Nurse the Hate: Thanksgiving

I went to a Thanksgiving parade in Philadelphia when I was about five years old.  There was a chill in the air.  The outdoors smelled like leaves and cigars and roasted nuts.  That's what Philadelphia smelled like in Fall in the early 1970s.  Leaves, cigars and roasted nuts.  I can't remember much about the parade.  I do recall Santa Claus passed though at the end, the official kickoff to the retail season I suppose.  It seemed odd to me that Santa needed to make a PR appearance in November when it seemed like he had already sewed up December, but everyone else seemed jazzed up about it, so why make a fuss.  Santa smiled and waved.  The nut vendors roasted away.  The cigar smoke wafted.  The crunchy leaves blew around our feet.

My father drove us there in his Grand Torino wagon.  One of the great tragedies of your parents passing away is being unable to ask them questions like "Why did you get that station wagon as a man in his twenties with one kid aged 5 as opposed to a 1971 Mustang?", but life is unfair that way.  He sold paper, and based upon current and retroactive pay scales, it's reasonable to assume he had limited choices, but a Grand Torino?  Jesus.  I feel like I need to look up the prices of those cars and run the numbers today.

As a child, my mind worked very similar to how it does today.  I have never spoken to anyone about this, but I have always been a middle aged man's mind in whatever body my age was.  This has been a drag as a seven year old looking at friend's parents thinking "What the fuck is with Nancy's dress and why does Mr. Schneider think I'm his best pal?", but has been a surprising benefit as I consider shark diving locations and new song ideas while my contemporaries focus on retirement health care.  So as I walked from that Thanksgiving parade, I wasn't thinking "Holy Shit!  Santa was RIGHT FUCKING THERE.".  I was thinking "Why would the organizers of this event place an obvious fake Santa as the closer when it was so disjointed amongst the marching bands and balloons?".  

We climbed in the Grand Torino and started driving home.  Before we hit the highway, we hit some action.  A fire had broken out in an apartment building.  As a seven year old, I was a very big fan of the TV show "Emergency".  I was more of a John Gage guy than Desoto, but they were both swell guys in my book.  To see an actual fire roaring out of a brick building was absolutely incredible.  A boy ran down the sidewalk.  Orange flames roared from a fourth floor window.  A woman screamed.  It was jaw dropping.  The fire trucks pulled up and the men got to work.  It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen.       

We went home after a short bit of rubber necking.  I rushed into the room with perhaps the most important information a five year old could ever have:  We just saw a fire.  My mother did not seem to grasp the magnitude of the event.  My father put the TV on.  I looked it up.  He either watched the Detroit Lions beat the Chiefs if it was 1971 or the Jets if it was 1972.  Either way it's mindblowing to think of the Lions winning games period, much less two Thanksgivings in a row.  I will admit, the Greg Landry Lions seem much more charming than the Jared Goff Lions.  I think I have romanticized the, at best, competent Landry and unfairly downgraded the, at best, competent Goff, but what are you going to do? 

Like many middle aged men of my generation, I am preparing for Thanksgiving the only way I know how.  I will bet on the Lions as big underdogs and then have it ruin my Thanksgiving.  I know in advance that taking the Lions as part of Krusty and I's annual "Galaxy of Wagers" will be the lynch pin that destroys my day, but I am also powerless to stop it.  What am I going to do, take a road underdog Bills that have looked painfully underwhelming since Allen's elbow injury?  I can't do that, so let's embrace certain disaster and the Lions.  

The key to the Galaxy of Wagers is have a staggering number of bets all rolling in an interconnected fashion.  That way, no matter what happens in a game, you have been hurt somehow and can blurt out things like "Jesus fucking fuck!" and "Why the fuck didn't they take the fucking field goal?" in front of relative strangers that never asked for that kind of intensity at a family gathering.  Another key is to tie in The Egg Bowl, a rivalry game between Mississippi and Mississippi State in which I have no (zero) information on and will yet be heavily invested as last legs of an ill-advised teaser.  College basketball?  Yep, let's tie it in there.  World Cup?  Hell yeah.

Here's what I'm considering today:

Detroit +9.5

Detroit +15.5/Giants +16

New England +3

Detroit +18.5/Giants+19/New England +12

Mississippi St +8/New England +9

Northeastern -3.5 (college Basketball)/Buffalo -9.5/Minnesota -3 parlay 

Wisconsin UNDER/Lions OVER/Minnesota UNDER parlay

Portugal -300

The point is that The Galaxy of Wagers is a living entity, ever expanding.  It is only when the plates are being loaded into the dishwasher that the triumph or disaster of the day can be fully realized.  With any luck, I'll see a house fire today and have a real good old fashioned Thanksgiving.