This Thanksgiving I got one of those fancy turkeys.  You know the ones they sell at the fancy meat store–the turkeys that put on airs about who their great-great-grandturkeys were?  Well I got this unusually pompous bird home and I brined it, and I cooked it, and let it rest, and I read to it…but it came out gamey, and leathery, and , well, rather unfortunate.

I now suspect this turkey had been reincarnated from a football.  And not those footballs made from leather, the vinyl kind.  Yes.  Definitely.  The turkey tasted like roasted vinyl.  After we were sure we weren’t chewing a pair of our old moccasins, we carefully covered the remaining carcass in foil, placed it in the fridge, and pretended to plan for leftovers.

That was when the wife had the idea to buy me my birthday present…an ipad.  And I got her one too… for the Holidays.  And we bought them together and, of course, played angry birds while we ignored the angry bird in the fridge.  Boy.  I bet I could get really good at angry birds.

Now it’s several days later, and there is still an angry bird lurking in the fridge.  I’d like to toss it out.  But I feel guilty.  Perhaps I could make some kind of salad out of it.  Yes.  Douse it with some sort of dressing; grind it up so it is indistinguishable from bits of leathery cheese; cover it with hot sauce to numb the tongue.

But that’s not what’s going to happen.  What’s going to happen is thousands of years from now aliens will reconstruct our culture based on the ritual sacrifice of the foil covered angry turkey bird in my fridge.  It’s never going anywhere.

I guess I have a bit of sympathy for it.  I mean, it’s like me on Twitter–it just sort of hangs around the joint, eavesdropping on other peoples conversations.

I suppose I could send it into orbit.

Or I could try to set it free.

Who am I kidding?   I’m just going to ignore it, go back to playing angry birds, and chew old moccasins.