PERRY: I’m grateful for so much, especially not being nominated to the Trump Cabinet

Here’s the progress: While the American Puritans are credited with starting the whole Thanksgiving thing here in the New World, they soon lost control of the holiday.

That was good news.

This meant that the holiday soon focused on the festive portion of Thanksgiving rather than the fasting portion. How football and cheap televisions factor into the whole equation is more complex than the splitting of atoms at CERN.

I’m grateful that I don’t have to understand everything myself, and I’m even more grateful for this year that’s easier to understand:

• I’m grateful that I’m still either agile enough or stealthy enough as I climb my 30-foot ladder to clear the gutters of leaves that none of my neighbors or my wife call 911.

• I’m grateful that I spend most of my waking hours in a community where no one notices that the lady bagging groceries is wearing a hijab.

• I’m grateful that I never lived past the age of 9 and find that most of everything is funny.

• I am grateful that, as strenuous as right-wing extremism is, I am never too exhausted to simply accept it.

• I am grateful for friends who laugh at my jokes.

• I’m grateful that Donald Trump appears to be sleeping some of the time.

• I’m grateful that I have the screeching, cicada-like tinnitus and not the roaring, whooshing version.

• I’m grateful that I found a way to live without plastic shopping bags after going through a period where I seriously feared I wouldn’t be able to do it.

• I’m grateful that my family no longer cares about me refusing to serve turkey on Thanksgiving and doing things with an animal carcass in the sink that would otherwise require a confession or legal defense.

• I’m grateful that Comcast executives will surely suffer a veritable plague of grievances and unfortunate events after accumulating the worst karma in the world for years.

• I’m grateful that my addiction to extravagant food, wine, beer and coffee means I don’t have to shoot them or chase down a delivery person who never takes off his coat.

• I’m grateful that, unlike my wife and daughter, I can’t smell anything that’s in my car.

• I’m grateful that Colorado now has more microbreweries and taprooms per capita than anywhere else on our strange little planet. And this year I’m especially grateful for Dry Dock’s black beer and forever grateful for the Left Hand Nitro Milk Stout.

• I’m grateful that police radars and body cameras can’t read my mind as I imagine all the horrible things that happen to the assholes on Interstate 225 every morning and every night during rush hour.

• I’m grateful that people in most parts of the world see Donald Trump as something forced on us and something we have to endure, rather than something we forced on the planet and everyone but us has to suffer. As bad as it is for the world, it is much worse for us.

• I’m grateful that cheap Irish whiskey is perfectly drinkable, unlike cheap bourbon whiskey.

• I am grateful that I don’t have to say, understand, or suffer, “The shoe is on the other foot.”

• I’m grateful that most of the friends and family I see every Thanksgiving understand that the turkey dinner thing is actually a cruel joke played on Americans by the early pioneers.

• I am grateful for the scientific method, that I understand it and stand behind it.

• I am grateful that my tolerance for physical pain has increased proportionally as I have gotten older.

• I’m grateful that happiness can actually be bought, often in the bin at the back of the supermarket, and that sometimes I have enough money to prove it.

• I am grateful that I have perfected the skill of appearing to be listening and enjoying someone babbling on about me, or that I think I have perfected that skill and others are happy, not the opposite to point out, or so I also have the option of hiding these complaints.

• I’m grateful that bell-bottoms, skinny jeans, and jock socks with stripes aren’t marketed to my age group, let alone sold legally.

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