2/16

i'm thankful for this incredibly beautiful essay about stardew valley, which you should read even if you're not really interested in video games, i'm thankful that i was playing after dinner last night and was invited by a letter in my mailbox to a summer luau on the beach south of town. i'm thankful that i was told to bring something nice to add to a communal stew. i'm thankful that i really meant to do this but forgot until the day of and i'm thankful for my panic when i realized i had already sold all my harvested crops and went into town to buy some prepared food from the store or restaurant to bring instead and found that they were all closed because of the luau. i'm thankful that i thought about going home, but figured i should still go make an appearance. i'm thankful for the beach, which was festively decorated and to have met the governor, who visits once a year for the luau to taste the stew of my town. i'm thankful for the people i talked to who discussed the nice vegetables they had added to the stew. 

i'm thankful to have stepped up to the giant stew pot and to have looked in my inventory one last time, as if some food that i hadn't seen would appear. i'm thankful that when i did so, i noticed i had a can of cola and realized that i could add that. i'm thankful that i briefly wondered whether this was a good idea but then thought about carnitas and other recipes featuring cola and poured it in. i'm thankful that the luau silenced and the governor came over to taste the stew (i'm thankful for the tiny animation of him lifting a spoon to his mouth) and...said it tasted gross, because someone had put a poor quality ingredient in, which was my fault. i'm thankful to have realized it probably would have been better to just not add the cola at all. i'm thankful for the subtitle that showed after the luau ended, which said that even though the soup tasted bad, everyone had a nice time. i'm thankful to have ended up back at my farm and petted my dog and went to bed.

i'm thankful for some reason last night i went into obsessive research mode about various unimportant topics. i'm thankful to have learned about the pompatus of love and about the reason for the bass line on "walk on the wild side" and that the band wild cherry, who were named after a cough drop flavor. i'm thankful for the very intensive google deep dive i went on trying to recall an episode of an MTV reality show which featured the son of a man who had written an embarrassing one hit wonder song in the 70s/80s and whose father was an embarrassing and weird presence in his life, forever obsessed with the glory of his hit. i'm thankful that i first thought this was an episode of true life but then realized that it was made instead. i'm thankful for the strange and hypnotic wikipedia episode list for made. i

'm thankful that despite realizing this and despite being sure that the one hit wonder song was "play that funky music" by wild cherry, i could not find the episode. i'm thankful that i eventually realized that this was because the one hit wonder song was not "play that funky music" by wild cherry but was instead "funkytown" by lipps inc. i'm thankful to have learned that the episode was season 6, episode 1 and originally aired on June 29, 2005. i'm thankful that knowing this has no point or relevance but i'm thankful that for some reason finding it last night felt important and i'm thankful that i was able to. i'm thankful for the strangeness of memory, which is often a trail of breadcrumbs leading into a dense forest.

i'm thankful for the girl i was in line behind at the pharmacy yesterday who gave her age for verification purposes and whose age was ten years younger than mine, which made me feel old. i'm thankful to remember san junipero. i'm thankful to fail captchas, which i will spin as an act of resistance against training the neural networks that will eventually form skynet. i'm thankful for kendall jenner and i'm thankful for sam donsky. i'm thankful to commenter clyde for his persistent comments about the salvation of line-height: 0. i'm thankful for this ridiculous shit.