Aimless Thoughts: Thanksgiving

    There’s an inside joke my coworkers have about me, which they’ve always been good about explaining to new hires. Basically, they use me as a thermometer. You know it’s cold if Max is wearing long sleeves. I think it’s overstated, personally. They’re not wrong that I’ve got an unusually high cold tolerance. They’re not wrong that I’ve spent a lot of time outside in short sleeves while it was actively snowing. But that’s only because a lot of the light snowfall we see these days happens when it’s barely below 32. You better believe I wear more than that when I shovel, when there’s high wind, etc etc…

    It always gets me thinking about the cold. You ever think about how cold the universe is? The universe is so fucking cold that most of the plainly visible regular matter out there is held in literal balls of fire and it’s still cold. Industrialization has ushered in an exceptionally hot era of Earth’s history, but even during an ice age our world got warmer than the universe wants to be. Cold is inevitable in a way it’s difficult for our little lizard brains to truly grasp.

In another life this was how I explained a tendency towards pyromania. Then, when I thought I was a sci-fi writer, it was a recurring motif: the universe is a body that wants to be cold and phrases like it appear throughout my juvenilia. Now it’s just background radiation in my head, always on my mind but never on the forefront until something makes it make sense again. Winter always does. Every time I go outside, no matter how warm I dress, I can feel the warmth giving up little by little. Extreme cold makes your body want to stop trying. At its worst it can almost feel like an active hijacking of your systems. Fire ‘dying’ is a common turn of phrase. Never heard anyone say the cold had died.

All that gets me worried about people I’ve never met. Homeless people, and the millions of us who could find ourselves fucked out of shelter in a single paycheck. The other day Lily and I went out to get pizza close to midnight, at one of the precious few fine establishments open that late. Outside the door were three teenagers, two boys and a girl, all splitting a cig I’m pretty sure was already nothing but filter. The guy who made my pizza was scrawny, with frayed hair and a smattering of indents, moles and randomly distributed stubble across his face. His nose had seen better days. Half a pack of Newports sat out on the counter, right by the pin pad. I left with my pizza, three kids staring me down the whole way. Their Newport was stamped out in some gray snow.

I don’t know what those kids were doing there. Nothing good. The same sort of “nothing good” that defines millions of peoples’ lives. I could’ve been one. I’m not as far out of the muck as I like to think. Not nearly so far removed from the teenager who ran away from home as I try to pretend I am when I punch in to work. As if knocking on an old man’s door and begging him for help after I locked my keys in my car wasn’t like, half a decade ago. Think his name was Joe. He’s the reason I’m still here. Thanks, Joe.

Thankfully my parents cared enough to take me back. I was gone for less than a day and in the years since then they’ve worked on themselves a lot. We’re pretty close now, actually. Which is weird. I’ve got a lot of fucked up stories from that part of my life. All the stupid shit I did when I was an angry teen, and all the stupid shit they did to get me that angry. It’s not something I like to dwell on.

Not wanting to dwell on it is something I’ve been dwelling on, actually. You can find the same sentiment in some of my previous Aimless Thoughts - I have trouble addressing the darkest bits of my life. It’s how I was raised. My parents taught me not to solve problems I could ignore. Introspection was something I felt guilty over, sometimes. I came out to them about eight years ago. We argued about it for a day and then none of us brought it up again. That’s fine by me.

But I think it’s held me back creatively. Every creative decision I make, I hear my parents asking me what was wrong in my life that made me think of something like that. It’s difficult to create art that reflects the full breadth of my life experience without feeling like I’m wrong for doing so. I can never totally embrace the darker or queerer sides of myself without guilt - the last time I did it, in a novella loosely inspired by my time working at the YMCA, I deleted the document after two days. In part, that’s why I’m so drawn to the ugly-ass music and prose that gets a lot of my attention. It’s why I surround myself with so many people who make darker art. I’m living vicariously through other peoples’ bodies of work.

That’s only one of two creative crises I’ve had recently. I’m currently without a major focal point. The novel has been abandoned and I can only stomach working on my tabletop game in short bursts, usually months apart. I’m being paid for a short story in an upcoming anthology, which is cool. I’m working on some fun stuff for YouTube. These Aimless Thoughts leave me fairly creatively satisfied. But my friend Tyler just started developing a game. Sean’s working on a platformer engine. Jason is the guy who makes election maps for Wikipedia. Colin and their girlfriend both have impressive fantasy universes they’ve been building for a while now. I’ve got a couple short stories, an unfinished comic script and half-assed plans for about one season of a sitcom starring Bob Newhart as Satan.

Then again, my entire life has been about lacking focus. For chrissake, my blog is called “Aimless Thoughts” and I was talking about cold weather less than a thousand words ago. I lack any serious religious or political affiliations, I couldn’t care one way or another about the company I work for and I’ve never really sat down and thought about how I’d describe my sexuality or gender or anything. I’m loyal to people, but when it comes to abstract ideals you’d be hard pressed to find a less committed person.

I recently realized that cooking is turning into a major source of creative satisfaction for me. All of my friends and several coworkers have tried my recipe for stir fry and I haven’t heard one complaint. Lily and I have also worked out a solid mix of seasonings for burger patties, though we are both hilariously biased toward lemon pepper. This has helped, especially as I’ve tried to “de-market” my creative brain. I’m not in the business anymore of trying to make things for the general consumer. Everything I make is for me. Creating something so temporary as food, especially a dish like stir fry where every batch ends up a little different, has done wonders. These days, I find full creative satisfaction in something which, by its very nature, can only be consumed by a handful of people.

For Thanksgiving I made turkey, cheesy hashbrowns and cranberry sauce. I followed a recipe for the hashbrowns, the same recipe my mom’s been using my whole life. For the cranberry sauce I operated mostly from intuition since it’s been my signature Thanksgiving dish about as long as my parents have trusted me with the oven. The turkey was a mix of advice from my mom and some ideas I came up with myself. It turned out a little dry, for reasons I can live with, but everyone who ate it said it was alright. Can’t wait to try again next year.

My family’s always celebrated Thanksgiving at my paternal grandparents’ house. Last year, grandpa had only started chemo, so he could still just about host. Late 2024, he can hardly get out of bed. So Thanksgiving got up and sat down about two hours north of me. I didn’t really feel like going. Nobody seemed upset by that, much as I tried to guilt-trip myself into changing my mind.

We were digging through the dollar bins at a local comic shop when Lily asked me if I’d thought about visiting my grandparents for Thanksgiving and dropping off some leftovers. I had, but that conversation cemented it as the Thanksgiving plan in my mind. It was something I had to do. This is probably grandpa’s last Thanksgiving on Earth. Even if he slept through all of it, I had to be there.

So, with the turkey still in the oven, we packed containers of cheesy hashbrowns and cranberry sauce and asked grandma if it was okay we dropped by. She said sure, but grandpa was sleeping. Sleeping on a hospital bed in the living room, where his couch used to be. Which, yeah, figured as much. He ended up getting up and staying awake, managed a somewhat lucid conversation through the chemo fog. He met Lily, we talked about Vonnegut. The usual, really. I even caught glimpses of the sharp sense of humor chemo had mostly suppressed.

Grandma was having a lucid day, too. She got confused telling a story about one of my cousins, but aside from that she seemed a hell of a lot more aware than average. Most of the night I sat nodding my head as Lily and her got to know one another. Grandma ended up texting a couple people, after the night was over, telling them she loved my girlfriend. Kurt Vonnegut once said, “shame, shame, to have lived scenes from a woman’s magazine”. Shame on me, then, for having lived a scene from a Hallmark movie.

Before we left I took her upstairs, where my grandparents keep their two guest rooms and their two lifetimes of photographs. They redid the closest bedroom to the stairs right before they got too frail to handle the trip up and down, which would’ve been when I was about fifteen. It’s super modern, all bluish greys with some minimalist furniture and one obligatory pseudo-industrial dresser. In another corner is a shelf of assorted oddities from throughout grandma’s life. Girls’ book series from her childhood, photos of her with all her grandkids, candles, jars of old things. It’s a nice room, a strange meshing of eras and all the more so for the half-decade of memories I have attached to it.

Though I always preferred sleeping in the Zebra Room. When they bought the house they found the second upstairs bedroom decked out in zebra print wallpaper and correctly concluded that that was a defining feature of their new home. In the coming years they amassed a sizable collection of jungle-related furniture and decor, the centerpiece being the bedside lamp with two zebra heads making up the body. They cut off at the neck in a wavy pattern, revealing a little bit of bare ceramic on the rear. That’s always stuck with me, for some reason. 

Other highlights include a corkboard of jungle-inspired art the grandkids did for school and a super sick Robin Hood playset currently stowed away beneath a gorgeous wooden desk. If you Google ‘Robin Hood playset’ it’s the first result, and deservedly so. Without a doubt one of the coolest damn toys I had the pleasure of playing with growing up. They also had a Lego table in the room, and even that didn’t draw my attention away from the simple wonder of making little plastic snakes spiral down the sides of trees.

I stopped in the bathroom on our way out and happened to notice they’d moved all the grandkids’ toothbrushes upstairs. Once upon a time we all brushed our teeth in the one attached to the master bedroom, where grandma also kept a tote of McDonald’s toys she somehow had in bulk. These must’ve all been purchased around the same time, since they mostly came from around 2000-2002. I am one of few people in the world with a complete set of McDonald’s Galidor figures, for the record.

Anyway, all our toothbrushes were upstairs. The last time I used mine would’ve probably been in around 2019, since that’s the last time I slept over. Maybe I’ll talk about that some time. It was a nice visit. I listened to Of Montreal’s Paralytic Stalks in the modern room, their Hissing Fauna in the Zebra Room and we visited the Sun Drop soda museum in Shawano. I certainly hope I brushed my teeth after that.

But then, my toothbrush looked fresh out of the box, hardened bristles aside. As a private joke I checked under the cap of the brush that once belonged to the eldest grandson, dead almost ten years now. It had what almost looked, if not for how dry it was, like a fresh dusting of toothpaste and mouth debris on it. I joked to Lily that it looked like he’d been there more recently than I had. There’s something to that.

She and I spent a good long while browsing the photos hanging throughout the hall; as I said it’s a fairly extensive lineup cataloguing most of two entire lives. Their own grandparents appear in a handful of pictures. Others are of brothers and sisters who I’ve only heard of in passing. A favorite of mine has all my great-grandfather’s brothers and him standing together the day they went out to fight the Germans. I’m also quite partial to the picture of my grandpa, bushy beard still all black, riding a camel. This was when he and grandma were living as hippies, roaming Wisconsin together and somehow ending up in Morocco for a while. That’s one of those things I never really asked about, despite my life-long fixation on sixties counterculture. I guess I’d prefer they went out with a few skeletons left in their closets. Dead people don’t always get that luxury.

We left them with some of our leftover cranberry sauce and cheesy hashbrowns and grandma sent us away with something one of their attendants had made. So far as I could tell they were just whole cranberries coated in powdered sugar, but pretty damn good. Grandpa waved goodybe and said, “you know where to find me” or something like that. It’s his new favorite joke. At home I basted the hell out of the turkey to make up for lost time and let it cook for one more hour. Sean and Jason dropped by with leftovers and board games. Sean had this concoction made of wild rice, dried cranberries, squash and ginger that I couldn’t get enough of. Jaon brought So Clover, a sorta loose-associative word game that’s generally a hit at parties made up of the kinds of nerds who appreciate loose-associative word games.

Things went bizarrely well on Thanksgiving. 2024 has been a tough one for me. Some of the reasons for that are subjects of prior Aimless Thoughts, others are still too fresh in my mind to record. Thanksgiving, though, was one strangely sublime day amidst the chaos, and that I’ll never forget. Especially not after having to work Black Friday. But enough about the mundane, predictable disorder of retail - it’s Christmastime again.

I am, as a retail worker, something of an anomaly. Y’see, I love Christmas. Always have. It’s not like I love every part of it. The commercial bullshit and the zombie hordes of customers who are somehow even dumber than usual do in fact piss me off. I can’t say I’m a fan of the drunken political arguments between family. And the religious elements are an absurd hodgepodge of basically everybody’s ceremonies, drenched in a thick coat of Christian lacquer and retconned into representing a birth that more than likely didn’t actually happen in December. The Christmas celebration we currently observe is such an apt metaphor for the cultural black hole of the Christian industrial complex; it’d be funny if people didn’t take it so seriously. “Keep Christ in Christmas” as if certain Christian groups didn’t fight for hundreds of years to keep Christ out of this slurry. “War on Christmas” as though Christmas is something one could ever define well enough to actually fight. All of this stuff is dumb as hell to me, some of it is even straight-up infuriating.

It’s just not at all what Christmas brings to mind for me. I’ve struggled with some form or another of seasonal depression since I was a kid. Snow made me miserable and the cold was the deepest form of horror I could imagine. What kept me going were the small moments of warmth, something Christmas became an integral part of. Evergreens as proof cold couldn’t drag us all down with it; fires and bright lights to keep the beast at bay; traditional candies representing basically all my favorite flavors. Yes, presents too. My brother and I were just talking about a particular Christmas break in which, each day, we waged an elaborate game of war between his and my new Lego sets. That alone cemented the present as something worthy of my adoration. But it really isn’t about the material aspect to me, and never truly was.

As I’m writing this we’re at the start of the year’s first big snowstorm. Lily’s first such storm in Wisconsin. I have a fire going and a curtain cracked open. She’s just turned on the string of lights wrapped around our Christmas tree, a real tree we cut down on our own. That was another first for her, though a long-standing tradition in the Conley household. My parents got theirs at the same time as us, we turned it into a sorta double date. It went well! Not sure I’ve mentioned it in the Thoughts yet but they really love her - which I am eternally grateful for, after the tumultuous relationships we’ve all weathered with one another. We’re all learning to respect each other as adults, and thank God for that.

I stocked up on various assorted odds and ends last night, at the end of a brief venture into the great grey north of Appleton. It was damn near midnight, which meant my options were either Meijer or Woodman’s, two 24-hour stores that couldn’t be more different. Woodman’s was closer and has a better selection of La Croix, so that won out.

I’ll briefly describe Meijer as a gentrified Walmart. It’s bigger, more respectable and stocks a lot of stuff you can’t find at Wally World. But at the end of the day it’s still a big fucking cube full of tired-looking people and tiny versions of chain businesses affixed to the wall by the registers. I think this one has a Great Clips.

Woodman’s spends so little time appealing to respectability it’s not even funny. The one door they keep open this late has a Bitcoin logo on the glass, and a vending machine in the vestibule is loaded with trading card packs. Straight in front of you you’ll find a big, woodgrain-covered tobacco counter. To the right, a big ol’ shelf of dollar store toys and what I’m pretty sure is their internet router plugged into an outlet no more than four feet from the ceiling, wires held to the wall with tape. Down the way from that is an entire aisle that’s just magazines. The store doesn’t have books, another rarity among retailers these days. Even Walgreens finds room, if only for Nick Sparks and Nora Roberts. Woodman’s is all magazines, though, and they’ve got ‘em all. Sans most digests, I mean. Which unfortunately means none of my usual sc-fi mags.

One of ‘em still managed to catch my eye. In the corner on a lower rack was some hideously-colored concoction of mismatched images. A big melting face with the McDonald’s arches on his forehead, Charlie Brown holding a photo of a shoe and asking an operator if he could report “a singularity”. Two Boston Dynamics robot dogs. A woman boxing a red elephant. One of the guys from Yo Gabba Gabba. 

This was the Autumn issue of 2600, a quarterly digest originating out of the ‘80s phone-phreaking scene and remaining in distribution among hacking and general computer enthusiasts ever since. I quickly skimmed What Cops Really Want by Mallory Knodel and decided I’d be willing to pay eight bucks for this thing. It wasn’t anything groundbreaking, to be clear, but it was well-spoken and clarified a few cybersecurity issues I wasn’t as aware of as I should be.

It was also, in one peculiar way, unique within this magazine’s pages. See, Knodel is among very few contributors to 2600 who write under a regular human name. Maybe it’s a pen name, I’m not sure, but it is at the very least more “real” as a name than blue_elk934. Whose contribution, incidentally, was a pretty neat little write-up about cashierless stores.

Other features that grabbed my eye included the inner cover occupied entirely with reader-submitted photographs of old payphones. Take notes, FSF, this is a much better use of cover space than ads for Baen Books! I’m also deeply intrigued by the presence of a limited quantity of “hacker-related” fiction. Currently I’m pretty sure there’s just one episodic serial going on. It’s the exact kind of corny fun I expect you’d want from fiction published through a computer magazine. 

The letters page, potentially the greatest and most underrated piece of any given periodical, was also really damn good. Readers often came off very strongly opinionated, and the editor’s responses were politely worded but never missed an opportunity to call somebody out for being wrongheaded. The issue contains people from all over the political spectrum, as one might expect from a techy anti-authority subculture, and also features a letter from a guy giving his grandma shit for not understanding technology. The editor’s response, in brief, is “maybe she doesn’t know what a password is, but she’s also not rotting her brain on Twitter so good on her!”. Truer words have never been spoken.

Anyway, yeah, Woodman’s. It’s got off-gray tiled floors except when the floors decide to be made from roughly brick-sized tiles with a wood texture. Its candy aisle is basically an extended version of a gas station’s snack selection but with endcaps featuring Shaq gummies and self-service Jelly Belly bags. The made-in-store sushi cooler has a color-changing sign above it that says SUSHI. All the signs advertising deals are just plain fonts on various colors of laminated printer paper. The store never closes, and the employees are all so tired you’d believe they just sleep in the back room. This place feels like the American Dream to me the same way my house did to Sean. I don’t know if that makes sense, but it’s true.

I’ve skipped a lot of things here, and devoted too much of my runtime to an off-the-cuff review of a special interest magazine on a subject I’m not especially interested in. I should’ve gone into more detail about Thanksgiving and about all the weird little Christmas traditions my family has that I got to share with Lily for the first time. Like how we play I Spy with the ornaments on our tree, a selection which includes an oblong ball of yarn I cobbled together at age four. I could’ve talked about taking Lily and my mom out to dinner at the same time because I owed both of them money, or about Lily talking me into buying a manga that was very unsubtly erotic at Barnes and Noble.

Part of me would love to drag this out to twenty pages, to talk at length about every single thing occurring in my life right now. It’s just not honest. These posts aren’t about my life, they’re about my thoughts. I skip over a ton of important details because I just don’t have much to say on the matter. I will always strive for unflinching honesty on this blog, even if the end result is an article that’s just as much about Woodman’s as it is about mourning a loved one. Because that’s life. Life is the part of living where fate briefly becomes ignorable. That’s how I want to end this year, I think.

Until 2025, this is it for Aimless Thoughts. Over the course of some twenty thousand words I have built up an impressively meaningless body of work. In the past year I have contributed nothing of value to the world of autobiographical prose. I’m quite proud of what I’ve accomplished, in my own backwards way. I think, somewhere in the sludge of white noise that results from the aimless exhuming of one’s innermost thoughts, I’ve done some of my best writing. I plan to keep going, whenever the mood strikes. You know where to find me.

My dad told me a story today that I absolutely need to record somewhere, for posterity. It’s a story about grandpa, back in the ‘70s. He used to sleep with a police radio on all night. That drove grandma crazy and didn’t seem to do his sleep many favors, either, if the rest of the story is any indication. See, if he ever heard an address within reasonable distance, even if he was already comfortably half-asleep, he’d hop on his bike and pedal his ass down there to watch the show. He did this for a good chunk of my dad’s childhood, apparently. It’s the most grandpa shit I’ve ever heard. If I could only ever remember one anecdote about him, odds are decent it’d be this one.