Happy Thanksgiving

Tomorrow I will be having Thanksgiving with complete and utter strangers.

There will be one person I know well and two, the hosts, I casually know, but the rest of the guests -- and there should be a total of 10 or more -- are people with whom i am on neither a first, last, nor even World of Warcraft name basis. In such situations, I tend to be very quiet and unobtrusive in a corner of the room -- that is, until it's time for me to say something incredibly stupid -- and yet, unremarkable -- and to hear what sounded hysterical in my head just sort of ... trail off ... into nothingness.

What's better is that many of these people will be in someway connected to the independent film industry. And that means that while they will be discussing whether "2046" was a disappointment or not, I will be searching for a plausible lie to cover for the fact that the last DVD I watched was "Hostel" (but only because "Cool Runnings" was checked out).

And this isn't to say that these people are pretentious in any way: far from it. It is to say that I like to compound my social inadequacies with the Awkward Bomb (It's amazing: you look down at your ring finger, and it has a grenade pin around it. And you say to yourself, "I don't remember saying: 'Brain: Pull it.'").

And to explain it in another fashion: Ladies, remember the 12-year-old fat girl at the dance with the braces and floral print dress, and Gentlemen, remember the 12-year-old who brought his entire collection of Transformers to school one day for no apparent reason and even the History Club stayed away? That's me.

What I'm most worried about, however, is that my friend Cortez (as he sometimes does) will announce, quite drunkenly (as he all the time does) that "Hey, well, yeah, you know" -- BURRRRRP! -- "John's got a ... a ... a blog!"

"Really?"

"Yeah, where's your computer?"

And it will be at that moment that my only hope will be that Irony is not dead but has evolved to some higher plane to something beyond the idea of solids, liquids, and gases.

And it will be at this moment, the one you're at right now, that they will look to me to say whatever comment comes to mind, but instead exclaim, "Where's John?" And notice, for the first time, the door ajar and the bird getting cold.

Today's lesson: A happy Turkey day, all. Stay safe, drunk and wise, and we'll see each other again on Saturday.