Slaughterhouse 54

Start Time 10:47 PM
End Time 11:35 PM
Word Count: 533

This week’s question: In the spirit of the now-passed holiday season, for what are you thankful and what are your goals for the new year?

I’m not really big on the concept of New Year’s resolutions. Since New Year’s theoretically affects everybody, there are an awful lot of people who are deciding that they want to make changes in their life because the sun is over there rather than where it was a few days before. I’m a regular fitness club denizen, including all of those months where people haven’t decided that now is the time to change their lives, so I have some well-established opinions on the crowd that I call “the Resolooters.”

I won’t share those here, but ultimately I wouldn’t think of immersing myself in a culture without having the slightest idea of the rules and the expected norms of behavior. And while I have no desire to discourage anyone from coming to the gym and attempting to make a better life for themselves, the reason I get so annoyed with the Resolooters is, I see these same people every single year, for precisely the same stretch of time. I even have the ratios broken down – 50 percent of them will be gone by Martin Luther King Day, another 10 percent by the Super Bowl, 20 percent more by Valentine’s Day, and the remainder by Good Friday. And then I don’t see them back until January 1. So resolutions are only to be abided by until spring? Hmm. Can’t claim to understand that, but let’s move on.

As for what I’m thankful for, I’m grateful for so much. I have amazing friends, both here in a physical sense and farther away in a virtual sense, people who stop by and read what I’ve put together here whether or not it’s coherent, people who have spent time in my life both old and new who have ensured that I will always have something to laugh at or smile about, people who are nice enough to smile and laugh at what I say to them and seem to mean it. In terms of tangible things right this second, I’m thankful for George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” from An American in Paris, even though the fine folks at United Airlines ruined the song for the rest of my life, because now I have to work twice as hard to keep the vision of smug yuppies sliding into an aisle seat from invading one of my favorite piano concertos of all time. I get goose bumps right around the 11:30 mark. I’m thankful for some Frenchman somewhere who first harvested foie gras and convinced one of his impressionable but thick-witted acquaintances, “Here, eat this, tell me if it’s any good.”

I’m thankful for red wine and air travel and some of the wilder moments in life, but ultimately I’m more thankful for those friends that are there at the no-matter-what level. The people who could call me at 4 in the morning and say,”Jim, we’re off to Miami, you’re going to want to bring at least five figures in cash and a gun.” Depending on the person at the other end of the line, I wouldn’t even need to ask any questions. Life needs as few of those moments as possible, but as many stories as you can stand.