New Jacket

Last week I went to the flea market at Fairfax high school with friends and on the outer rim of a vendor's lot, which was mostly hippie clothing and $6 "I survived" t-shirts, were these blazers made of drug rug material, detailed with wild, wild west images and scenes from a prairie on a clear day. They sent me on a babbling tangent.

"Oh my God," it began, and after a pause I added, "This is so real. I mean, this is on some other shit. This on some real shit that I've actually never seen before. They basically just took some Ameri- cana and then played up the like, fetishizing of Original American handy crafts, and then somehow figured out the perfect length at which to end the jacket, like they somehow knew that I wanted it like three weeks ago and got to work. This is like the natural progression. This rules so much." I decided to calm down. "I have to walk away now, I have to think about it. But I'll be back."

I walked through the entire flea market, telling vendors that I'd come return to spend all of my money at their booth, when I clearly wouldn't.

When I made my way back to the front of market, where the jackets were, I tried them all on in front of a warped mirror. I finally decided on the black-and-white one with wild horses sewn on it - although the colorful one with a tiger head and lion head on the back and black faux fur on the collar was a close runner-up.

The woman selling them was happy to take my $25. "Oh yes," she smiled at me, "these are very new," and then mentioned a reservation or New Mexico or both.
I told her that I could tell and that I didn't need a bag. I waited until I had left her sight to rip the shoulder pads out.

Ethnic Cleansing

As with most historical genocides, there's no worst part about Thanksgiving, except perhaps that it's celebrated in my country. The mass txts haven't stopped, and I really have no intention of writing back. It would be like if the Germans won, and we all had November ninth off from school and work and the mail didn't come, and then network TV closed 5th Avenue and allowed blondes to march down it popping balloons and throwing drinking glasses. "Thank you for being my friend," they'd say to one another, "and for keeping your skin so fair."

I watched three minutes of Macy*s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I assumed I would have missed it, having slept until 1pm EST, but NBC played the merrymaking on a three-hour delay for those of us on PST. I saw the shiny Planters peanut car, with a giant, immobile Mr. Peanut in the backseat, his cane awkwardly held out in front of him, followed by a 35-person-controlled balloon of Ronald McDonald, which was trailed by a convertible driven by sickly children, Ronald McDonald standing up on the backseat.

Floats stopped in front Macy*s Herald Square, "the biggest store in the world," whose top two floors have been littered with trash and under construction since I was in nursery school, and whose jail accounts for another full floor. A float shaped like a pink castle pulled up to the store and paused, which didn't seem so bad because, unlike the Big Apple Circus float, it wasn't pulled by horses. It was covered with little white girls wearing feminine colors and doing a-rhythmic pelvic thrusts. NBC announced that this was Princess Academy's Castle of Dreams, where all girls can learn new skills and be princesses through practicing Generosity, Intelligence, Beauty, and Confidence.
"What a fucked school," I said to my dad, both of us mesmerized. According to a Macy*s press website, which has since been deleted, the float was made with "230,000 flecks of glitter," a unit of measure with which I am unfamiliar.

NBC then zoomed in on three blond pubescents who had a private balcony on the Castle of Dreams. Each had thick, crisp bangs, and matching platinum hair extensions, although only Destiny and Paris are related [Madison is their best friend since forever!] They were the only people on the S.S. Rosatia wearing black, and they were covered in dangly, silver jewelry. Microphones appeared in their hands, and the three girls began to lip sync very poorly to a song about about a boy. It looked as though NBC was dubbing over three blooming Germans from the Kristillnacht parade with English lyrics.