This year, I spent Thanksgiving away from family and with friends who might as well be family. We had a great dinner (for which I supplied the requisite side: cornbread dressing), which was accompanied by good food, drinks, company, Trivial Pursuit (90’s edition) and the Cowboys beating the Jets 34-3.
New York is an interesting scene on Thanksgiving in that it actually gets quiet for a day. It’s not quite Will Smith in the I Am Legend previews that have been lynching the TV lately but still a little eerie and suspicious when you’re walking around the city. Of course if you’re out for a more typical 4am curfew, you can greet the Black Friday shoppers arriving in the city and lining up ready to feed at the trough.
Walking down Broadway through the 20s the next day, I noticed some sketchy-looking guys putting out boxes of random retail product on the sidewalk to move. A crowd would collect around each one until it was sold out and the ravenous shoppers would move on to the next one. It could have been socks or iPhones, but I think just the prospect of getting a deal — never mind how the product came to be in an unmarked shipping box on the street — was enough to attract customers.
My own consumerist thirst - which is rarely quenched - has never been enough to get me out on Black Friday not to mention enough to scope out the Red Hot deals I witnessed on Broadway Ave. For that, I am thankful. And a short list of other stuff like my 5 senses and my health, my family and friends, my career and employment.
Oh and I am also thankful for Dennis Franchione’s resignation, delivered in the press conference immediately following Texas A&M’s win over Texas for the second year in a row.
Texas fans will be quick to point out how that win is nothing compared to a National Championship that they won in 2005 against USC with Vince Young, blah blah blah… But in a year in which Missouri is the #1 team in the nation going into the Big 12 Championship game as an underdog to #8 Oklahoma — not to mention A&M’s mediocre season — you take what you can get.
I was just listening to Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas