The Guy Who Hated Thanksgiving

You may think this is going to be some sort of parable or funny story from the title. No and no. On one of my first Thanksgivings in Florida my father and brother were out working shortly before dinner. Their work was towing vehicles, reselling or scrapping them, that sort of thing. They came back to the house obviously moved by something. They'd towed a car in a really poor part of town and talked to some people there, among them the guy who hated Thanksgiving.

He hated Thanksgiving, in fact he hated all holidays, because he was poor and couldn't give his family what they knew so many other families in the U.S. had. I'm not talking about a new X-Box here. I'm talking about food on the table.

I've got some extreme righty beliefs but what I have more of is extreme lefty beliefs (as well as some that fall into neither camp. I've got something to piss off everybody). Among other things, I believe a strong nation needs not only a strong military, but a population that's well fed, as healthy as possible and well educated. We seem to find unending supplies of money for only one of those things. Beyond the interests of national strength, though, there's basic human decency and the desire to ease a person's suffering.

I'm asking everyone who reads this to consider doing something to relieve hunger. If you want to do something on a grand scale, that's wonderful, but I know most of us don't. Tiny things done by many people work wonders as well. I'm not trying to guilt anyone. What I'm trying to say is many of us can give something small so as to not even feel the pain. So why not do it?

Donate a little something to a food charity. Five bucks. One buck. A can of food. Something you won't even feel, but something. Buy food for a homeless person you see on the street. Bake a little something for a neighbor who's seeing hard times. Go play Free Rice for a few minutes. Anything you can do, any little thing that will fill a belly for a few hours is one of the noblest things any one of us can do. And it really does make the world a better place.

Happy Thanksgiving Eve, everyone. I hope you have a fantastic holiday. And if you don't live in the U.S., just have a fantastic Thursday.

130

Just finished and sent out story 130, my first story in nearly two months. That's sobering. Shipped it off to The New Yorker because, like the lottery (not Shirley Jackson's), you can't win if you don't play. And your odds at being published in The New Yorker, as impossible as they may seem, are much better than your odds at winning the lottery.

A Body Is For Driving

Go read my latest story, A Body is for Driving, in Grant Stone's sparkly new fanzine, b0t. http://b0tzine.com/ Its beautiful cover is by Ashley Storrie.

b0t is published as an epub file, meaning you can read it on the plastic reading device of your choice. If that device happens to be a big-ass computer, Firefox has an add-on called, strangely enough, EPUBreader, which works pretty well.

Now go enjoy and you can tell me how wonderful I am later.