The Thankfulness Expansion

A belated happy Thanksgiving to one and all.

I'm very keen on Thanksgiving, truth be told. Seems to me to be a celebration deeply rooted in dead birdflesh and the candying or roasting of every conceivable carbohydrate known to man. So hey - where's the bad?

I'm also quite keen on what might be considered the other point of Thanksgiving -  y'know, the taking of a day to look around and think "Wow...dude, this Being Alive gig pretty much kicks ass!"

That it does this is of course a somewhat boyscout assertion, under constant threat of revision by, when all is said and done, the asshattery of other people. Other people should not, I feel, on the whole, be allowed. Other people frequently go staggeringly far out of their way, apparently with the sole determination in life to be asshats and increase the general - or indeed, sometimes the specific - level of misery in the lives of everyone else they encounter, and most particularly, me.

Sometimes, I will happily grant you, this makes it something of a challenge to look around and see the reasons in your life to be thankful, cheerful and generally upbeat. Or even, if we're honest, not to smash an asshat in the face with a baseball bat.

Life itself, too, sometimes seems to go out of its way to be a kind of cosmological Asshat (it earns the capitalisation due to its majestic and natural bigness). The propensity of people to just die and leave us alone, the surge of wind or water that wipes out lives and memories, the famine, the war, the specific shittinesses of life, tend to make it harder to be upbeat and boyscout about the whole "Being Alive" schtick.

But then, we're not talking about a permanent effort. Just a day. A single day to quote the Rainmakers in my favourite song of theirs - "In spite of everything, it's pretty good to be alive."

I think Thanksgiving would pretty much rock were it not to be so limited a notion. Worldwide Thanksgiving Day would be kinda cool. Couldn't be mandatory of course - the freedom of thankless Scroogey bastards to remain thankless Scroogey bastards should always be maintained. But maybe we should be allowed on that one day to annoy the piss out of them with random and spontaneous acts of kindness. Flashmob kindness in fact - hell, we can organise riots that way, why not kindnesses?

Twitter campaign, anyone?