Ashley, Alex and I had stayed up late and rose for Thanksgiving day around 2 PM.  I contacted Mitch who was to be the host for Thanksgiving and received a nebulous response of “my shoulder hurts and I’m hung over.  Fuck Thanksgiving” when I asked him about a good arrival time.  I indicated he’d be shark chum if he canceled and we arrived around 4 PM to him preparing shells and cheese.  We and he had very different definitions of what a Thanksgiving meal consisted of so after he called around for someone who had overprepared and found none, we left to find a super market that was still open.  As we traveled from closed Publix to closed Publix we found something magical, a Thanksgiving Carnival.

To me, traveling carnivals seem to be exercises in self-parody like this gem:

You couldn’t pay an artist to have a more depressing arrangement of lights that could shatter the dreams of a child.  They had the obligatory rides and vendors of foodstuffs as well as the Photoshop booth where one is chromakeyed into some sort of shot.  Being a sucker for farce I asked “do you have something with rainbows, a unicorn, and possibly some teen pop icon”, she said yes and later we received the following:

Alex bought a funnel cake and I went on a hunt for an Italian sausage and, finding a well equipped food stand, saw they had turkey.  We asked if it was available and were told “that’s for us”.  This redoubled our efforts at finding an open grocer and, after winning a gold fish, we continued driving.

Walmart was still open and after a brief debate between “make it ourselves” vs.  “Golden Corral” the former won and we purchased Thanksgiving.  All the parts assembled, we were nearly back to Mitch’s house when his aunt called.  Apparently both she and Mitch’s grandmother had prepared a raft of food, not knowing the other would and our purchases turned into a talisman against hunger.

On the way back, Ashley noticed that the floor of my car by her feet was wet, very wet and I chalked it up to something having spilled.  Otherwise, Thanksgiving turned out surprisingly ok.