The post Halloween season for me has always been a royal drag.

The holiday of Halloween heralds for me the end of the autumn fun. It's a New Orleans funeral, as it were, filled with the extremes of human behavior, creativity, lust, anarchy, a final bonfire of the vanities before the drudgery of winter. My soul dances in the fading shades of gold taunting Death until the Shadows fall. During the Halloween Time. I fill up my convertible with pumpkins and deliver them to my friends who have children. I watch the dogs at the park romp through piles of leaves. The best part - the entire color palette of Nature around me - from the sunlight to the color of the trees completely shifts into something new and completely saturated. I love it. And, as with any other "la petit mort", it is over all too quickly.

For the past three weeks, I have been vacillating wildly between utter despair and enlightenment, between selfishness and altrusim. Now we begin the time for my LEAST favorite American holiday, which is Thanksgiving. It USED to celebrate the cohesion of us as a Nation. We all ate the same food, a culinary communion, where folks from sea to shining sea were having turkey, stuffing, cranberries, and those green beans with the weird deep fried onions on top. However, right now in my part of the United States, the "traditional" Thanksgiving meal is now viewed as a "racist expression of the colonialism of indiginous peoples" and, as a result, there is often a dish added that is supposed to "honor" these people, an offering meant as an apology. I actually heard a woman ask at Costco if the turkeys were "free range" and "humanely killed." Look lady, the turkeys are .99¢ a pound and at that price, I doubt very much that the turkeys got to forage for a variety of grains in a pesticide-free environment. Take that shit to Whole Foods. More importantly, BE GRATEFUL THAT YOU HAVE *ANY* FOOD AT ALL. It's ridiculous.

Here's why I absolutely hate Thanksgiving; it's completely rule-bound. Unlike Halloween, which is sweet intoxicating anarchy itself, Thanksgiving is chock full of rules from word "go." Football games: full of rules. Kitchen prep: full of rules, including staffing issues and schedule. The guest list: More rules, and a dress code to boot. Now we add into that the rules of what-dish-offends-what-long-dead-ethnic-group sensibility. I hate it.

The best Thanksgiving I ever had? I was driving the Great Ocean Road on my way to Adelaide to catch a flight. I stopped to take a photo. There, I gave two rolls of Fuji film to a fellow traveler, a girl from Scotland, and she thanked me profusely for the favor as the nearest roll of film was a twelve hour drive away. I was glad to help out. THAT is the best "Thanksgiving" I've ever had and probably will ever have in my entire life. This whole holiday depresses the hell out of me.