Gripestaking
November 8, 2022 – Vancouver, Washington, USA
During a typical Tuesday night in their apartment, roommates Dean and Enoch sat sprawled out on their couch. Each had one eye on their phone and the other eye on the Disney+ show flashing on their 50-inch TV. Whenever the on-screen action went silent, the steady tapping of rain on the roof could be heard.
Dean played with his messy beard and winced at a new text message. “My family is already nagging me about Thanksgiving,” Dean said to Enoch.
“Yeah, mine too,” replied Enoch sympathetically, running his finger through his mullet haircut.
“So what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. It’s such a hassle getting home. If I drive, it takes me eight hours. Flying takes almost as long because there aren’t any big airports where my parents live. And flying before Thanksgiving is crazy busy. The worst time of year. You’re lucky all you have to do is drive over the bridge to Portland.”
“How is that lucky?” replied Dean with the shake of his head. “It means I’m expected to head home for any little thing. My mom gets a new sink faucet and I have to take a look. My nephew gets a tooth and I’m supposed to drop everything and celebrate. At least you can use the excuse that you’re far away.”
“Yeah, but you can always leave after a couple of hours,” said Enoch. “When I go home, I’m stuck there for days. And for Thanksgiving, there’s always a million relatives around. As soon as I walk in the door, I’m in the middle of a big fight. Half of the family is calling the other half a bunch of morons.”
“Do they get all worked up about politics or something?”
“No, much stupider stuff. I’m sure this year they’ll be arguing whether the new Top Gun was better than the original. Or which Stranger Things characters they should kill off.”
“Well, I’ll have to see my Aunt Janet and her kids. I’m sure she’ll talk about how great cousin Michael’s doing. And by great she means that Michael is his probation officer’s favorite. He’s got a ton of friends in and out of prison. And my mom will say she wishes I was as friendly as Michael.”
“Thanksgivings are the worst. No doubt,” said Enoch.
“I hate how horrible you feel after eating so much turkey. I don’t even like turkey, but I feel obligated to keep eating it.”
“And then everybody’s lying on the floor groaning with their pants unbuttoned because they stuffed themselves.”
“And I like football as much as the next guy but watching from morning until night is overload.”
“And the whole thing consumes like three or four days because it spills into Friday and the weekend. On Sunday night you’re still doing the same thing and fighting with your family.”
“When it’s all over on Monday, I always feel worse than I did before it got started. I wish I could skip the whole thing.”
“Or do exactly the opposite,” said Enoch.
Dean’s face suddenly glowed like a newly lit candle. “You know, that’s a pretty good idea. If Thanksgiving makes us feel so bad, doing everything the opposite should make us feel good.”
“So instead of Thanksgiving, we’d do something called Thankstaking.”
“To be totally opposite you’d have to change the ‘Thanks’ part of it too . . . what’s the opposite of thanks?”
“How about complaining? Or griping?”
“Yeah, Gripestaking sounds pretty good,” said Dean with a laugh.
“Alright, and the food has to be totally opposite too. What’s the opposite of turkey?”
“A turkey’s a bird. So maybe the opposite would be a fish.”
“And turkey takes forever to cook in the oven. We want the fish to take only a couple of minutes. How about microwaveable fish sticks?”
“Then what about the mashed potatoes?”
“Potatoes grow in the ground, so the opposite would be something that grows on a tree.”
“How about an apple? Instead of being mashed and soft it would stay crip. You don’t cut it or anything. You just put the whole thing on a plate.”
“My mom makes this green bean casserole,” said Enoch. “We need something opposite for that.”
Dean threw out suggestions involving bananas and cheese sticks. Then he said, “Maybe we’re overthinking this. What if we stuck with beans, but they were red and from a can. Like baked beans.”
“Fish sticks, apples, and baked beans,” said Enoch with an appreciative chuckle. “All served on a paper plate instead of anything fancy. And we couldn’t pig out. Only small portions of each thing.”
“Yeah, yeah. I like it. And instead of sitting around a table with a bunch of people, you sit by yourself.”
Dean laughed. “My family does this thing where we all have to say what we’re grateful for. For Gripestaking you should write down a list of your complaints.”
“And afterwards no watching football. What would be the opposite?”
“How about dancing? Maybe a Dancing with the Stars marathon.”
“And no Christmas shopping,” added Enoch. “Instead, you have to go through your closet and find things to throw away.”
“And no walks outside in the leaves talking about sweater weather. You should stay inside and watch videos about spring.”
“We really should do it,” Enoch said with a laugh. “Then we could tell everyone how great it made us feel. Maybe do a TED Talk.”
“It would be easy for you to try,” said Dean. “Just tell your family you can’t come home. Tell them your car broke and you can’t get a plane ticket.”
“It should be easy for you too. Tell your family you have to go out of town for work.”
“My mom would never believe me.”
“Tell her you’re just as upset about it as she is, but your boss is a total jerk.”
Dean and Enoch laughed about the Gripestaking idea for the rest of the night. Usually their creative conversations were forgotten by the next morning, but this one stuck. As the November days passed, the roommates kept bringing up their new holiday. It transitioned from being a joke to a dare. They both felt the pressure to follow through. Dean was the first to commit. A week before Thanksgiving, he called his mom with the news he was being sent out of town for work.
“On Thanksgiving?” cried his mom.
“I’m just as mad as you are,” replied Dean. “But apparently it’s the only time the facility will be shut down so we can do the upgrades.”
With Dean on board, Enoch was obliged to feed his family his own set of excuses. He was swamped at work. His car was acting funny. He could not get a flight. The family finally accepted that he would not be returning home.
“We have to record the first Gripestaking for posterity,” Dean told Enoch with a smirk. “We need video evidence of our preparations and all the big events.”
Dean used his phone to record Enoch selecting fish sticks and beans at the supermarket. Then he chose thirty seconds worth of footage to include at the start of a new movie project called “The First Gripestaking.” Dean added a logo and introductory animation and was ready to record more history in the making. On Gripestaking morning, he mounted his phone to a tripod.
The first pseudo-action came when Enoch started a nature documentary about spring on the 50-inch TV. The roommates lounged almost motionless for hours. Around noon, Dean pointed his phone toward the apartment’s kitchen as Enoch warmed up fish sticks and baked beans.
The phone recorded Enoch eating alone and then making a list of complaints. The complaints started off very general, things about the weather and the need to have a job. Then they gravitated toward specific first-world problems. Enoch did not like the small cup holder in his car, how he could not erase certain apps on his phone, and how he could not figure out whether to use hand soap or shampoo on his beard.
Dean took his turn at the table. He slowly crunched his apple after finishing his beans.
“What did you think of the food?” called Enoch from the couch.
“I’m still hungry!” Dean called back.
“Good. You’re supposed to be. Don’t try sneaking extra fish sticks!”
Dean wrote his own complaint list, which included many of the same issues as Enoch’s list. They were not sure what to do with their lists. They ended up hanging them on the refrigerator with magnets.
“I’m feeling good about this holiday,” said Dean. “I’m hungry, but I don’t feel fat or bloated.”
“We’ve got the lists done, so I guess we can move on to Dancing with the Stars,” added Enoch.
Dean rotated his phone and tripod back toward the couch and TV.
“Let’s start with an older season of the show so we can binge watch as long as we want without running out of episodes,” said Enoch.
The roommates settled onto the couch, giggling about how clever they were. Very few people had invented new holidays. The giggling faded after the first couple of Dancing with the Stars episodes. Dean decided he did not need any more TV room footage and he disconnected his phone from the tripod. He could not help scrolling through all the messages from his family.
“Looks like everyone’s having a miserable time at my mom’s house,” said Dean.
“Yeah, mine too,” said Enoch while looking at his own set of messages.
As Dancing with the Stars continued to play through the early afternoon hours, Dean turned to Enoch and asked, “How much longer do we need to watch to make this official?”
“Official what?”
“You know, like once we’ve watched this many episodes, we’ve officially celebrated Gripestaking?”
“Are you getting bored? You’re not thinking of baling on me, are you?”
“No. I just thought we could have a limit. It’s not like we need to watch all day and all night.”
Enoch did not reply with a suggested minimum watch time. The show continued playing as the roommates spent more of their attention on their phones.
Dean held up a picture of his nephew with pumpkin pie smeared over his face. “Check this out,” he said to Enoch with a laugh.
Enoch nodded in acknowledgment. “Maybe we should move on to the closet cleaning thing,” he said to Dean.
They left Dancing with the Stars playing as they stuffed old pants and shirts into bags. Dean used the opportunity to disassemble a hamster cage he no longer needed. The roommates dropped their unwanted clothes and cages next to their front door and returned to their couch.
After slipping into a zombie state, Dean suddenly regained full consciousness like he was bursting from a pool to suck in air. “We should grab some dinner,” he said to Enoch.
“It’s only 4:00,” replied Enoch.
“Feels like we’ve been sitting here way longer. What are we doing tomorrow?”
“I don’t know. We didn’t plan that far ahead.”
“We could go over to my parents’ house for dinner. I bet they’ve got a ton of food.”
“They think you’re gone. Remember?”
“Oh yeah. Wow, it seems like this day has lasted forever.”
As the words slipped from Dean’s mouth, the roommates heard footsteps and voices outside their front door. Then someone began jiggling with the lock. The deadbolt slid open with a click. Dean and Enoch exchanged panicked looks before ducking behind the couch. Dean grabbed the TV remote to throw at the home invaders. Enoch’s fingers were ready to dial 911 on his phone.
The front door swung open. Two middle aged women in sweatpants stood outside holding food dishes. A younger woman behind them carried a pie plate.
“He’ll be so surprised. He’ll be making turkey sandwiches for a week,” one of the older women said to the other.
Dean’s head popped up from behind the couch. “Mom? What are you doing here?”
The women standing at the door nearly dropped their food containers. Dean’s mom recovered and said, “What are you doing here. You were supposed to be gone. I’m using your spare key to drop off some food.”
Dean squeamishly stood up, followed by Enoch. “Yeah, I uh, just got back. They let us come home early,” Dean stammered.
“You flew on Thanksgiving? Why didn’t you tell me you were coming back?”
“It was total last minute. I guess I was too surprised to let you know.”
Dean’s mom gave him a suspicious look. “I wasn’t expecting to see Enoch here either. I thought he’d be with his family. You should introduce him to your aunt and cousin.”
Dean turned to Enoch and said, “That’s my Aunt Janet with my mom. And my cousin Emily behind them.”
Enoch said, “Nice to meet you.” He smiled directly at Emily. She pulled her hair away from her face and smiled in return.
“Let’s get this food in the fridge,” insisted Dean’s mom, walking into the apartment. When she reached the kitchen, she saw the Gripestaking complaint lists and asked, “What are these?”
“Oh nothing. We were just messing around,” answered Dean. He hurried to pull the notes off the refrigerator door.
Dean’s mom and aunt pushed things around on the refrigerator shelves until the extra food was stuffed inside. “You’re probably exhausted from your trip,” Dean’s mom said to her son. “We’ll take off and let you get some rest.”
Dean glanced sheepishly at Enoch before saying, “I don’t know. We were talking about grabbing some donner. If you’ve got anything extra at home, maybe we can follow you back. What do you think, Enoch?”
Enoch was mostly smiling at Emily when he replied, “Sounds pretty good to me.”
“We’ve got plenty of food left,” said Dean’s mom. “Enoch, when you come over, feel free to step over the bodies lying on the floor. They all ate too much turkey and are sleeping it off.”
“What about Christmas shopping? Who’s up for that?” asked Aunt Janet.
“We could probably go,” answered Dean.
“I’m so glad you’re back,” Dean’s mother said to him with a relieved smile. “It wasn’t Thanksgiving without you.”
“Yeah, I guess I missed it too,” said Dean.
On their way out the door, his mom noticed the tripod used for recording the Gripestaking video. “What were you doing with that?” she asked.
“Just a little movie project. I don’t think I’ll finish it.”
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