There’s no way I can come up with a worse post title.
At the end of today I hope to be eating from one of those mutant birds you only ever see at a Lions’ Thanksgiving Day game: a Frankenfood monstrosity sporting six legs and the gleaming brown formica carapace of turkey skin baked to crispy recondite invulnerability, and somewhere in the background Matt Millen is crying. Because only winners get to eat from the Six Legged Beast of Famine and Doom and Thanks, and Matt Millen is no winner.
Victory, in other words. I want it with a side of gravy.
Even if victory doesn’t come, though, I have to be pretty grateful I’m even in Tempe to watch USC take on Arizona State and its gang of mercenaries, of which there is only one member and he is named Dennis Erickson. I could still be in Brazos County, or decomposing in a swamp in Louisiana, or frozen to a flagpole in Kalamazoo, or chalking up the buildings of Morgantown with the fine white residue of my ashes. Instead I am here in Arizona celebrating Thanksgiving with my family and the usual complement of contentedly sedate looking USC fans.
Thank you to everyone who has: sheltered me, fed me, got me drunk, given me directions, helped me financially, provided a ticket, waved an angry fist in my defense, told others that “he’s cool, don’t punch him”, introduced me to a female acquaintance, shown me around town, driven me anywhere, picked me up from a number of places, asked about the condition of my car and my psyche, offered life and/or college football advice, striven to dispel local stereotypes, fully confirmed local stereotypes, let me play my first game of Halo 3, waved me off with only a warning to not speed in the state of Kansas or Ohio, pointed me towards the best watering hole in the county, not arrested me and thrown me into County, been, generally speaking, a decent human being unaffected by the miasma and cynicism of life in 2007 America and thus willing to take a chance on a strange guy from California who just wants to know if there’s anything to do in town on a Tuesday night besides go to the library, and, hey, why don’t you just crash at my place? Just don’t kill me or steal my XBox 360.
Which is a request I got quite often. So, hey!: I didn’t kill you or steal your XBox 360, and you didn’t harvest my organs.
Thanksgiving!
82 Sluggo Win 