I believe tomorrow is the day that I finally meet this year's honoree.

It's Ten's turn to name it this year. She assures me that she has to meet it first. It's like that, you know. It really takes a meeting to understand the personality and give it a suitable name.

Also, I will not be specifying the grocer from which I will be acquiring this year's bird. You know, for security purposes.

You probably think it's unlikely, but I think that if I share the market from which I will be selecting this year's bird, there's a much greater chance that it will hatch up a zany escape plan and there won't be any turkeys left when I arrive.

So I'm declaring that detail to be classified in the interests of fictional security.

[REDACTED] has a good selection of turkeys that allegedly lived very joyous lives on an open pasture.

It's a sad story for them if you really think about it, but at least it's a mediocre story for us.

This year's turkey has been acquired.

I stood there staring at the selection for what seemed like an inordinate amount of time. Which one of these birds deserved a good home? That one there looks like an asshole. This other one looks stubborn. Yet others I'm sure would have been passable, but I knew the moment I saw it which one was mine.

It was sitting in a corner of the freezer bay, untouched by the others and looking quite rejected.

I'm sure I saw it smile when I added it to the cart.

I drove home like I was leaving the hospital with a newborn, my typical quick turns and prompt acceleration reduced to the measured calm of a man transporting delicate cargo. I could tell the bird was nervous. It shifted almost imperceptibly with each pothole and variation in the imperfect road surface, riding into what it surely must consider the great unknown. I played chill indie to ease the transition, carried it gingerly inside, and gently placed it in a place of honor in the freezer.

I'm going to give it a few hours to unwind. It's pretty dark in there, so I'm guessing it'll fall asleep.

Ten will meet it soon, and then we will know what it's called. Probably. She might just call it Turkey McTurkeyFace though, so I guess we should all be ready for that.

It has been suggested that I erect a shrine to this year's bird, and I suppose I could.

I already have two very powerful talismans to add. They're stuck between the acoustic tiles on the wall in my office.

I don't remember the weight of Gary, but Fred was ~23lbs.

I'm pretty sure I heard a muted gobble coming from the freezer as I was making my second cup of coffee, but that's impossible.

The bird doesn't need to be watered or fed, on account of the fact that it's missing its head.

I guess it could be pretty lonely in there, but I don't see the problem. There's all kinds of frozen goods to keep it company.

I even made sure to keep the gyoza wrappers nearby so that it could get as much sage advice as it needs.

I mean seriously, how often does a frozen turkey get to hang out with gyoza wrappers?

I'm not going to tell the as yet unnamed formerly happy giant bird that there are dozens of people who are keenly interested in what's going to happen to it.

We don't want to make it unnecessarily nervous, but mostly I think it would have a dangerous motive to escape if it knew how popular it has become.

"You fool! It's frozen solid! It's wrapped in thick industrial plastic! It's an inanimate object! There's no possible way that it could escape!"

That's just what Big Turkey wants you to believe.

If you don't remain vigilant against the possibility of frozen turkey escape, you might wake up one morning to find your freezer door ajar, turkey gone, splotches of formerly frozen turkey frost lying in a trail of small puddles that lead directly to your back door. You'll stare into your yard, flummoxed at your bad luck, eyeing a turkey-sized hole in a nearby fence, wondering what mayhem and shenanigans it will wreak upon your community, all because you thought escape was impossible.

Let's talk logistics.

We're going to call Thanksgiving Day Zero. It's the day that you actually want to eat turkey.

Day -2 is when you want to start the brine, ideally 48 hours before you start to roast your turkey. More on that soon.

Day -5 is when you want to begin thawing your turkey. You can do this in the fridge, or you can use a cooler.

Between day -5 and day -2, you must buy your bird thawed. You're going to be sad if you get it frozen.

You can order turkeys at exorbitant prices, but it's much cheaper (and rewarding) to prepare your own. Your brine doesn't need to be particularly complicated either.

For mine, I'm dissolving ¾ cup of salt per 1 gallon of cold water. That alone will make your bird superb. I add fresh herbs, liquid smoke, and a smidge of maple syrup, but these are all optional.

Brining is one secret. Spatchcocking is the next. Use kitchen shears to remove the spine before the brine, and it'll cook much faster.

Spatchcocked turkey is both delicious and fun to say amidst a group of people who might not be familiar with the term.

Them: "What did you do to make this so tasty!?"

Me: "I spatchcocked it."

Them:

*We now return to your local sordid turkey saga already in progress.*

I saw someone asking about the sentiment meter and it kind of made me feel bad because if you really think about it this entire thread is about taking a happy giant bird and murdering it for tradition.

This makes me even more concerned about the premise of Jurassic Park, in which geneticists use dinosaur DNA to bring back the terrifying ancestors of modern turkeys which would definitely hunt me down and eat me out of retribution for mercilessly devouring their kin.

If an old man in a fedora invites me to a remote island, I am sorry but I am definitely out.

I bet it takes a lot of salt to brine a tyrannosaurus.

I asked Alfred. He knows everything.

Ten just got home from school.

She doesn't yet know that there's a formerly happy, currently probably dead giant bird in the freezer.

She's just sitting there, mere feet away, completely oblivious to the fact of its existence.

I should probably tell her. Maybe.

I will not elaborate on how—specifically—most (but not all) of a giant formerly happy currently almost dead bird ended up in our freezer.

Some stories are just too tragic for the impressionable youth.

I'm guessing the first question would be, "what happened to the rest of it?"

We don't like to think about that particular question.

Not one little bit.

I'm adding the premise of roasting a sloth to this thread.

Why?

No particular reason.

This post has been brought to you by Roasted Sloth™.

Roasted Sloth™, for when you've tried everything else and want to experience every kind of poisoning there is, it's Roasted Sloth™.

Related: "Roasted Sloth" is currently in the top three of potential names for my future all-dad kazoo band.

Full circle, if you're going to a concert featuring a band named "Roasted Sloth", it is perfectly acceptable to bring your frozen turkey friend to partake of the shenanigans.

I mean, why the hell not?

You would probably make a lot more friends if you properly brined and roasted that beast, but that's a little harder to pull off, what with the need to carry it around and whatnot.

People who are new to CounterSocial have no idea what in the hell is going on with this thread, and that's actually really funny if you think about it.

I will not be inventing a handy freshly roasted turkey dispensing fanny pack for your attendance to Roasted Sloth concerts.

Just to nip that particular rumor in the bud.

Ten has met the bird.

She's currently thinking of a name. If it takes too much longer, I will have her sit with said bird in quiet contemplation until a name is chosen.

For now, it's black smoke from the imagination of Ten. Pray we see white smoke soon.

I feel bad for the folks who are vegetarian who might also be new to CounterSocial.

I guess it's possible that turkey heads actually look more like Godzilla than the classic, artificially manipulated "Big Turkey" corporate turkey heads.

They sell them to us without heads, so we'll never really know.

If someone had just given Godzilla a well brined turkey, he probably wouldn't have gone on all of those epic rampages.

Godzilla is probably a dinosaur, which reminds me of actual dinosaurs, which are the distant relatives of modern turkeys, and there are plastic toys of dinosaurs that are made of actual dinosaurs because that's how we get plastic, from ancient decomposed dinosaurs.

And that's probably why we eat turkeys. So that they won't become cyclic plastic turkeys in some far-off imagined future.

"How many random-ass thoughts can one man have about effing turkeys, anyways!?"

At least another week's worth. The as-yet unnamed bird isn't destined for glory until the Saturday after next.

I'm sorry, and you're welcome.

We name the things we love, and thusly, every turkey prepared gets a name.

It's a posthumous honor that also comes in handy when it comes to documenting how it was prepared in the Turkey Captain's Log.

Ten is still mulling what to call this year's bird.

Soon.

Adding to the thread for posterity.