In Other News…

–The Redheaded Kid brought us delicious chocolate pecan pie.

–And told us that his sister-in-law had her baby a month ago! I guess he’s just failed to mention it in the intervening weeks.

–And he hugged my mom! Who knew the Redheaded Kid touched people?

–And he told us this hilarious story about how his younger brother, who is a grown-ass adult man, refuses to wear pants and has full-body Sonic the Hedgehog pajamas.

–Our friend, TJ knows the most random crap so ages ago I put him in my phone so that I could text him about shit I don’t know. Yesterday, I finally used it–asking him the difference between a pole cat and a skunk. (None.)

–My dad is convinced that he’s seen some weird skunks down here, that he claims are mostly white with black stripes. I think our skunks look pretty much like this. He keeps insisting that he sees out by Percy Priest Lake, alive, and then dead along Old Hickory Boulevard between our house and their motel, this skunk. Which I pointed out is not white with black stripes, and doesn’t live in the area, but my dad says we cannot believe scientists about this.

–You heard it here first, folks. We have white skunks with black stripes in Nashville, but The Scientists are keeping it a big secret to… um… not alert Mexico to the fact that Tennessee is stealing its skunks? Not to incite panic in the nativist skunk population who will be upset at the undocumented skunks? I don’t know. But I will keep you informed as I find out.

–My mom, who is not very political, was telling us about this upsetting lunch she had with two of her friends she used to work with who seemed, from the story, to take her out solely to inform her how Obama was going to round all the farmers up and put them in a prison outside of Kankakee.

–I am constantly amazed at how people’s paranoid fantasies always have them at the heart of it, and yet, they never realize it. We have a big old country and a lot of places a lot more isolated, where “good” Americans wouldn’t ever have to see the Farmer Prison, wouldn’t ever have to even really face that it was happening–if it was, which is it not–and these two think that the Farmer Prison is just going to happen to go right along I-57? Then Obama is the dumbest evil genius ever.

–The Midwest, I love you, but the Farmer Prison isn’t even a real thing and I already feel terrible for the people who have to staff it. If we wanted to keep farmers preoccupied wouldn’t it just be easier to lock all the bathrooms at their local coffee shops?

Happy Thanksgiving

I have a lot to be grateful for this year. Honestly, this has been one of the most amazing years of my life. From the ceiling over my head right now to the amazing book readings of October to the art people made inspired by me to… well, to everything.

As I’ve said before, for a long time, I owed every good thing in my Nashville life to Charles Wolfe, who, rest his soul, was the kind of guy that would have never occurred to. He was just someone who shared his enthusiasms widely and I benefited from it. It’s weird to think about, because it gets right to the heart of the inherent unequalness of these sorts of things. Someone can do so much for you without even knowing it, because from their end, it seems like so little, so not a big deal. I’m sure Charles Wolfe liked me fine but gave me no more than normal thought. He certainly didn’t set out, ever, to make my life awesome.

And so it is, I’m sure, with you guys. You have given me this awesome life, for which I am profoundly grateful. I have no idea if you ever feel the magnitude of that.

But I hope, a little bit, that you do.