Didn't fly home for thanksgiving this year. stayed here in the city with Boo Boo Kitty. Macys day parade. Then Madame tousants wax museum. Then Bridget Jones diary part II, with a thoroughly bored Hugh grant who seemed to be saying throughout the film, I am so fucking sick of playing this same part that I have actually gone insane. Can no one else see it but me? then off to Brooklyn to have dinner with Chapper’s whole family who came down from Vermont. A lavish feast with good conversation. Mainly centered around the mystery of the people of the red states and how in shock they still were up in Vermont about the election results etc. good people. educated, friendly, hospitable. Then a cigar and a few beers out on the terrace in 35 degree finger freezing weather and then a surprisingly stimulating eight person trivial pursuit match over coffee and various pies. A good night had by all.  

While laying half asleep tonight, I noticed something move to my right. something small and black. I jumped slightly and as I did I noticed a mouse I swear to fucking God run across my blanket with a Frito corn chip in its mouth. I jumped up. I had never seen a mouse before. how cool. what I wanted to know was where it got that Frito. I wish I had found it first.

A real mouse. That's great. Never saw that before. of course I didn't sleep for hours. Just waiting for that thing to jump on top of me again. Yes you see this in New York. other things too. the other night at about 4 in the morning, I was sitting out the stairs in front of my brownstone smoking and writing and this guy stumbles up to me obviously wasted on something, just tripped out. and he comes right up to me and touches my computer with these glassy eyes. I looked at him and said very loudly and deliberately as if I were speaking to a little kid, “laptop.” He acted like he wanted to play with it. but I stared him down. And then he stumbled away. I see a lot of people stumbling by in the wee hours of the morning drunk off their asses. Just Stumbling all over the sidewalk. Wonder how they make it home. wonder why they get so drunk. you see many hunched over men and women looking very sad in the streets and subways of the city. People who have forgotten about their lives. People who life has left behind. For the moment. they can come back if they want to. I keep that candle burning for them in my heart. I carry my leftovers from my meals with me in my laptop case so I can give them away whenever the opportunity rises. When someone asks me for money I always just reach into my pocket and give them a bill and keep another for myself, unless I only have one; then they get that and I get nothing. The other night I whip out 6 bucks. “Well I guess that's a fiver for you and a one spot for me you lucky bastard,” I tell the guy. You wouldn’t believe how happy that can make someone. What's really funny is when an hour or two a later I go to get a burger or something and reach into my pocket and realize that I only have a dollar and I have to go away hungry. That can make you laugh at yourself.

I think that it is a noble mission to have on the side as you are building your empire. Give away a little everyday. Allow God/the force to use you as a conduit or a missionary so to speak. Just always be in the right place at the right time for those in need. since I don't really choose to make the time to volunteer or anything, which I feel awful about. cause I know people do and I envy their dedication to that. but I figure that if I prefer to just focus all of my time on working hard to build my shit up then I will have so much money then I can just give a lot of it away and that will be my way of giving. I know its easy and not doing that much, but I still think it does something, even though its small. I think God kind of picks us out and knows what each of us can do for the other. I picture him/her whispering in a homeless persons ear, ‘turn down this street now; there's this long haired kid sitting on some stairs typing on a computer. Ask him for money. he’ll give you whatever he has in his pocket.’ And that's my way of fitting in to the whole complex mechanism of it all. I have still not come to terms yet as a man with some of us having food and shelter and some of us not having that. it freaks me out and makes me sad.

I do not see it in our future. I have to be honest. I believe that man will one day rise to a state just beyond modern capitalism, of which I am very fond of to be quite honest, unlike many of my activist comrades; a kind of socially conscious capitalism so to speak. Someone told me yesterday that some 30,000 children die everyday of starvation. I don't know if this is true but I will check on it. if this is even close to being true than we have far indeed to go in our evolution as a species. America is a great example of our species still being caught in the middle. We certainly give more than any other great empire of the past, but obviously not enough, since so many people are still hungry and in need.

Last screening: life and debt. Story of Jamaica and their heartbreaking struggle to make it in the global economy. They complain about the global economy and how hard it is to make it because of the world bank and the IMF. More free trade, globalization stuff. But honestly, in the free market system if a country can’t raise itself out of its financial problems, they should just feel lucky that there is a bank they can go to to lend them any money. I mean, from a very non socialist viewpoint, who says that any other country has the obligation to help any other countries. I mean if yo uare to look at it purely from a logical standpoint. Hard to do though at the same time. but this is must see if you are a socially conscious person. the global economy powers that be have really fucked over the Jamaicans in a big way. destroyed their country in twenty years. unfortunately America had no small part in it. destroyed every money making industry they had going and loaned them money at ridiculous interest rates so now they are slaves to the United States. Tommy Hilfiger had a big hand in it. so did the Dole and Chiquita fruit companies. Hardcore capitalism. At its most fiercest and heartless. Again, I'm not going to cast the first stone, because I make my living from the capitalist ways so I can’t really say anything. It’s the free enterprise system after all. like I said, we have to let all the old war dogs of the old capitalist system die out and then sneak in there and make things a bit more fair for the peeps that aren't doing as well.

I always wonder Why the turkey is called with the name of my country.
Let's read the article;
 
Talking Turkey: The Story of How the Unofficial Bird of the United States 
Got Named After a Middle Eastern Country by Giancarlo Casale

How did the turkey get its name? This seemingly harmless question popped 
into my head one morning as I realized that the holidays were once again 
upon us. After all, I thought, there?s nothing more American than a turkey. 
Their meat saved the pilgrims from starvation during their first winter in 
New England. Out of gratitude, if you can call it that, we eat them for 
Thanksgiving dinner, and again at Christmas, and gobble them up in 
sandwiches all year long. Every fourth grader can tell you that Benjamin 
Franklin was particularly fond of the wild turkey, and even campaigned to 
make it, and not the bald eagle, the national symbol. So how did such a 
creature end up taking its name from a medium sized country in the Middle 
East? Was it just a coincidence? I wondered. 


The next day I mentioned my musings to my landlord, whose wife is from 
Brazil. "That's funny, he said, In Portuguese the word for turkey is "peru." 
Same bird, different country. Hmm.
With my curiosity piqued, I decided to go straight to the source. That very 
afternoon I found myself a Turk and asked him how to say turkey in Turkish. 
Turkey? he said. Well, we call turkeys ?hindi,? which means, you know, from 
India. India? This was getting weird. 

I spent the next few days finding out the word for turkey in as many 
languages as I could think of, and the more I found out, the weirder things 
got. In Arabic, for instance, the word for turkey is Ethiopian bird, while 
in Greek it is gallapoula or French girl. The Persians, meanwhile, call them 
buchalamun which means, appropriately enough, chameleon. 

In Italian, on the other hand, the word for turkey is tacchino which, my 
Italian relatives assured me, means nothing but the bird. But, they added, 
it reminds us of something else. In Italy we call corn, which as everybody 
knows comes from America, "grano turco," or "Turkish grain." So here we were 
back to Turkey again! And as if things weren?t already confusing enough, a 
further consultation with my Turkish informant revealed that the Turks call 
corn misir which is also their word for Egypt!
By this point, things were clearly getting out of hand. But I persevered 
nonetheless, and just as I was about to give up hope, a pattern finally 
seemed to emerge from this bewildering labyrinth. In French, it turns out, 
the word for turkey is dinde, meaning from India, just like in Turkish. The 
words in both German and Russian had similar meanings, so I was clearly on 
to something. The key, I reasoned, was to find out what turkeys are called 
in India, so I called up my high school friend's wife, who is from an old 
Bengali family, and popped her the question.
 
Oh, she said, We don't have turkeys in India. They come from America. 
Everybody knows that.
Yes, I insisted, but what do you call them?
 
Well, we don't have them! she said. She wasn't being very helpful. Still, I 
persisted:
Look, you must have a word for them. Say you were watching an American movie 
translated from English and the actors were all talking about turkeys. What 
would they say?

Well...I suppose in that case they would just say the American word, 
turkey. Like I said, we don?t have them. 

So there I was, at a dead end. I began to realize only too late that I had 
unwittingly stumbled upon a problem whose solution lay far beyond the 
capacity of my own limited resources. Obviously I needed serious 
professional assistance. So the next morning I scheduled an appointment with 
Prof. Sinasi Tekin of Harvard University, a world-renowned philologist and 
expert on Turkic languages. If anyone could help me, I figured it would be 
Professor Tekin. 

As I walked into his office on the following Tuesday, I knew I would not be 
disappointed. Prof. Tekin had a wizened, grandfatherly face, a white, bushy, 
knowledgeable beard, and was surrounded by stack upon stack of just the sort 
of hefty, authoritative books which were sure to contain a solution to my 
vexing Turkish mystery. I introduced myself, sat down, and eagerly awaited a 
dose of Prof. Tekin's erudition. 

You see, he said, In the Turkish countryside there is a kind of bird, which 
is called a çulluk. It looks like a turkey but it is much smaller, and its 
meat is very delicious. Long before the discovery of America, English 
merchants had already discovered the delicious çulluk, and began exporting 
it back to England, where it became very popular, and was known as a ?Turkey 
bird? or simply a ?turkey.? 

Then, when the English came to America, they 
mistook the birds here for çulluks, and so they began calling them ?turkey 
also. But other peoples weren?t so easily fooled. They knew that these new 
birds came from America, and so they called them things like ?India birds,? 
?Peruvian birds,? or ?Ethiopian birds.? You see, ?India,? ?Peru? and 
?Ethiopia? were all common names for the New World in the early centuries, 
both because people had a hazier understanding of geography, and because it 
took a while for the name ?America? to catch on. 

Anyway, since that time Americans have begun exporting their birds 
everywhere, and even in Turkey people have started eating them, and have 
forgotten all about their delicious çulluk. This is a shame, because çulluk 
meat is really much, much tastier. 

Prof. Tekin seemed genuinely sad as he explained all this to me. I did my 
best to comfort him, and tried to express my regret at hearing of the 
unfairly cruel fate of the delicious çulluk. Deep down, however, I was 
ecstatic. I finally had a solution to this holiday problem, and knew I would 
be able once again to enjoy the main course of my traditional Thanksgiving 
dinner without reservation.
Now if I could just figure out why they call those little teeny dogs 
Chihuahuas....