By R. CHASE
Bachelor Behavior
If Halloween is the bachelor’s dream holiday, then Thanksgiving is most certainly its anathema. What other holiday can cram you into a house full of relatives at 5 p.m. with no available women while you shove turkey down your throat until you pass out in a tryptophan-induced coma?
You won’t find many single men over college age getting excited about Thanksgiving. And why should we? Only people without any interesting forms of positive recreation could get that excited about watching football and eating bread crumbs that were shoved up a turkey’s butt.
Because when you’re married with children, that’s about the biggest thrill you’re going to squeeze out of a Thursday afternoon.
There’s no parade of half-drunk college girls doing tequila shots at Z-Bar. There is only your cousin Maureen and her weird husband who locks himself in the spare room immediately after dinner (don’t you wish you could do the same?). Or maybe it’s Uncle Jimmy, who monopolizes most of the dinner conversation by rehashing the plot of Atlas Shrugged and praying to a tiny statue of Ronald Reagan he had mounted on his dashboard.
Or perhaps you’ll just hear everyone else wonder when you’re going to “settle down”. Maybe it’ll be the 1,000th complaint from your mother about how you don’t have a wife, 2.5 children and live next door to her.
Or possibly a coworker will invite you to their house “just so you’re not alone” on a day when you would be perfectly content to be alone if everybody else didn’t insist on making a big deal about it.
Either way, you’re pretty much screwed. Somewhere, somehow, you’ll inevitably be sucked into a conversation with a guy who looks like a used car salesman about a mixer at the trailer park last week.
Thanksgiving is a holiday for family, and family doesn’t make for a very exciting evening for the single man about town. In fact, you can’t go out on the town, because everything is closed.
But there’s one place a man can retreat from familial commitment on Thanksgiving and still eat as much turkey and gravy as he wants: Churchill Downs.
This is Louisville, where, if gambling and horses don’t supersede American values, they certainly merge in glorious combination. I’m not much of a gambler, but there’s something exciting about the trample of the hooves and the smell of the sod on a chilly day in November.
As I milled about, checking out the scene, little islands of old, single men popped up here and there, forlornly swizzling their bourbon and staring vacantly at the racing forms. There was Dewey Green, who went to Goldsmith Elementary, picking at his turkey. I heard he divorced in 2001. No children.
And there was Jerry Rubenberg, brother of Tommy Rubenburg, with mustard stains on his frayed sportcoat and rumpled button-down, sitting at his table with a crossword puzzle. He’d never married, but his brother had a wife and daughter out in San Diego.
I spotted them, one after another, staring into space, fiddling with the racing forms, fumbling through lost tickets. It was a herd of isolated, aging bachelors. No kids, no wives, no connection to anyone important enough to take precedence over the races.
Freedom.
I looked at my reflection in the bathroom. Was I on my way to becoming one of those sad, lonely old men?
As I looked closer I noticed an ancient gravy stain on my lapel that spelled out my future as clearly as a tea leaf reading. The track shut down and I shuffled out with the rest of the old men, only the sting of a $ 75 loss to keep me warm.
I retired to the Outlook for a nightcap, sitting on the cold hardwood benches to watch the riffraff floating in. If togetherness is the theme for the family man on this day, then the inverse must be doubly true for the bachelor.
Like Leonard Cohen, 10,000 nights alone is the price we pay for that freedom we are so fond of clinging to. But we bachelors, and all aging single men, must all ask ourselves: is it worth it?
Are 10,000 nights of screaming kids and prison-like marriages the price those other men pay for not being alone on Thanksgiving and Christmas?
The bachelor state of mind is often misunderstood: it stems not from fear of commitment, but a fear of commitment to the wrong person. Ten thousand nights alone is a price worth paying if the alternative is the lifetime spent next to somebody you loathe.
So we can wallow in pity or believe that the future is an unwritten book (or if it wasn’t, you still wouldn’t really know the difference).
We may not have families on Christmas and Thanksgiving, but we have the alternative: freedom. And one thing you get to do with freedom is decide how you want to use it.
Ten thousand nights should be enough time to figure that out, right?
Happy Thanksgiving.
Contact R. Chase at YourVoice@voice-tribune.com