“Spleenful” is another great word. Add that to your list, along with “slugabed” and “sesquipedalian.” See? I’m thankful for something — awesome words. But today is not a day for thanks, oh, no. The name of the day is Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving. Which means I’ve given all my thanks away. I had them. I had them in a basket. They were wrapped up in a pretty red bow. They smelled nice. Fragrant. Like lavender and lemongrass. But then I went and handed them out, and now I have nothing. I have an empty basket, and that basket is at present a sucking, vexing void. It is the basket not of the happy gobbling turkey, but instead it is the basket of that shrieking beast, the cranky Thanksgiving Pterodactyl. The Pterodactyl drops the empty, hateful basket in my lap.

The basket is oblivion.

It is filled with anti-thanks.

So, I share them with you.

These are the things for which I am totally not at all thankful.

Fuck these things. Fuck them right in their ears.

Let’s begin.

Cancer

I figure, go big or go home, right? So, let’s open big. Cancer sucks.

Cancer is a boring worm chewing its way through much of my family. If someone dies in my family? Probably cancer. (Which gives you a nice predictor for me: how am I going to die? Probably cancer. That, or my head’ll get cleaved in twain by an unruly ostrich foot because frankly, I’m always fucking with ostriches.) It’s coming up on two years now that Dad died, and others in the family have cancer now, too.

Cancer — technically “malignant neoplasm” — kills some 13-15% of people worldwide.

That being said, I’m not sure if people know what cancer even is. At it’s core, cancer is obviously “cells gone bad,” which is far less sexy than “girls gone bad,” as it features far fewer ladies making out with one another on top of pool tables. But some seem caused by viruses, others caused by environmental carcinogens, others still are caused by hereditary issues or gene mutations… shit, were you to tell me, “Cancer is caused by goblins,” I’d have to concede a knowing, suspicious nod. In fact, fuck it. Let’s just get it over with and call cancer the “Goblin Particle.” You come back from the doctor, and you say, “I got the Goblin Particle but bad. Goblins are all over my colon. It’s Helm’s Deep in there, but it’s deep deep. I don’t know if I’m going to make it.” Then, when you die, they say, “Shit, man, he finally lost his battle with the Goblins.” And everyone nods solemnly, and pours a little on the curb for our lost warrior, you who perished beneath the infected claws of the Underhorde, yet still dying with honor. Because you were fighting Goblins.

Alternately, you want to go a different metaphor, you might go with “terrorists.” I mean, here we are, constantly discovering that Terrorists Walk Among Us and we didn’t even know it, right? It’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers up in this bitch. Terrorists seem normal until one day they take out the 7-11 and all the Slurpie Guzzlers contained within. Or it’s like school shootings, or postal freakouts. They go rogue, just like how normal cells in the body suddenly flip shit and start gunning everybody down (appropriate too how terrorists gather in cells — huh? huh?).

Point is, cancer is a big fuckin’ asshole. Plus, the darkest reality is it’s probably something we’re doing to ourselves. Your rarely read news that says that cancer is caused by something in nature. “Oh, hell, today they discovered that cancer is caused by sparkling clean drinking water. And puppies!” No, it’s always that we’re putting some kind of evil plastic in our baby bottles, or we’re feeding rubber tires to our milking cows, or that our laser printers emit some kind of invisible ink cloud that launches goblins into our lungs. Our Western lifestyle is a right fucker, and it’s probably going to kill us. Cancer in that way is maybe our way of exterminating ourselves — not individually, not necessarily, but as the decision of an entire species. Like maybe we got together in our dreams one night and simply agreed on, “Let’s bombard our lives and our world with chemicals, and see how long it takes for us to wither and die on the vine. Let’s spray our babies with pesticide and line our colons with industrial lubricant and bomb our clouds with microwaved pharmaceutical waste!”

Then again, maybe it’s just the ostriches. Maybe they’re cursing us with their dark ostrich magicks. That’s magic with a k, which means it’s for real.

Eggplant

I know, I’m an asshole — somehow, I’m capable of putting “cancer” and “eggplant” on the same Axis of Evil. But, fuck it. Eggplant is for jerks. (Plus, Thanksgiving is a food holiday, so it seems only fitting to list a food.)

I’ve come to terms with many of the foods I once disliked. I love fish. While I won’t do tomatoes raw (and insist that in that form they will dick up a sandwich something fierce), I do concede that in nearly all forms tomatoes are a godsend. Hell, I used to loathe raisins. I detested them the way you detest pimples or Sumerians. (In college someone once stuffed my mailbox full of raisins. Be aware, saboteur, soon as I find out who you are, I will stuff your mouthbox with my fist.) But even now, what do I sometimes eat? Raisins. That’s right. I’m over it. I’m good.

And yet, eggplant is still anathema to me.

Oooh! Eggplant, I hate you! Eggplant isn’t even a vegetable. It’s a fruit. A berry. A berry of… what family? Oh, right, the nightshade family. Nightshade being a poison and all, this surprises me in no way, shape or form. I recall sitting at the dinner table across from my father, who often insisted I clean my plate like any father, and he told me to eat the eggplant in no uncertain terms. I explained to him that I would throw up, but my father was not a bargaining man. I ate them. I vomited. That was the last time he forced me to eat anything off my plate. Goddamn nightshade.

Taste-wise, it’s bitter and unpleasant. Or, put more poetically, it tastes like a squirrel just shit in my mouth. It’s like a squash gone bad. It has minimal health benefits, and weirder still, possess nicotine and histamines. Plus, just look at the damn thing. It’s dark. Shadowy. The short squat ones look like demon eggs, and the big long ones look like truncheons wielded by the Armies of Satan.

Eggplant, you are the bane of the vegetable community. You are the culinary equivalent of a balloon filled with roofing tar. I loathe you. Anyone who eats you should be considered suspect.

Frankly, eggplant is probably what causes cancer, let’s just be honest.

Winter

Winter is coming, and I could not be sadder. I get why animals hibernate. It’s not some kind of biological function, it’s just because — well, fuck winter. Why subject yourself to that? Just crawl into a cave, your belly full of meats and root vegetables and chocolate, and pass out under an electric blanket for the duration. Since winter is basically the year’s own version of nighttime, it makes sense to me. Just sleep it off, little bear buddies.

Maybe if I lived somewhere where winter was serious, it’d be cool? Utah or Colorado or something — big dramatic snows, swift melts, skiers, Yetis, sherpas, all that shit. But no. I live in Pennsylvania. Winter consists of a few big snows, lots of little ices, and a ceaseless parade of damp, cold, gray days. Every day is like one hazy, unfulfilling nap. The color is sucked out of the world by some invisible vampire. Things are dead. I mean, listen, Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Years are all well and good, but those things are essentially still in autumn. Winter itself is that yawning gap between January and March, that nowhere-nothing verboten zone. It is the Wasteland, and in it, we are the Hollow Men.

Trust me, I intend to be one of those old dudes who escapes winter by fleeing to some tropical or semi-tropical clime. Every winter is the winter of my discontent. Last winter we fled to Hawaii for a week, and it was the best thing ever. January! With 70 degree weather! And orchids! And sun, sweet merciful sun! Of course, coming back was like re-entering the atmopshere after surfing the Aurora Borealis on a Space Pony — we got back home and it had snowed and iced and gotten colder. Still. What a respite, and a much-needed charging of batteries.

Screw you, Old Man Winter. Screw you big.

“The News”

Note the quotation marks.

Do you watch the news? Do you read the news? Do you believe you’re actually getting All News? Then you may be oxygen-starved. Check on that.

Let me thumb you in the eye with sharp truth: news is entertainment. This is particularly true of any so-called news you get on TV. They have to sell advertising. They sell advertising by gaining viewers. They gain viewers by exploiting, titillating, exaggerating. Facts are lost. Data is manipulated or ignored. Agendas on both sides of the political divide are plain. You don’t have to look far back in time for the evidence of this: Fox News has had their recent, erm, “mistakes” (riiiight, mistakes). Or what about that dude who Isn’t Really In A Coma? The media’s been touting how he’s been communicating, which according to James Randi (noted skeptic) is basically a charlatan’s act. (Randi isn’t disputing that the guy isn’t in a coma, by the way, only that the facilitated communication is highly suspect.)

Half the time I look at the news, I see barely any story, and a frenzy of “analysis.” I don’t want analysis. At least not up front. Not with my news. I want facts. “Yolanda jumped over the fence” is a fact. “Yolanda jumped over the fence likely because she is infested with fence-jumping toe parasites, or maybe she’s just depressed” is analysis. Save the analysis for its own weird little corner of the world. Don’t mix.

The other thing our so-called news is good for is stirring — or outright concocting — false debate. The reason why we’re suddenly having a surge against science and reason is in part because the news is happy to whip up the fake debate. They’re more than happy to give the Vocal Minority the Very Loud Microphone so that it seems like the booming voice is representative of millions of people, not the four Jesus-addled meth addicts in an Airstream trailer. Arguments over evolution, “nutrition science,” vaccines, the health care debate, Obama’s goddamn birth certificate — these are all false debates. They are debates that are not debates. This shit ain’t news, people. This is entertainment.

It’s a weird world when we get greater fact checking from Snopes-dot-com and The Daily Show than we do from our actual news.

Sad that we don’t have an American equivalent to the BBC.

So, fake-ass punk-ass news? I am not thankful for you.

Ptoo. I spit in your hair.

Poser Cable Channels

And that leads me to: cable channels that don’t show the shows they’re supposed to.

Examples:

MTV (Music Television) does not have music.

The only thing I “learn” from TLC (The Learning Channel) is to engage in Hercules-strength birth control.

History Channel thinks I need to have reality shows featuring pawn shops, truckers, and loggers.

Sci-Fi is now SyFy, rebranding itself into utter ambiguity.

Note that this isn’t true for all cable channels. Discovery actually still allows me to discover things — Mythbusters, Dirty Jobs, Time Warp, these are all entertaining shows, but I actually come away with information and appreciation. Comedy Central still shows comedy (at least, by most definitions). I don’t see shows on the Food Network about hunting the Chupacabra.

I mean, what the hell is up with all this exploitative bullshit programming? Why does Animal Planet want me to engage in cryptozoology? Why does the History Channel or the Travel Channel and the SyFy Channel and A&E all think I need television shows about goddamn ghosts? All these dillholes wandering around dark hallways with electromagnetic asshole detectors, jumping at every noise and voiding their bowels?

At least History still shows some really good historical programming, and at least Animal Planet is largely about actual animals rather than Unicorn Hunter University or whatever they put on Saturday nights. But TLC? Man, TLC. What the hell, dude? Every time I turn it on, it’s midgets on tractors or tattooed people or eight-year-old pageant sluts and their insane parents. Never mind the fact that TLC is the home to Jon and Kate Plus The Spawn of Hate, or their ever-enduring quest to find families with larger and larger litters. “It’s Buck and Stacy Plus Their 72 Preemies!” It’s an apocalypse of babies over there.

(For the record, that is the correct term. A school of fish, a parliament of owls, a murder of crows, and an apocalypse of babies.)

Still, the worst is probably MTV. MTV, oh how far you’ve fallen. Once a station whose opinion was actually important, once a station that concerned itself with social issues, once a station that played actual music. Anyone remember when Real World showed… semi-real people? Some dude wants to be a comedian, another dude wants to be a comic book artist, whatever? Sure, the drama was probably false and the participants still were occasionally Vapid Young People, but they seemed to want things, they seemed to be faintly human. Now it’s drunk, fighty 18-20-year-olds, all basically clones of the last batch. Empty-skulled bucket-heads, to the last. I think right now the only worthwhile show on MTV is True Life, and even then that show still doesn’t play music (an essential quality of any station inserting the word “music” and “television” in its name, but what the hell do I know?).

It’s sad, really. I know the day is coming when Comedy Central starts showing syndicated episodes of like, Gray’s Anatomy and when the Food Network offers some reality show where people compete to have sex with a grizzly bear. Lowest common denominator programming will rule the day like clumsy, crack-addled dinosaurs. We will be crushed beneath it and made extinct.

Oh, All Right, Thanks

Fine, fine, yes, it’s been mostly a pretty good year, and I’m thankful for all that, and I’m thankful to my wife above all others, for she puts up with my dumb-ass. I’m sure if I looked around the Internet hard enough I’d find her secret blog, and on it would be an Anti-Thanks list, and I’d be at the top under the header: “My Husband Is Basically A Dumbass.”

What I’m trying to say is, Happy Thanksgiving, people. Enjoy your turkey. Avoid the pterodactyl.

Feel free to comment here and tell me about the things for which you are most anti-thankful. Or, if you’re so chipper and cheery, those things for which you’re thankful. I don’t care. Surprise me.