Like it or not, the holidays are upon us. I'm sure when you were stumbling home in the wee morning hours of November 1st in your slutty Madeline Albright costume, you saw the shopkeepers ripping down witches and vampires and putting up pictures of a fat old man who breaks into your house and tries to woo your children with toys. But there's also that other holiday in between, that one dedicated to an afternoon spent face-down on the shag carpet, woozy from tryptophan and big-bottle wine. A time when you listen to and look at your family and wonder "Who are these people??" I was thinking about this the other day and, in the immortal words of Mr. Ed: later that night, I got to thinking. I've decided we'll have a new Thanksgiving. A Gawker Thanksgiving. It's so corny! I know! But, I get sentimental this time of year.

So. How will this work? I think we'll start with the location. Naturally Laurel Touby, founder of MediaArby's, will be our "cyber hostess." (Ugh.) We'll all meet sometime around noon. Julia Allison will bring her darling dog Lilly and Jakob Lodwick will bring his darling fashion lenses. Tinsley Mortimer will arrive wearing an old, soiled Santa suit and just blink confusedly at everyone. (She'll disappear for much of the night, only to be found in the backyard, stuck in a bear trap.) Kristian Laliberte will arrive with his new boyfriend, Elijah Pollack. They'll be so in love! (Later, during dinner, Anna Wintour will lean in close, her breath reeking of gin and clamato juice, purring into your ear "Aren't they just divine together? They're like Paul Newman and Katherine Ross in Butch Cassidy. Except, you know, gay and, um, young.") John Fitzgerald Page will come crashing through the foyer in his Beemer, Eiffel 65's "Blue" blasting loudly, and shove a sweaty bucket of fried chicken into Laurel's hands. Then, just as we think all the guests have arrived, we'll hear a strange hum, a demonic orchestra tuning. As the whole house rumbles, Sean Hannity will shriek, jumping up and down and clapping his hands, "Rupey is here!" Mr. Murdoch will disembark his flaming humpback whale nuclear stagecoach and shove a sweaty Judith Regan into Laurel's feather boa.

James Lipton will utter a dinner bell clarion call from deep within his diaphragm, and all the guests will be seated at the long oak table. There will be a beautiful centerpiece fashioned out of the rawhide remains of Jocelyn Wildenstein's face. The feast will consist of many bottles of Coppola Vineyards wine, PinkBerry soufflés, and turducken. Robert Olen Butler will be the first to get drunk and hurl recriminations at people. "Elizabeth!!" he'll shout across the table at Jann Wenner, "No one poops in South America! It wasn't a sign! It was nature!!" Chris Crocker will defuse the awkward situation by stripping down to his skivvies and doing an old-style fan dance/Britney Spears hyper-sexual mash-up that erotically incorporates Janet Robinson's famous green bean casserole. ("It's the fried onions that really make it work," he'll say in a post-performance YouTube interview with himself.)

Once all are sated and sufficiently boozed up, plates will be cleared by Laurel's faithful butler, Neel Shah. Then, it's on to charades! Mandy Stadtmiller will start. She will pantomime long walks on beaches and summers spent murmuring on porch swings about the big, bright future. In mere seconds team partner Alyssa Shelasky will shriek "SuperPreppy!!" Commenter KarenUhOh, who has been quietly assessing the legal ramifications of all this, will dryly deadpan: "I thought the category was real people." Mandy will run out of the room weeping and farting, having had her hideous secret revealed. Graydon Carter will be next. He will act out a strange series of lilts and affectations, and Lizzie Grubman will yell with delight "Spike! Spike! It's your little fey creature of a son!" A few more rounds will come and go, and of course it will end in a tie and all will be smugly satisfied with their own accomplishments.

The rest of the evening will be devoted to that most revered and corny of Thanksgiving traditions, the actual giving of thanks. The list of thanks will be long and varied. Selected highlights will be:

Tionna Tee Smalls: The film Ishtar
NewToJezebel: Jewish people.
Jeffrey Epstein: Those High School Musical: The Ice Tour tickets he managed to score.
Christopher Hitchens: Religion and Bic razors.
Atoosa Rubenstein: The well-meaning gypsies who style her and, in a bold extension of an olive branch, the Omega Kitties.
Senator Larry Craig: Feet, and a willful spirit.
Josh Schwartz and the rest of the Gossip Girl team: Blacks and Asians.

And, finally, the yoga stick of thanks will be passed to yours truly. And your friend LolCait will say this:

"I find the word 'thanks' inadequate, or even inappropriate. 'Thanks' implies expectation, a resigned 'Phew! Of course these good things were coming after all.' So I'm not thankful, I'm grateful. Things of late seem pretty awful and, truth is, I've Done Nothing During The War, and yet some good things keep coming to me. Six months into my participation in this bizarre social experiment, it is quite baffling to have found both silly entertainment and keen insight on this most cold and unfeeling internet. So I am grateful for a strange new home, for precarious new friendships."

All will be quiet for a moment, and then I will fall down, completely drunk. I will be scooped up by the ever-friendly Josh Ferris (swoon!) and taken from the room.

The night will end as nights do, with sloppy hugs and prolonged, slurred goodbyes. Dear James Kurisunkal will be passed out in the broom closet, spooning a snoring Spencer Pratt, who will still be in his 'Vincent from the Beauty and the Beast television series' Halloween costume. (Or is it a costume??) Ira Glass will dejectedly try to coax Merry Miller into his cab. The Gawker editors will wander off into the night, a bottle of champagne shared between them (with a pour to the sidewalk, remembering Balks, Shafrirs, Spiers, Oxfelds, and others long gone.) Nick Denton will open his umbrella and float whimsically away into the purple night sky. And I will ramble off, thinking of puns and light bulb jokes for the next week. But, before I turn the corner, I will feel a tap on my shoulder. "Don't be alarmed," a voice will say. "It's only me, Douglas." I'll messily grin at him, this most famous of Queens landlords, and say "Oh Douglas. I'm not alarmed. I'm just grateful... Just wonderfully, queasily grateful."

Douglas will shrug his shoulders and walk away, headed off to yuk it up with Michelle and Emily, happy to have been included at all.

"Who are all those strange people?" Patrick Moberg will ask as he stands on the stoop and watches this all unfold. "I don't know," his new wife Camille will respond, robotically petting his arm.

"I've only just met them."

For one thing, the female halves of these couples are all comically (well, "comically") disinterested in what their partners are doing to them. "Though you are a kindly one and you are a merry one and you are a droll one, these are trivial things to me, I am an elf, I am of forest duff and I am of tree-bark dew and I am of quaking top-leaves and I am always of this trembling yearning body and I can dance a man to death, but you are managed now and you are spun and you think too much, and all I really want from you, dear Santa, is a Dirty Decadence 12-Speed Rabbit-Want Double-Dip Flex-o-Pulse Vibrator."

Ouch. Also: Pulitzer.

"The personal is political all right," thinks Hillary. "At least I did get her to shave her legs pretty quick," thinks Bill. Har. Did you know Playboy pays like $10 a word?

Oh and here's Marcus Antonius boning Cleopatra: "The sucking sound of sword in flesh, and this sound is the same, inside me and out: that soft sucking sound, now beneath me, my mansword and the flesh of a queen ..."

It seems possible that Robert Olen Butler still has some issues with women that he's working through.

Enter the Contest!

In graduate school, Ann Beattie used to tell stories about how over-the-top he is. It always strained credibility, because Ann Beattie is similarly over-the-top, and for her to claim that someone else had a big ego just seemed sort of weird. She said that he once silenced the person introducing him at a writers conference by saying, "When you have won the Pulitzer, you no longer require an introduction."

Before we continue, though: "your followers?" This is a just a website. Not a cult!

"But to begin to see the email in a fair way, you must understand this premise: I loved Elizabeth deeply for 13 years. I did not stop loving her when she told me what was happening between her and Ted. I love her still in an altered but sincere way. She loved me. She loves me still, but no longer as her husband. I'm sure many, if not all, of your readers have gone through their own dramas of love and loss. Love is not easily relinquished and it can shift its shape."

"Altered but sincere way." Excellent word choice. "She loved me. She loves me still, but no longer as her husband." This is when I started feeling like I was going to cry. "I'm sure many, if not all, of your readers, have gone through their own dramas of love and loss." Um, as have some, if not all, of our editors! This one, for instance, has listened to the entirety of Joni Mitchell's"Court and Spark," every Bikini Kill single, and also "Just a Little Bit of Heart and Soul" by T'Pau three times—this morning!

"My drama of love and loss was particularly intense and had some strikingly unique characteristics."

Newsflash: we all feel that way! Everyone thinks their heartbreak is special and unique! But no one's feeeeeeeelings are more important or special than anyone else's, no matter how good they are at writing about them!

"And it presented only a small range of choices, none of them good. In terms of the inevitable news of all this, my primary concern, of course, was with the community she and I lived in. If I had said nothing, the naked facts of the events would have meant that Elizabeth would be savaged by the rumor mill."

Oh, way to dodge that bullet. We would like to take this opportunity to recommend that Robert immediately purchase a copy of the instructive book Send, which is a guide to email etiquette that also details the history of the medium of email, and explains why, if there is ever any sensitive information that you'd like to communicate to a select few people, you must communicate that information in person.

"Even with the facts of her terrible childhood before them, some of the commenters on this and other forums are saying terrible and cruelly untrue things about her character. With no mitigating interpretation at all offered about what happened in our lives and in our marriage, you can well imagine how much worse the reaction would have been. It's just human nature. Nor would very simple, broad-outline public pronouncements have made any difference. If I had simply said something to the effect of "they're marrying for love and she and I will remain friends and I wish them well," it would not have been believed and the very same false assessment of her would have occurred. The explanation vacuum—even a partial one—especially given Ted Turner's involvement—would have been filled in a way that would have been unfairly critical of Elizabeth. Remember, I'm talking about the circle of our friends and acquaintances and colleagues here. Those were the people I had to focus on, not the wide general public. I never dreamed you all would get this intimately involved."

Here's some unsolicited advice, Robert: stop caring so damn much what other people think. We all hate this advice. But isn't it the key to sanity?

"Either of those two choices—silence or vagueness—would have been the easy way out for me. I had nothing to gain from the letter I wrote unless it was a covert act of rage, an act of passive aggression. It was not. Your readers may not believe that. But my wife and I have warmly and lovingly spoken on the phone virtually every day since the breakup. We are going through this crisis of publicity together in a loving way. She is the one person in the world—the only one other than myself—who can judge if I am raging and aggressive over her. When I said in the email that she knew about, endorsed, and even encouraged the email, that was literally true. I showed the entire email to her before I sent it. She could have said not to do it. She could have significantly altered it. She did not. She made a few suggestions, which I implemented."

The fact that Elizabeth okayed your email doesn't mean that your email wasn't insane, in our opinion. It means that you and Elizabeth are both kinda insane!

"And the email was never a mass email. I chose five trusted grad students who know us both the best. I chose half a dozen faculty members who know us both the best. And they were asked, when the rumors reached them, to tell the appropriately nuanced story. Or to tell the fuller story on their own initiative—because everyone would soon know anyway. Yes, I sanctioned the use of the email I sent them in order to explain the circumstances to the people in our community who were hearing about this. Why should I avoid vagueness myself and then force them to be vague? Without that sanction to use the email, the explanation vacuum would have continued to form and be filled with lies. And this process worked exactly as I had hoped. That email went out six weeks ago. And faculty members and students alike have told me that all of the talk around campus and around town has been sympathetic and generous about both of us."

Any email has the potential to become a "mass email." That is the nature of the medium of email. It's icky, but true.

"Now as to the intimate nature of the email, this is crucial to understand: there is not a single fact of Elizabeth's or Ted's or my personal lives that the intended audience could not easily have already known. Elizabeth has spoken and written openly, publicly, about everything in her childhood. Ted's persona and the details of the pattern of his love life are widely known (just read Jane Fonda's memoir). I do connect some dots to try to explain why Elizabeth has been drawn to him. But it was not meant to be a judgment against either of them. Ted's own difficult childhood is also public knowledge. We all of us often—some psychologists would say pretty much always—form adult relationships as an acting out of the basic love patterns of childhood relationships. There is nothing unseemly or wrong about this. It is the human condition."

Oh my god, THERE IS SUCH A THING AS TOO MUCH THERAPY.

"And I tell you absolutely that Elizabeth did not do this for money and Ted did not do it lightly as conquest. They love each other deeply. And given what they've both been through in their lives, I expect them to be very good for each other. I love Elizabeth and her remarkable writing talent. I admire the wide-ranging good works Ted does to preserve the earth and prevent nuclear war. These are admirable people doing important work in the culture and in the world. I sincerely hope they have the rich happiness they deserve."

This part kind of reminds us of the opening few bars of "You Oughta Know" by Alanis Morissette.

"In spite of my previous chiding of you and your readers, I wish that happiness for all of you, as well. It's dangerous to live too deeply in a world of glib judgmentalism. And man, there is some truly legitimate short-burst writing talent among you all."

Whee! Clip and paste permanently! "There is some truly legitimate short-burst writing talent among you all" — Robert Olen Butler. We are all so excited to use this as a blurb someday for our novels.

"But I hope at least some of you come to realize that vituperation, no matter how funny or elegantly expressed, is not an art form."

Wrong! Also please point out exactly where we were "vituperative?" We'll give you this—some of our commenters are really mean. But they do love your writing!

"Because some of you may well be capable of turning your talent with language—and your ferocious sense of right and wrong—to a more enduring purpose: to exploring, with courage and frankness and humor and compassion and moral insight, the truths of the human heart."

Oh look, Bob: I just did.

Here's our second-favorite passage:

I was jealous in life. I admit it. I would admit it to her. But it was because of my connection to her. I would explain that. When we held each other, I had no past at all, no present but her body, no future but to lie there and not let her go. I was an egg hatched beneath her crouching body, I entered as a chick into her wet sky of a body, and all that I wished was to sit on her shoulder and fluff my feathers and lay my head against her cheek, my neck exposed to her hand.

And then the cracker [as the parrot has dubbed the lover, who is also described as having "a thick Georgia truck-stop accent" ] comes around the corner. He wears only his rattlesnake boots. I take one look at his miserable, featherless body and shake my head. We keep our sexual parts hidden, we parrots, and this man is a pitiful sight. "Peanut," I say.

In a column entitled "BREAST-FEED GESTAPO IN A MILK 'BILK'" (God, and Robert Olen Butler got a Pulitzer??), the Peys writes, "Take it from a mom. The pressure to breast-feed can make a new mother feel as if she lives in a forced-labor camp - where the uniform is half-nude." She goes on to decry the city's new policy of omitting free formula from postnatal city-sponsored gift bags for new moms, wondering whether the claims that breastfeeding leads to decreased breast and ovarian cancer in the mother, less postpartum depression, more bonding, and less child abuse are just empty claims from "renegade docs making stuff up."

"We'll see if the next generation is smarter, healthier and stronger than the last one. Or, if stressed-out mommies killed themselves for nothing," she concludes. Holy Jesus, Andrea. We're simultaneously glad and sad you're not our mom!

Breast-Feed Gestapo In A Milk 'Bilk' [NYP]
[Image: Splash]

That email, intended strictly for those who personally know Elizabeth and me, was to explain an event that, if not explained, would be spun in ways that would unfairly make Elizabeth look bad. It had its intended effect around Tallahassee and in some other places where she and I are actual human beings. The sad thing about your sneeringly printing this in a blog is that both of us are easily dehumanized. Which, of course, is your point. Dehumanization is the essential ingredient for the daily pleasure of gossipers and gawkers. What a creepy little circle-jerk of self-righteousness you're running.