You're Welcome, Homeless Orphans the commune's Omar Bricks will pass the gravy when he's damn well done with it
Monday, Nov. 12, 2001
Every year around this time I get a lot of mail from readers asking about the
holidays. It seems like everyone’s got a question on their mind like: “If you
run over a kid with your car on Halloween, and you’re dressed as a giant baby,
can you still be tried as an adult?” or “Is there a statute of limitations on
stealing thirty turkeys?” or “Omar, I think you got my sister pregnant at the
Christmas party last year.” Unfortunately, I can’t answer every question
personally, since as Twain said, “Time is money,” and nobody’s sent a valid
cashier’s check or money order along with any of their questions so far.
(Incidentally, the answer to all three questions above is “It depends on
which state you’re in.” That’s a freebie to get you started.) But this year
I thought I’d do a column answering some questions about the holidays, since
all I’ve had going on lately is jury duty and I can’t tell any of my hilarious
court stories here until they fry that pigfucker.
So anyway, last week I was at the courthouse on a Bicardi break during this
big-shot trial I was telling you about. (And like I said, I can’t discuss
the details
or who it is or whatever, but suffice it to say this is one guy won’t be
buying his wife any hats any time soon. Because she’s dead, and also because
he cut her head off with a chainsaw. And also because he’s a cheap bastard...
and also because his name is Steve. That’s all I can tell you though.) While
I was on my break, I ran into commune research editor Griswald Dreck out in
the hallway. Turns out he was on the jury for a trial down the hall, something
about this chef at a restaurant who was putting Comet in everything, he was a
crazy bastard or some shit like that. Anyway, while we were on break we
started talking about the upcoming holidays, and how those dumb-assed
Canadians don’t even know what month Thanksgiving is in. And that got us
started on where the holidays came from and who thought to cram all that bread
up the turkey’s ass or if that was an accident the first time. It turned out
that Griswald knew a lot about this kind of stuff, and it dawned on me that I
could probably hash out a column on the origins of the holidays during some of
those long-winded eyewitness testimonies.
We all know the story of Thanksgiving that they taught us in school, about how
the Pilgrims came over on the Mayflower and ate the Indians and we should be
thankful that Inidans taste pretty much like chicken, or else there would have
been trouble since the Pilgrims didn’t think to bring any Tabasco sauce with
them from England. Turns out this is really a crock that they taught us as
kids so we wouldn’t ask too many questions or complain if they served Indian
in the cafeteria.
Griswald clued me in on the real story, which goes like this: the Pilgrims
were all Puritans from England, a radical religious cult who wouldn’t wear
white wigs like everyone else and instead wore green ones, like it says in
the bible. They were pissed off at the king for not getting their royalty
payments on sales of oatmeal, which they needed to pay for all of their wig
dyes and the printing of their “The End is Near: Eat More Oatmeal” shirts and
their huge stockpile of muskets. Just when they were about to get all of the
back-payments straightened out they suffered a huge setback when the
Puritan’s lawyers and the king’s lawyers were all thrown into the sea during
the Great Lawyer Dunk of 1643. The Puritans decided that screw it, they were
moving to America, where the squahs were easy and all of the streets were
paved with shell beads. So they sold their wigs and changed their name to
“The Pilgrims” to keep from being made fun of in the new world.
The Pilgrims actually came over on three ships: The El Nino, The Fredo and The
Challenger, the last of which blew up half-way here because they’d picked that
ship to carry all the fireworks for the 4th of July party. The El Nino and The
Fredo made it to America though, which was known at the time as West London.
The Pilgrims settled and assimilated into the local culture, but they were sad
because all of their sports teams were getting their asses kicked by the
Braves and the Redskins and Indians and all that (this is before the Yanks
had Mussina, BTW) and they didn’t have any food and they were all sleeping in
this old Camero at night. And so the Indians held a food drive and brought
them some cans of green beans and butter squash and some other stale shit
they wanted to get out of their teepees. And now everybody was happy,
except for the Pilgrims who had to eat that nasty canned shit. The Indians
had ribs and hot wings and some bitchin’ stuffing with sausage in it and they
drank and watched football while the Pilgrims had to sit at the kids’ table
and they couldn’t even have any of the lousy fruit salad with marshmallows in
it until they’d eaten all of their asparagus spears and other inedible soggy
crap. So the first Thanksgiving really sucked the big tit but the Pilgrims had
the last laugh because along with all of their knick-knacks and ugly-assed
hats and Big Ben and the other shit they brought over from England, they also
brought rats and mosquitoes and the plague, and the Indians hadn’t had their
shots since they were away for a pow-wow or something on that day in school,
so they all died. Except for Crazy Horse, who was off carving his face in a
rock and babbling about the CIA and mind-control beams from the moon.
So every year we celebrate Thanksgiving to give our thanks that we’re not
eating any of that mushy canned shit, except for hobos and orphans and people
like that, but if they had a wall to hang a calendar on to know it was
Thanksgiving, they wouldn’t be homeless in the first place, so it’s kind of a
tough shit kind of thing for them.
Griswald also told me the story of the first Halloween, but right then this
great big fat guy in the hall fell right on this ice cream cone he was
carrying, and we were laughing so hard I think we both forgot where Halloween
came from. It had something to do with giving out candy to keep people from
dying on your lawn during the plague or something, trust me you’re not
missing a lot there.
Not long after that our break was over and we had to go back to deciding the
fates of the damned. It’s demanding work, but hell, I made four dollars and
got to dress up as a judge for a while, so I’m not complaining. Okay, before
we go I’ll take a second to answer three more reader questions: “No”, “Yes”,
and “Use the whole fist.” I hope all of you out there in commune territory
live it up this Thanksgiving and don’t forget to give something nasty from
your cupboards to those less fortunate than you. Bricks out.
Milestones
the commune's scratch 'n sniff look at last year's office potluck
Opportunities
Pants a Capitalist
Free Virus Baggies
Take a Kitten, Please
the commune book selections
the commune's Bear in Rearview
the commune's Big Book of Duke
Faces of the commune
the commune 100: Leaders and Revolutionaries
the commune 100: Traitors and Noodledicks
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Site Map's Somewhere in the Glovebox |
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Terms of Gary Busey |
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