EDITOR’S NOTE:  Just in case you think your Thanksgiving is going poorly, here’s a re-run of Eric Sim’s Thanksgiving 2011. Our Thanksgiving dinner this year was supposed to be low maintenance and effortless which, as a card-carrying member of the flannel and apathy generation, I seriously appreciated, man. We decided not to cook anything from scratch but to buy and reheat prepared foods from Whole Foods instead. Mind you, we didn’t do this because I’m too lazy and incompetent to cook Thanksgiving dinner, no sir! We did it because I’m too lazy and incompetent to renovate our kitchen (which is much, much worse) and cooking Thanksgiving dinner in that tiny, dysfunctional kitchen would be like trying to have sex with a horse in an airplane bathroom – or, more to the point, it would be like cooking a full Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings in an absurdly small kitchen with an undersized oven and no counter space– which is the hardest fucking thing you could do so it doesn’t need any clever little metaphors to make it seem harder than it is. It’s so hard that, in fact, it makes a really good metaphor for other things that are really hard like- “Damn! Passing that softball sized kidney stone was like cooking Thanksgiving dinner in Eric’s absurdly small kitchen with its undersized oven and no counter space” or “Whew! Fucking that horse in that airplane bathroom sure was tough! As tough as cooking Thanksgiving dinner in Eric’s absurdly small kitchen with its undersized oven and no counter space. Isn’t that right Seabiscuit? Yeah, you like that, boy? That wasn’t no carrot I was feeding you in there, but you sure went to town on it when I dug the spurs in Yee-Haw!” Right,...

Even though I have officially started my third trimester, babies aren’t on my mind.  Instead, I have my doggies on my brain.  Currently my two terrier mixes, Tango and Cash, are my babies, at least for the next three months.  Since I’ve owned them, I have imagined taking them on a family vacation.  Feel free to judge, but I enjoy having them around, so why not when all you are doing is relaxing and having fun? This week we’ll be traveling to Las Vegas with our doggies.  I would say this is probably not the best city to go to with pets, but circumstances made it be so we are going to have fun with it.  We are going to see shows for the weekend and staying at Caesar’s Palace, which now has a really nice pet policy that you can check out here.  The one down side is I have viewed their “run” area and even my parents’ 8lb maltese wouldn’t have enough space to play in the strip of grass provided.  I am actually wondering if my two medium dogs (one 35lbs and one 45lbs) would both fit in it to poop at the same time.  No matter, when it comes to the late night potty break it will work nicely. My dogs are generally easy going.  They love people (except Cash who is scared, but not vicious) and they love dogs even more.  However, on our last trip up to LA our dogs displayed some major anxiety over being in crowds.  While dining in The Grove they barked and sometimes growled at people and dogs that they deemed threatening.  It got to the point that we wouldn’t let strangers pet them (not even celebrities, like Patti Stanger who ogled over our...

Jerry Garcia died the day I left Albany for good, August 9, 1995. In an apparent murder-suicide, he took my childhood with him. (NOTE TO MILLENNIAL FUCKWADS: I don’t want to hear how old you were in 1995. Whether you were in Middle School, Elementary School or Diapers, I don’t want to know about it. And wipe that patronizing “listening to Grampa Simpson tell his Lollapalooza Mosh-Pit Stories for the 10,000th Time” smirk off your soul-patched, hipster side-burned, weasely little face. As far as I’m concerned, you’re the suckers who showed up too late to the Great Global House Party of cheap gas, music videos and nuclear anxiety that was the 20th Century and arrived just in time to mop up the puke, save the polar bears, and recycle our empties to pay for healthcare. Have fun with that, kids. Hey- if you’re lucky, maybe you can scrape out a little resin ball of Contentment from the huge bowl of Prosperity we smoked last century. That was some gooooood shit.) Anyhow, I always felt like by dying right as I left my hometown for the Big City, that Jerry was looking out for me, protecting me from myself. It’s like he was saying: “Hey man, I know you’re moving to New York to follow your dreams and that’s groovy and all, but it’s going to suck major dog-balls for the first few years, so, if you don’t mind, I’m just going to go ahead and die That way, while you’re telemarketing credit cards to old people who can barely afford the minimum payment, or cleaning toilets in comedy clubs for stage time and tips, or getting turned down for that sweet job at Brookstone (fucking personality test- I was this close before they made...