It is not important how late I stayed up watching Rutgers defeat Notre Dame on Tuesday night, in one of the many Thanksgiving-season college basketball tournaments happening right now. It is sufficient to say that it was late enough that I felt both tired and stupid the next morning, and arrived at my parents' house the next evening to help with Thanksgiving prep both a little droopy and decently primed for the cascading excesses of this season. Staying up to watch tournaments sponsored by the manufacturers of the orange-shaped chocolate thing my in-laws like, or the early rounds of the Bad Boy Mowers Battle 4 Atlantis, is a kind of gluttony in itself. It's less literal than the kind that generally defines Thanksgiving, but it comes from the same place—the instinct, when presented with an abundance of something/anything, to let yourself have a little treat, and then maybe another after that.
It's just that, in my case, those treats come in the form of basketball games played in what are very obviously hotel ballrooms and observed, from a courtside couch, by Sen. Jim Justice and his big sloppy dog. We didn't talk about this stuff for that long, really—Drew talked about touring the nuclear bunker under the Greenbrier resort for nearly as long as I talked about my half-shameful Thanksgiving basketball consumption—but it felt faintly decadent all the same. Not just in the sense that I was subjecting you, the listener, to what is wrong with me, one of the two people talking on this holiday two-hander. Although there is that.
It has been a strange and eventful year for Drew especially, but for me, as well. What once felt abundant seems less so; what we have seems more tenuous and vulnerable. There was something of a melancholy note to the conversation Drew and I had about a holiday we both love a lot—he about hosting for the first time after his father passed, I about my sous-chef/manual labor role in New Jersey and my parents' blown-up Joy Of Cooking and the experience of flying into Newark Airport on a frozen early morning, decades ago, and going to Short Stop Diner in Bloomfield with my father. There is always a lot of this sort of remembering in these episodes, because we are old enough and sentimental enough to remember a lot, and because that's part of what Thanksgiving is about—remembering things that have made you feel full, and remembering to be thankful for both what you've got and for however much more of it as there is to get.
The other thing that Thanksgiving is about is NFL football, so we talked about that, too. A zesty debate on the question of whether the Giants or Cowboys are in worse shape going forward enfolded Saquon's escape from New Jersey and the great work of digging out from the Gettleman Situation, the grim logic of Dallas dumping Micah Parsons for picks, and both of us forgetting the name of Hall of Fame Cowboys lineman Larry Allen. For both teams, the challenge resolves to the impossibility of Making Good Decisions when the people in absolute control of an organization are not good decision-makers. Because it is the holiday, we did not follow that in any of the obvious cultural or political directions we might have.
Instead, we dove right into the Funbag. We shared our tips for hosting a good Thanksgiving—mine amount to emphasizing the pre-dinner dips, meats, and cheeses that people actually want to eat; Drew encouraged listeners to not worry about everything somehow being hot—until I got sidetracked into talking about how people communicate on Long Island. A question about where we would move if we wanted to leave the U.S. led to Drew's idle dream of a shitty villa in suburban Modena and me chastising Drew for thinking that people in Spain are watching the Maui Invitational. They're not. They're in the damn club.
We fielded some questions from the Funbag Voicemail as well. One, inspired by the experience of saying "Go Birds" to a confused British person who was wearing an Eagles hat because he liked the color green, was about the worst fanbase to associate yourself with by accident; this became an excuse for saying Jalen Milroe's name in an appalling French accent. We closed with a remarkable voicemail addressing a classic conundrum: would you prefer to listen to a Red Hot Chili Peppers album in which they cover the songs from Hamilton or one in which Lin-Manuel Miranda does Chi-Pepps songs? Leaving aside the image of Lin-Manuel performing "Sir Psycho Sexy," which has haunted me since we recorded, I think we mostly hit our mark, here—excess, but in reasonable portions.
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