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At Kyle's house there's this big BBQ every year, where old guys from Ryerson have a tradition of getting together with their families. The springly little baby children all play video games and get drunk and go splash-splash in the pool. The elderly watch with approval from the balcony above, and divide their attention between golf and their growing progenies. Then someone cooks steak.

If this sounds like a pretty good deal then you, too, can start your own Tradition of Annual BBQ. First you need a starting point. For these guys it was the solidarity of attending (and surviving) Ryerson together, some 40 thousand years ago. If you didn't go to university, perhaps you could meet up with all your prison guard buddies to talk about good ol' shanking and how a shaved-down comb isn't what it used to be. Back in the golden years, that is.

Then you need a family to drag along with you every year, which basically means that you have to be both fertile and effective at heterosexual-type things. If you have no love and no babies, you probably won't get invited to the Annual Traditional Whatever anymore because all you'll do is stare hungrily at your prison friends' children, and that will be creepy. You won't really be hungry for them - babies aren't delicious - but you'll just realize that the burning hole in your stomach has always been the punishing suspicion that your genealogical line ends with you. A big big loser. No lover! No babies! No steak!

Finally you need a tradition at your Traditional Magic Goodtimes Gathering. The self-identified Ryerson Gang has some thing where a guy put a wine cork in a glass back in the Olde Dayes, so now corkage features prominently at their gatherings. 200+ corks dumped in the pool, clumping and unclumping and turning the pool water into a very, very mild wine. The wine equivilent of whiskey swish, except you can swim in it! Your tradition probably won't be quite as diverse, but you can still do some repetitive shit. Like, "Mikey goes to the hospital after eating poisoned potato salad every year!" Or "We debate the downward spiral of society into a consumer whoredom every year!", although that one is kind of a buzzkill. The sky's the limit, unless your tradition involves space travel. If so, I wanna visit your BBQ next.

Posted by Chris at 11:40 AM >> Commentations (2)