Control control control control control control control

This story appears in my book We Had It Coming

I had been sick for a couple of days feverish and chilled and incapable of experiencing joy although that third one wasn’t exactly new for me. I took a Covid test that came up negative and not long after was like oh right. I experienced the very dumb epiphany that a person can just at any time for no reason become ill in the very standard manner that had fallen out of fashion there for a few years.

On the morning of Thanksgiving it was negotiated that I would stay home instead of heading down to the shore to dine with my in-laws and I felt something like loss mingled with excitement at least in part on account of the potential Kevin McCallister scenarios.

More than any of that though I felt relieved of a burden considering how eating-based holidays like this are a driver of exceptional dread for people like me. 

Every holiday is eating-based I suppose but this is the big one. The Super Bowl of binging. The normal Super Bowl is also the Super Bowl of binging but you follow me.

So instead of feeling morose that I’d be spending the first Thanksgiving of my entire life alone it felt like a reprieve in that I would not have to eat and eat and eat right there in front of my wife’s cousins and God and everyone.

One doesn’t have to but one does anyway you know? How you drink more deeply and lustily when there’s an open bar. It costs something sure but it’s nonetheless free. 

Then when that brief high wore off later I remembered that I would have to at least eat a little bite of something at some point and that we didn’t have anything in the house besides expiring vindaloo. On top of the lack of food if I’m honest was the absence of anything to drink which was an amateur mistake on my behalf in terms of preparedness. One of the first things they teach you as a New England townie is which days the package stores are closed on account of the Puritans’ centuries old shame.

Also how you can’t buy scratchies with a debit card. That one was a good call at least. 

After a couple hours of football-based sloth I walked up to the packy and thought I’d buy some of the disgusting holiday flavored Polar soda waters they have out now and then sneak a six pack into the transaction like a nervous teenager disguising his condoms but they clocked me instantly and rudely to be frank. It was as if they saw me coming a mile away. 

Then it was like now what. 

I went home and drank my Pomegranate Champagne Soda and started calling around figuring maybe the Chinese places in the area would be open and then worried I was racist for thinking that.

Eventually in my research I saw that this Frank Sinatra-ass suburban golf dad steakhouse with the $60 filet and the $20 green beans was open and so feeling somewhat better now health- and outlook-wise I drove twenty minutes over there along the stretch through the desiccating marshes and found a seat at the bar next to a fifty something couple that looked drunk enough to be planning on fucking each other when they got home but also drunk enough that they might be too drunk to follow through with it by the time they got there. Drunk enough too that they were one hundred percent going to break a glass before they left. 

I ordered a Negroni that came out at roughly a half a pint and drank from its medicine and all of a sudden I wasn’t sick anymore. It was a holiday miracle. A very bad lesson for me to learn. 

I asked them to bring me a plate of Rhode Island style calamari that arrived soon with the hot peppers and the marinara and the half of a lemon inside of the mesh places like this give you so you can squeeze it all over and I poked my fork around the dish to give the gin at least something to contend with inside of my guts. 

It was unclear to me if I was underdressed here. Half the people were millionaires and half were going to be dead within two years and looked like it so I didn’t need to impress them. 

I looked at my phone and read a thread pushing back against the suddenly commonplace idea that queer people and the left are all groomers. 

It went on for a while but the salient point for me was about conservatives throughout history “...systematically lying about groups people are already socially authorized to dislike…”

That’s a sentence that put some things I’ve been thinking about into focus. It has for every single day that I’ve been alive been socially acceptable to either mock or villainize or place a target on the heads of people who are simply agitating for a more equitable and less predatory organization of society.

Even expressing such a wish for a better world has always been seen as de facto comical. The musings of a hybrid goofy romantic or would-be authoritarian in the way that the right always characterizes their enemies as both weak and all-powerful at once.

Then I had some of the newly presented cup of corn chowder that was thicker than crude oil and must have been two thousand calories per spoonful and hated myself for it and I read another tweet that went something like:

“In America, victims of mass shootings aren’t even guaranteed thoughts and prayers anymore.”

That seemed profound to me but now a couple days later thinking about it again I don’t think it’s true. I think the thoughts and prayers are still proffered it’s just that the right has given up on the pretense of lying about the specific content of those thoughts and prayers.

You can speak clearly about what you believe and want to happen to your political enemies when you are on the right in America but you cannot do so from the left. You have to be cute about it. Always thus but even more so now.

I thought back to a conversation I had with a friend a couple years ago on the case for the left arming themselves.

“In a lot of this discussion around arming the left it’s not an offensive posture, it’s a defensive one. For example, if twenty of us showed up trying to scrap with the cops, that’s twenty funerals. It’s stupid. But if we’re at a protest and twenty of us are there open-carrying, not causing any issues, just establishing a presence, the cops are going to act differently when they try to come toward the protestors we’re trying to protect.”

I am not going to get a gun to be clear. Only in part because of shit like this study I read that said “people who live with handgun owners are shot to death at a higher rate than those who don’t have such weapons at home.”

“We found zero evidence of any kind of protective effects” from living in a home with a handgun the Stanford researcher said.

After that I read some of a story about how tumultuous the Colorado Springs shooter’s childhood was and thought hmm me too but I just got into comic books and loud music and sports instead of going out and killing everyone.

Just now I went and looked back at notes I took during a conversation with my mother a few months ago so I could answer some questions my therapist had about my childhood. This part stood out:

"He sat there with a gun to your head. I don't know how much you remember. But you lived in a trauma filled world. He never physically abused you. He was abusive to me. But as a result our household was full of trauma. He was gone shortly after the episode with the gun but continued to terrorize our home. Burned down the guest house. Police constantly coming by. Does a two year old absorb that? Maybe?"

Maybe!

There was a crash and a squeal and sure enough the couple next to me had broken a martini glass. The biggest hunk was jutting out of the sopping bar mats like a jagged rock formation. The type of thing you could kill yourself on if you weren't careful. The veteran bartender in his vest and bowtie who was visibly desperate for his shift to be over said don’t touch it I’ll do it. 

Do not touch it he said again sternly but kindly and then they paid and left and drove home drunk to wherever it is these people drive home to. Lincoln, Massachusetts probably. Wayland perhaps. Weston. 

I guess we'll never know if they ended up boning or not. 

I drunk drove home myself not long after and realized I was missing my own family at this point. All of my family. Family I wasn't even meant to have seen one way or another today. I read a bunch of the typical posts about Thanksgiving Uncles and it dawned on me that I was lucky to never really have that kind of uncle. All me and my uncles ever really talk about is how insane my grandmother made us all and how cool it was to go see Santana all the time in the seventies. 

I posted something to that effect when I got home and someone shared a video of Santana playing Soul Sacrifice at Woodstock and it just consumed me for the next hour.

Everyone in the band is five seconds away from collapsing but just so in the pocket and on the moon at the same time.

I read a YouTube comment:

“The whole band is battling quantum realities but the drummer is keeping the portal open.”

I looked back again at the notes from the talk with my mother. 

"It was from an early age. The last time you were comfortable in your body was maybe 12."

Somewhere around my seventh watch through the Santana video my wife arrived home bearing plates of Thanksgiving leftovers and I thought nooo I was so close to pulling off calorie deficit Thanksgiving. I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for the stupid stubborn care of my loved ones. 

I had this pointless daydream about not eating any of it. I pictured myself going to bed not having microwaved an overflowing plate of stuffing and bird drenched in gravy and potatoes and squash and green beans and roll after roll and it was such a nice little fantasy to live inside of for a little while. To imagine myself the type of person who wouldn't have to do that. What it must feel like to be in control of something. Even if it’s only your own body.