Bramble Tamble

Some nights, I end my day with a couple of hours of Scrabble online (scrabulous.com). Last night was one of those nights, but this post isn’t about Scrabble. Rather, remember back about one post ago when I said that I didn’t feel like discussing, debating or defending much of anything anymore?

So, I’m playing Scrabble last night, minding my own business, working to find a place to use “sonatas” (and, ultimately, failing), when someone in the lobby makes mention of Canada’s Thanksgiving, which I guess is today. No biggie, happy Thanksgiving to my Canadian friends and all that. Warm fuzzies abounded for a moment, and made me look forward to the American Thanksgiving in November.

Until, that is, some woman chimes in, “Thanksgiving symbolizes our ancestors’ mass slaughter of cultures.”

Sigh.

That pressed just the right buttons on my psyche. Fully aware of what I was stepping into, I replied, “I thought that Thanksgiving symbolized, you know, the giving of thanks.”

Oh no. It symbolizes the white man’s oppression and slaughter of other cultures that they deemed inferior. We need to think about this and not celebrate that holiday, because we’re all in this together, white, black, red, yellow. According to her, anyway. Me – trying to live day-to-day, paycheck-to-paycheck – it doesn’t warm my cockles any to think that we’re all trying to make it on this big blue ball floating in space. I have bigger fish to fry than “I’d Like To Buy The World A Coke.”

(Hey, check it out. I said “cockles” and “big blue ball” in the same sentence without meaning it dirty.)

“Oh geez,” I said. “Off your high horse. I never should have opened my mouth.”

“Sad atitude,” (sic) she said. “I wrote a book about it seven years ago. It was a best-seller.”

Yeah, I bet it was a real page-turner. I love me some light summer reading. (Although, if she can’t spell “attitude,” it surprises me that she was still able to poop out a book. She must have had a very forgiving editor, or is a fucking liar - what are the odds?)

(This would have been the perfect time to whip out the old Bob Knight quote about journalists. “Most of us learn to write in the 2nd grade and then move on to bigger and better things.” I love that.)

Then some other dude asked her where she lived, and she said that while she lived in St. Pete, FL now, she just moved back from Spain, and prior to that, she lived in Paris. And then came the topper:

“I like to live in a country for about 6-12 months. You know, really absorb the culture.”

I had dropped out of the conversation, because I don’t take part in stupid dumbass debates with some numbnutted animal-humping liberal halfwit who feels our dead relatives’ pain – as I said in my previous post, it’s just a bunch of wasted breath. But this was too delicious.

“*sniff*,” I wrote mockingly. “I like to move about every 6-12 months to hide from creditors and annoy the neighbors. You know, really absorb the trailer park.”

I think she had already gone to bed by that point, but my comment garnered giggles from other folks in the room, including the Canadian folks who were equally offended by her dumbassery.

But my God, that’s just ridiculous. I guess it’s a matter of priorities, though. Some normal, sane people like to take the time to celebrate holidays with their families and enjoy the turkey and watch some football and enjoy one another’s company to an extent. And other functionally retarded people feel survivor’s remorse for things that happened 500 years ago. Doesn’t make you a deeper, more thoughtful person if you feel that way. In fact, it makes you pretty shallow, cause dead people don’t give a shit if you feel their pain.