Ah, Thanksgiving break — the time of year when I finally get to relax after months of strenuous pipe-smoking, poetry-writing and colonialism. This old boy doesn’t have the energy he used to, back when I was an undergraduate at Harvard, rowing on the sun-dappled Charles and getting belligerently drunk with my cohort of young, muscular, snow-white peers. I still get out my old letter sweater and cry into it once in a while.

Where were we? Ah, yes, Thanksgiving. You know, Ezekiel Barnabassus Twillingsby III — who sat next to Squanto at the first Thanksgiving — is my great-great-great-great uncle thrice removed. Thanksgiving runs deep in the Twillingsby family. And I have a lot to be thankful for: Boston, this City on a Hill, whose founders I am also directly descended from; the reelection of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, whose father, also named Henry Cabot Lodge, would change me from time to time when I was a baby; and finally, the fact that I know the Crimson lads will give the Elis a good, old fashioned whupping, like they did back in my day. You know, I sometimes worry that lads these days don’t know how to give a good, hard whupping. I certainly got my share at Harvard. And when I was growing up, Father (I still don’t know his actual name) would give us a good licking if he caught us cavorting with any Irish Catholics. God forbid they ever let any of their ilk into Harvard.

But in any case, the Cantabs seem to have this game well in hand. I’d bet my moustache and my monocle on it. Our defensive line will hold like the Yanks did at Gettysburg. Our quarterback will sock it to ’em just like Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders did at the Alamo, which I will never forget. But it only makes sense. Harvard seems to win whenever we go head-to-head with the Elis. It’s Harvard money that’s driving the Industrial Revolution, which we are now in the middle of; it’s Harvard money that keeps Washington, which is now our capital, moving. If I’m sure of two things, the first is that Europe is headed for a thousand years of peace, and the second is that Harvard will beat Yale in this year’s Game.

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Why do they keep shooing me away? Harvard students are so damn exclusionary. And pretty waspish themselves, in my opinion. Seems to me awfully hypocritical.

Buzz. Buzzzzzzzas;dlkjasdfffffzzzzzzzzbooooola. Boola. Boola. What does that mean? Boola Boola. The chant of a benighted race.

I will sting you. You, man of the crimson cap and beer-stained hands.

Stung. Serves you right for swatting at me. The blood will come out in the wash. Oh tush, it’s the same color as the sweatshirt anyway.

It is awfully hard to reach skin with all of these “layers” they have on. It’s not even cold! Not for a true wasp.

For where are the “WASPs” they all spoke of? I thought to meet enormous, queen wasps, I thought this was a wasp capital. Why else would you capitalize it? Instead I find bloodless, pale, shivering men, drunkenly cheering, beer-sloshed and belligerent.

Descending, I cleave the air, faltering, buzzing, whirring, plunging into day. Buzzzasaazzzzzzllkjhdasadsf. Hummmm Hmmmm buzzzzzzz. Football is boring from the cheap seats. I hover on the field, floating and observing. Much better view up here.

On a helmet, on a blade of grass, on the finger of a player who shoos me away, I see The Game. I see all.

What is this roar? Faces contorted in joyous stupidity. Mass hysteria. Have these people no shame? To adulate a man dancing around in the end zone, clutching a pigskin in one hand, his crotch in the other, parading his meaningless success … !

And yet I am softened at the sight. Some stand up in synchrony, in a sort of wave-like motion. That one hurls a baton into the air and flashes a smile. One kisses another in bliss at the sight of a touchdown.

Sight hateful, sight tormenting! Here they all join in song, and I, cut off from the world, among a species not my own, sting aimlessly hither and thither. Buzzzzzzsdfasdfdsf boolllabulldogs bulldogs, bwewwwww — I cannot enunciate the words. I am cursed with this voiceless buzz.