feeling better lately than in have in a long time.

Enough of that though. What I want to talk about today is my friend Mikey. Actually, he’s not really a friend of mine. I’d say he’s more of a friend of friends of mine, but my friends don’t really like him either. Which is one of the many good things about the fact that he’s leaving town next week and heading back to home, for good.

Mikey entered our lives a couple years ago, on his way back from serving as a marine in Iraq. Naturally, he decided the best place to start his civilian life would be in a large, harsh city that mostly disagrees with the war he just got done fighting, offered no concrete leads for his employment, and where he knew very few people. What is here, however, is our friend Kevin. Mikey is in love with Kevin.

I should say right now that Mikey is completely straight, despite quite a lot of evidence that might suggest otherwise, such as his aforementioned man-crush on Kevin. During his first weekend here, he kissed a man. It was a cross-dressing man. You might think that’s hard to believe in a oh-sure-like-he-really-didn’t-know sort of way, but you have to remember that Mikey had just gotten back from serving in the military in the constant company of nothing but men, so his perception of what women look like was probably a little compromised anyway. And I’m here to tell you, that guy made one hell of a convincing woman. Not that I would have gone anywhere near his/her face with mine, but when you add in the fact that Mikey just really isn’t all that smart, what you’ve got is a lot of factors leading up to a perfect storm of an accidental homosexual incident.

Over the past couple years, Mikey has supplied as us all with a lot of entertainment, most of it at his expense. It’s a tradeoff really, as laughing at him is really the only thing that eases the difficulty of being around him. I don’t like to sound mean, but Mikey is, well...an idiot. He says a lot of inappropriate things at the worst times, he’s completely lacking in basic social skills, and he’s unable to understand how everyone else in the world isn’t as obsessed as he is with sports and the whole going-overseas-and-bombing-the-hell-out-of-a-whole country thing. Frankly, we all felt too bad for him to completely nix him from our lives. Besides, he kept getting our new phone numbers. But now that he’s leaving, we can all just sort of sit back and remember the good times without the accompanying bringdown of knowing we’ll have any more of the bad.

Number one on the list of all-time great Mikey moments is when he was brutally attacked for absolutely no reason by my friend Desiree’s cat. Buffy simply scurried across the room, claws extended, tail swollen and back arched, and swatted at Mikey repeatedly like he was a living, walking, screaming scratching post. That was also the night Mikey later single-handedly caused my friend Keith, one of the sweetest, calmest people I’ve ever known, to stand up and threaten Mikey’s life during a hand of Texas Hold ‘em Poker. Was Mikey cheating, you ask? Hell no. We’d been spending the previous hour trying to explain to Mikey how to play. That was one of many times at least one of us had to leave the room or run the risk of strangling him.

In his time here, he was banned from three bars. He fell in love with one bartender at a local bar, who, as Keith once put it, might very well be the ugliest woman on the planet. She refused to go out with him. As his grand finale, and serving as the reason why he’s leaving town a couple months earlier than he had planned, Mikey got fired last week from the packing company he had worked at for two months. The reason? Wait for it: stealing bubble wrap. Except he didn’t even steal it. The security cameras clearly show him walking out to his car with a wad of bubble wrap in his hand, opening the car, throwing his sweatshirt in, and then returning to work with the bubble wrap still in his hand. So conspiring to steal bubble wrap then.

This Sunday night is the Farewell Mikey party. Because, after all is said and done, he’s someone that was part of our lives for at least a small part of it, and we all wish him well. And just to show our good will, we’re all pitching in for a gift card for free gas.

That way, if he runs out of money on the trip, by that point he’ll probably be far, far away.

My day-to-day life all takes place within a five to ten square mile bubble. It’s been that way for the past six months, since I moved to a new apartment closer to where I work and do everything else I do. Though I don’t really miss the commute in the mornings and evenings, and I’m glad to have the extra money once spent on gas, it still feels a little weird to me that my whole existence can be contained in such a small area. There’s a whole big giant world out there, and I subsist almost completely in a pinprick-sized portion of it.

Most of my time is spent at my eight hour a day job, and then another eight hours or so goes towards sleep. My calculator just told me that that leaves me with another eight hours daily to go out and exist in this big crazy world we live in. And I spend a lot of that watching TV. But I do sometimes leave the apartment and venture out. Like, if the power goes out or something.

It’s my relative lack of movement in the outside world that makes me all the more amazed by the fact that I keep seeing the same guy with uncanny frequency. I see him walking around at least once a week. And it began long before I even moved down here. I’ve walked past him, on the other side of the street from him, seen him walking by from the window of my office or some restaurant, driven past him, and almost run into him a few times. He literally must walk continuously around the area for me to have seen him as many times as I have.

The reason I always notice him is because he’s odd looking. Not so odd that anyone would run away screaming or even point and laugh really, but he sticks out. He somewhat short, say 5’6”, in his 50’s perhaps, with what I would call a black pompadour for hair, probably dyed, and always wears unfashionably big sunglasses. He’s very Italian looking, in a retired mob thug kind of way. Two qualities about him really stick out to me more than anything else though. One is that he has extremely long arms and big hands for his body, giving him sort of an apish appearance as he walks because they swing behind him with every step. The other is that he always dresses warmly no matter what the weather. That really bothers me. I can’t personally think of anything worse than going for a long walk and not dressing appropriately for it, especially if it means wearing a long sleeved turtleneck on a sunny 90-degree day. You’d think that as much as this guy walks, he’d check the weather report before leaving his house.

But does he have a house? That’s the question that always naturally pops into my head. Where is he coming from, and where does he go back to…eventually? I forgot to mention that he walks pretty fast, sort of giving the impression that he really has something to do and a place to go, unlike the typical homeless people in the area that merely saunter and wander.

I don’t know why I care, but one day I’d like to follow him. I know that sounds crazy, but if I’m ever out on some Saturday with nothing special to do and he should walk by, I think I’d just like to see where he goes and where he ends up.

Assuming, of course, I’m dressed for it.

I once hit a deer.

It was in a bar, and he was being mouthy. He said crude things to the girl I was with, so I punched him. I’m not proud of it. A brawl broke out, and things got scary when he started ramming me with his antlers. It’s a good thing he was young, as his antlers were quite small.

The police were called, and they arrested him. They let me off with a warning. Even I have to admit that the cops seemed a bit biased in the situation. I even felt a bit guilty as the police car drove away, lights flashing, with the deer tied to the roof.

I heard once that what makes children special isn’t what they don’t know and all the things they aren’t aware of, but the innocent and remarkable ways they interpret everything they see, hear and feel as they experience the world around them. It makes sense. If ignorance equaled cuteness, we would love and adore blondes instead of merely wanting to sleep with them. Likewise, the fact that I don’t know how to ice skate doesn’t make me more endearing; it only makes me not gay.

When I was very little, the first time I saw the crescent moon in the sky, I naturally assumed that it was a floating, bitten-off thumbnail of a giant. I went on believing that for a long time. I remember thinking that the fact that it changed shape and became more circular as the month went on certainly seemed like a strange thing for a giant fingernail in the sky to do, but I just chalked it up to be one of those things a grown up could explain but that I wouldn’t really understand anyway, so I might as well wait until I’m older. There were lots of things like that when I was little.

I’ve long ago gotten over the pride I once felt at learning that the moon is in fact just a big rock floating in space, and furthermore that we’d already landed on it and took a little stroll a few years before I was born. I also regret learning the truth that trolls don’t live under bridges. I mean, not that I want a troll under every bridge or anything. That would really suck for all those people in Oakland that have to commute to San Francisco every day, having to deal with some goblin jumping in front of their cars at any given moment. But I do think the occasional troll living under a small wooden backcountry bridge here and there would kind of perk things up a little, especially if it’s the bridge over the river on the way to grandmother’s house. That would make me feel that amazing things exist in the world. The closest thing to trolls in the real world are the homeless people that I walk by every day at lunchtime, but they only make me feel sad. Although a lot of them probably really do live under bridges.

Why is Paris Hilton the closest thing we have to a princess? Why does our president have to make fairy-tale villains look harmless in comparison? How did pharmaceutical companies take the idea of magic beans and turn it into something so sinister and abused? Why does my personal dragon that I have to slay before I can have my happy ending have to involve resolving debt, and constantly fixing car problems, and never feeling totally at ease with anyone at all really, and just generally never knowing if I’m winning or losing, or even if I’m really in the fight in the first place?

I guess I don’t want to know less than I do. I just wish I could perceive it all in some special way again. Even if I were dead wrong about everything, it would make some beautiful kind of sense, if only to me.