November

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving: which means I’ll be going home, like a whole lot of other urban dwellers, to their small or suburban hometowns. I’m almost 30, and yet I can’t help but feel, at least in the small windows of time around Thanksgiving and Christmas, like I’m back in high-school; suddenly, old friends are hanging out in basements again, sharing beers, cracking old jokes; you see family members you don’t normally see, or try not to see, and generally, the community you grew up in seems — stress on ‘seems’ — like a community again. We crave — and resist — holidays, because they invoke our nostalgia for local ties, for togetherness. What we forget is that holidays, with their deep, pagan roots, were not meant to restore community bonds, but to celebrate and strengthen them: they were not the restoration of the community, but the expression of the community. The modern holiday, the modern Thanksgiving, is a pale echo of the original Thanksgiving, in which a small religious community celebrated peace and even more fundamentally, survival in a harsh new world. The American family and community is largely comprised of sick, distracted, lonely people, most of whom have bullshit jobs that serve no purpose and bestow no dignity upon the worker; politics are polarized; communications are completely distorted by the presence of phones at all hours, in all circumstances. We may all be on trains, plains, highways today, but do we understand why or what for? Do we have any motivation to travel other than the vague pleasure of doing things we used to do when we were teenagers, seeing people we don’t get to see, even if we don’t…