Gratitude in an Ungrateful Year
NEWSFLASH: This year has been rough.
Some look at Thanksgiving as an opportunity to overeat in spectacular fashion with loved ones. Others see the holiday as a colonizer’s attempt to paint the white Pilgrims as wholly benign and continue the drumbeat of imperialism. A few, like atheists on Easter, just see it as another day in the string of days until their demise.
In Chicago, for years, I’d have an actor’s Orphan Thanksgiving, inviting twenty or so thespians who couldn’t go home to visit family. I’d make a huge spread and we’d eat and drink and watch holiday specials conceived of by advertising executives in the sixties.
Today, I’m not as into the piles of starchy goodness and vegetables covered in sauce and sodium as I am drawn to the title of the day: Thanks Giving.
I spend most mornings, in between the first and second cup of coffee, pondering what I am grateful for in my daily grind and so it is on this day as well.
On Thanksgiving 2020, I am thankful that:
Donald Trump is finished as the President. Sure, he’s spinning out his final days in the exact chaotic neutral he has since inaugurated but the days are numbered (as in, there is an exact number of days before he packs his shit in his Chevelle and heads to Florida) and I am quite thankful for it.
Nevada weather. To be able to walk out of my apartment in late November to clear, sunny skies and not have to scrape the snow off of my car is a blessing, man.
I somehow managed to become employed — without any casino experience at all — by a company that kept paying me during the three-month COVID shutdown. I understand how stressful it has been for so many and I’m incredibly grateful for both fate and successful risks that put me in an enviable spot.
David Himmel and LiterateApe.com. Keeps me creative, gives me a podcast (which is just two friends yapping about random stuff), and manages to give me an outlet so I can completely eliminate social media from my daily grind.
My family has been virus free during this horror.
Both my mom and I have Facetime. Every week.
I’m married to an extraordinary soul who is both generous and exacting in equal measure.
We both were featured in a book about Las Vegas by Las Vegas writers which means we, on some metric, have become citizens of Sin City.
Good coffee, strong tobacco, and bracing rye whiskey.
Little packets of honey.
Comfortable shoes.
Days off with Dana.
Hunker down, gang. Wear your mask when you go out. It’s dark out there. Humans fear not so much the absence of light but what lies in wait in those shadows. The thing is that which dwells in the dark was always there in sight. It’s the fear, the anxiety, the frustration that changes the mundane into the arcane.
Practice gratitude because every day you feel a little hurt means you’re still breathing and can still enjoy a solid Hazy IPA and some Korean BBQ. Sack up and prepare for when the light peeks over the horizon because it will get better. It always gets better.
