It’s Thursday November 22, 2018, Thanksgiving in the United States, and I wish everyone who is celebrating this wonderful holiday a very happy day. Be thankful, be content. Don’t let yourself get roiled up by forces that don’t have your best interests at heart.
My So Last Year project is at an end – for now. When I started, with the first entry on Thanksgiving Day 2016, I observed people heading to a stadium two blocks up the road for a football match between our city and the neighbor city across the bridge. While I quite enjoyed watching the streaming crowd, I didn’t know what to make of the spectacle, nor did I understand its significance for local traditions. In the following months, much of what I thought of as anchors in my life became unmoored as personal transitions coincided with larger social and political ones. The latter include, of course, the 2016 election and the meltdowns in its wake (aided and abeted by mainstream- and social-media). Ever the contrarian (“I wouldn’t want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member,” etc.), I found myself isolated from people I formerly would have agreed with, but who now appeared to be mere sheeple following a media-orchestrated moral and social panic.
Back to the football game: I still don’t really get it. I’m an immigrant, not US-born; I’m not an athlete nor do I follow any team sports. But I have a new-to-me feeling of respect for those fans. In all the turmoil of the last two years, their steadfast devotion to this “quaint” tradition of heading out on Thanksgiving morning for “the game” seems like an act of sanity. Long may it last.
As for So Last Year, I have some ideas for it which may appear this site. I also have another non-fiction project I’m working on. And of course I’d be thrilled if any reader found my Blendsorcery site and …well, actually bought something, …or just liked the images. 🙂
For now, I’m taking a Thanksgiving week hiatus.
With gratitude,
Yule Heibel
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