[i]
Waking up at 12:40 p.m.
A small bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats with Almond Milk.
I drive out to Norfolk for a Thanksgiving gathering at one of Ana's cousin's house near Ward's Corner. I'm introduced to most of the Filipino family – everybody with bright smiling faces and good cheer. Leah is here too. A plethora of foil trays filled with most anything you can imagine: Mac n cheese, Sweet Potatoes, Mashed Potatoes, Green Beans, Corn on the Cob, Pot Roast, Fish, Pancit Noodles, Rice, Fruit Punch, Apple Cider, Stuffing, Cranberry Sauce, a big ole fat Turkey, etc. After somebody says a prayer we all dig in. I try to sample a little bit of everything. The Apple Pie seems to be the favorite; Ana spent a few hours baking it from scratch last night using a recipe I sent her. The dogs, Luca and Papa, run around our legs staying alert for any fallen food. I feel overwhelmingly tired after eating; I guess from all the different foods my body is trying to digest.
"Let us be grateful to people who make us happy. They are the charming gardeners who make our souls bloom." – Proust
Back home recuperating.
Lifting weights and doing ab workouts. Kevin walks in after just getting off a China Wok dinner shift; he's got a mug of beer in one hand. Not too long after Darren appears. He's in town for Thanksgiving and with a whole lot of stories and ideas to expel off his chest, one of which included a stressful situation for his delivery job at a Chinese place back at Radford and ended up losing over something frivolous. We migrate downstairs and gather around the table in the dining room. I eat some leftovers: Fish, Stuffing, Pancit Noodles, Corn on the Cob, and a Parmesan Bagel. A fuzzy black jumping spider crawls out from under a record. Lo and Kevin trap it in a plastic container and attempt to get it high.
...
Conversations roar with Darren at the pulpit. I mostly listen and just enjoy my dinner and sip on a beer. I mean all I'd have to do is take him into a talk radio studio and hit the record button. He speaks with such conviction and goes on these long, long tangents about pretty much anything that concerns him about the world...
Darren: "It shouldn't even be called the Bible Belt. It should be called the Bible Pillow."
...
In critique of all the college kids he meets at Radford, "I feel like the new class of male is like a fucking pathetic fucking loser. Everybody I meet. It doesn't matter if they're like the jock-ish type or they're like lonely loser computer nerd, they both have the same...'I don't know fucking anything about the world, I've never had any real responsibility in my life ever, I pretty much get everything given to me, or I'm here on a gigantic student loan so fuck it bro! It's just so weird, dude.'"
Richie chimes in, "Technology! That's what it is."
Darren: "You know what I think it is? You know, that male character has changed. MacGyver is not a man's man anymore! Where is the badass and being able to work on your car? I feel like you're not a badass for working on your car anymore. You're a badass if you can afford a ten thousand dollar exhaust system that you paid a professional to install for you on your Japanese import!"
After a few comments on my part he continues, "I feel like there was a day and age where a man built his fortune and he didn't give fuck-all to his kids because fuck them they can earn it themselves, right? But in today's day and age it's just become the children are so fucking entitled they're like 'oh my parents have a shit ton of money therefore I have a shit ton of money' and that is it. You've got so many kids that have carte blanche access to their parent's wallet that they start to feel like they were the ones that built this fortune."
...
"People's wages should not reflect the amount of work that they do. It should reflect the amount of responsibility they have."
...
Then, he hits me with this proposition, "Now just hear me out. I know you blog and shit. But what if this summer when the lease runs out at Chanticleer, if we just started at my aunt's house in Scotland, we got a EuroRail, and we just went from Scotland to China, we went all the way to Shanghai, China and just flew home, right? Maybe I'm just more of like the spontaneous, pizzazz, do it up, this is the shot, this is the scene where we should go, make it hot, make it fresh, blah blah blah. But you are the fucking brains, the lay it down, make sure it gets fucking done, organization, you are the database, and you have a lot of experience. You have the experience of taking your thoughts and feelings and writing them down. I feel like maybe I can make thoughts and feelings and you can make them legible. We'll go on vacation anyway and just Vlog it. You know? People make dumbass travel documentaries and they just fucking go and they do it."
Settling down in my room with another beer and watching Lincoln (2012).
Sleep 3:30 a.m.
[i] All images by me.
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