In The Past It's Always Thanksgiving

Most of us from time to time get sick of normal old daily living. It's tiresome in its sameness, some even dare to call it boring. The word I use for it is prosaic, which means something like stultifying. It's easy for our brains to go immediately numb when we wake up.

As for myself, I'm always trying different mental tricks. I couldn't make it through a normal day without mental tricks. Just a quick example will suffice. There's something wrong with the base of my toilet. It rocks back and forth when I sit down. I hate it, but I've got a mental trick. I open the back, toss in a quarter, then tell myself it's a drug store horse like they had when I was a kid. A quick ride and I'm feeling better.

Everything can be sort of boring. But nothing's more boring than eating by yourself, which I do a lot. So the mental trick I came up with is to think of Thanksgiving, when eating is a lot more fun. This is a mental trick you can really immerse yourself in, because, think about it, if you have enough Thanksgivings under your belt, you can relive those memories forever. And because Thanksgiving lasts all day, every waking minute can have something to do with it.

Of course mealtime has the closest connection to Thanksgiving memories, because it goes along with piling food on your plate, about 20 different things, so much that there's no more room but you're still stacking it a mile high. One of the big memories of Thanksgiving is that everyone else cares about what you're putting on your plate. If it's not enough, there's a comment. If it's too much, there's a comment. It's the one day of the year when your plate is everyone's business.

And how about the laughs on Thanksgiving. Not only are they commenting left and right about what's on your plate, but it's also a subject for great merriment. There's nothing prosaic about a plate piled high. Right now I'm reliving a Thanksgiving memory, a constant, my uncle's big belly laugh at family meals, especially on Thanksgiving, when he really kept track of what you were doing. It was not enough, it was too much, your eyes were bigger than your stomach.

You could even take Thanksgiving Past with you to the dentist. I need lots of mental tricks at the dentist, but most of mine involve meditation and the shifting of conscious/unconscious states, transcendence. But Thanksgiving memories would be just as good. They want you to open your mouth for the suction pipe, but to you it's a magnificent drumstick. They have a wedge for your back teeth, to keep your mouth open, but to you it's a piece of pecan pie.