This Thursday we will celebrate Thanksgiving, or as the Native Americans call it “I can’t believe we gave those fuckin’ crackers turkey. What a bunch of schnooks we were.”  If you squint a little bit, you know, just enough so that you can’t really see all the truly terrible shit that happened on this continent after white people arrived (the way you have to do whenever you want to think something nice about America’s past), then Thanksgiving can be a wonderful opportunity to gather with family, watch football and eat pie. Especially pie — nothing goes with genocide like pie! Liberal guilt, colonial attrocities and the pastries of oppression aside, Thanksgiving is neat. For one thing, it’s one of the few non-Jewish holidays that actually gives you a totally gratuitious second day off – unless, of course, you work for a bank or a retail store or a total cheapskate asshole or a theatre (Uhm, yeah, sorry about that guys — Go Team! I’ll be at home if you need me—don’t call before ten.). For one thing, Thanksgiving features my absolute favorite art project- the hand turkey. Even a complete art-tard like myself, a man so artistically inept that his four year old niece only allowed him to color with the white crayon so he wouldn’t fuck up a perfectly good Barbie Princess Pony coloring book, can trace his hand, draw a beak and sign his name in scrawling, kindergarten penmanship. It’s a wonderfully creative expression of holiday joy for the developmentally disabled, the hopelessly senile and me! Thanksgiving also features my all-time favorite condiment- Canned Jellied Cranberry Sauce. There are those people out there who believe that Cranberry Sauce should be some type of “sauce” made from “cranberries”. Freaks. Thank god the rest...

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...