Super Mario Brothers

From time to time my brother would get me to play video games. But I was a terrible partner. I flew the battleship through halls of stars while my brothers shrieked help from Star Fox, Star Fox; in Selenitic there was a bookcase, filled with squares of cracked vellum, green leather, each rowed with black hieroglyphs like Hebrew on a corpse's arm. How could one resist such richness, how could one look away? I slumped through ivory patios and wanted to see. My favorite was a room above the crested mud gateway to the hall of Princess Peach. The black walls were noiseless and veloursome; it was an error of code, the material bounding the room jangling with emptiness. My steps clipped delicately and deadened on the lighted picture window, an inverse, rose-soft image of the Peach; there were only twenty paces wall to wall. The Princess held a rose. The noise of the game came in from a great distance. Other people were eating mushrooms, other people were leaping three hundred feet in the air. No one else could enter. I sat under the diffuse blush of the window. The sun came from far off.

Slapstick in Swiss Cheese: This Month's "There Comes A Time" Time; or, Mr. Donuthead, Who's Trying To Kill You?

I got up at 4:30 this morning. Not because I wanted to, or even because I had to. I did it for one reason. One mean old reason, the reason for the season, a reasonless reason, the reason to end all reasons: my back hurt. My goddamn back hurt.

That old waitress war wound, like every fake smile I ever gave turned on its side and stabbing me in the spleen. My back hurt. Like a cracked rib, like a dead dog, like an ice sculpture, like a fishing creel reeling me in. My back hurt. That old lady refrain pressing me tight as an iron maiden. My goddamn back hurt, so I woke up at 4:30. And I went to work.

Christ, you must be saying. Author. Jacqui. Is this going to be one of those complaining blogs? Like the cameraman in that pivotal moment in Wayne's World, you are walking away. Wait! Okay, okay, come on back, I say. Come on back. Things aren't as bad as they seem! I'm sorry. I didn't mean to dump on you. I'll figure something out. Okay? I tuck my hair behind my ears. I smile.


Some days the end of the world is burning a swiss cheese sandwich. This is one of those days. One of those "There Comes A Time" times. There comes a time, I'll say, when your rotten teeth and waitress wound and poor-me-Sally-ness and inability to make grilled cheese all catches up with you. These days you feel melancholy as a bear at the blind edge of winter and you want to dig a hole in the snow because the days are short and dark and full of hunger and it seems about that time. But you're not a bear. You're a human. A gol-darned lily-livered spume of a human, and singing in the shower, although fun, fails to change that peculiar predicament which you find yourself affixed to like a patch on the ass of a bum. You try to find the thread of where things went wrong, but it isn't there. It's all wrong. It's just you.

These are the days for harelip prayers.

I tuck my hair behind my ears. I smile.

Come on back.

Maiden Names

Oh mother, when I stand above the water,

On my white face I see your printed cheek.

I smell the betel shell of every daughter,

The currency of newness, rare as teak,

I see the teeth your mother used to crack you,

Whose mouth made holds that bellied you and blacked you,

Whose words were traders' tins to weigh you weak.

Why is my mother's maiden name forgotten?

Who tore your scrivened name to pieces, mother?

When did you take your fingers from the typewriter

and knot them in your lap to bloat and blubber,

to wend and bludgeon fatly through the water,

as, on the mudded bank, your only daughter

burning for an image, gasps and smothers?

The woman part of me was never named

Nor was the woman part of you. We are

Dumb sons without a provenance to claim,

Meek, muted by the keeper's clink and screw.

We cannot write in ink, we cannot mark

The places we have stood, submerged in dark.

How can I know my name, my nameless mother?

How can I be but some bright mirror's shadow?

A hold made sole for likeness, loyalty,

Blind darkness, corded to the absent shoulder

Of any captain, shunted sea to sea,

though rough, the waters hide my own clean cheek?

Daughter, will I brand you so I can speak?

Will rough reels buy my passage, weigh you weak?

Completely Unprepared for Jaguars and Gorillas, Our Intrepid Traveler Forges On; or, Not Enough Bell Peppers To Go Around; or, Eek Ik! An Anthropologist's Nightmares Explained.

There are many fives in my life. Five a.m. alarm clock. Five hours of sleep. Five bus trips daily. Teacher, grade five. At approximately Ray Bradbury's death hour this morning I scrawled five hieroglyphic phrases on the lined paper next to my bed. Kegan. Jaguar. Tried to warn. Didn't listen. Got me. Later, there was a gorilla I couldn't feed: I tried to scrounge for tossed-out vegetables, as one would give a rabbit, but this rabbit was a thousand pound living bludgeon and all I could find was one tray of discarded red and green bell peppers--hardly enough for a jungle animal that, in dire straits, will eat young gazelle. As if bloodthirsty silverbacks were not enough to drive the psychic message home, for some reason the gorilla attracted to him a throng of uncommonly loyal, dumb and adorable dogs who were depending on me utmostly to also sate their carnivore's diet of ground beef and kibble. Awoke in a sweat--five sweats, to be precise.

Spent all day yesterday reading about the Ik. Colin Turnbull's other ethnography that I've read was about the BaMbuti, a Congolese pygmy tribe who act and look like tiny, dark-skinned Groucho Marxes. It was called The Forest People. In it, the tribe sings songs about the goodness of the forest, likes to laugh, and has a taste for the hilarious and slapstick. The Ik are not the BaMbuti. Their book is called The Mountain People. An excerpt:

When the mother finds a spot in which to gather, she loosens the sling and lets the baby to the ground....Then she goes about her business, leaving the child there, almost hoping that some predator will come along and carry it off. This happened once while I was there--once that I know of, anyway--and the mother was delighted. She was rid of the child and no longer had to carry it about and feed it, and still further this meant that a leopard was in the vicinity and would be sleeping the child off and thus be an easy kill. The men set off and found the leopard, which had consumed all of the child except part of the skull; they killed the leopard and cooked it and ate it, child and all.

It's like some bizarre Lewis Carroll rabbit-hole where everything is reversed. The Ik are starving. Uganda and Kenya have made them settle in what used to be their spring lands, and forbidden them from hunting in the surrounding "state parks". Their familial allegiances used to be dictated by traveling groups and gathering groups, rather than by biological nuclear families. Now there's no traveling, and there's no gathering. So there are no allegiances. Since there's not enough food to go around, either, there's absolutely no incentive to do something like nurse your infant, or shelter your elderly mother. The most depressing thing is Turnbull's anthropological conclusion that biological family ties are not part of human nature, since the Ik are human and family seems to mean zilch to them. I might argue that analogs of this same behavior can be seen in any situation of acute stress to the survival of the group, like war. Regardless of theory, I'm dreaming of jaguars eating my skull, starving bloodthirsty gorillas, and generally of being put into situations of great responsibility without the resources to handle them.

There's no suitable pun on which to end this post. Pray for me, readers: the jungle approacheth. And it's five a.m., and time to wake up.

Ruby Crenshaw

Missouri was hot as a bitch's fiddle, was what Father Crenshaw said, and without further ado they got Brotherville behind them. They went to California. They went by Greyhound bus, and most people thought that they were Mennonites, and Father Crenshaw made them sing at the pit stops and his old greasy wife bobbled at his side inanely gazing at her scuffed-up sneakers, and sometimes people threw dimes at their feet, but mostly people ignored them. Melton thought that they would probably stop in Hollywood, but Father Crenshaw made it known that he intended different. They'd go all the way to God's great blue sea, he roared as they wobbled into Ventura in the yellowing dawn, slumbering passengers slitting their eyes or dragging sweatshirts over their muttering faces, all the way to that sparkling blue sapphire of a sea that God created only for His chosen people to lay eyes upon and relish in and cleanse themselves inside, they would go to the shore as did Jesus, the Christ, when He was a fisher of men. And when Ruby woke up once more the bus had stopped and the family was singing again and Melton was pinching her shoulder, and they had come all the way to some town which she could see by a sign on the front of a donut shop was called Santa Monica.

Wonderland, Part Two: Mount Olympus and The Foibles of Zeus

Just as I was falling hopelessly and eternally in love with baby dragons, the Wonderland Avenue curriculum moved on to Greek myth. My bus, traversing the moneyed community of Laurel Hills, passed by a set of golden gates every morning, as tall as houses and ostentatiously bedecked with a glittering chrome sign reading "Mount Olympus" in scripty lettering. Naturally, I was happy to learn that I lived right near the famous Mount Olympus, and I yearned to go there. I was confused when my friend Lindsay told me that all that lay inside were big mansions for rich people. "You mean mortals?" I asked. "Well, I think so," she said, suddenly unsure.

Somehow, none of the parents were fussy enough to censor the parts about Zeus impregnating different ladies while dressed up as different barn animals. Thank the Gods for that, because these parts of the story caused me no end of mind-expanding consternation. Why would the ladies want to go anywhere with some strange cow, even if it was white as snow? What were they doing over there? Did cows do that with ladies? Could they? And, most importantly, why were the babies that resulted from whatever the heck they were doing half-God, and not half-cow? I mean, we were second-graders, not total idiots. We knew how DNA worked, roughly. Brown-haired parents made brown-haired children. Cows made cow babies. It didn't matter if the cow was Zeus or Captain Kangaroo. It was totally simple, and a matter of science.

Wonderland, Part One: Pillow Talk of the Round Table

I started attendance at Wonderland Avenue Magnet School in the second grade, thanks to my mom's dogged and somewhat dishonest insistence that I be tested again and again until it was scientifically proven that I was a genius. At my last school, the only slightly-less-fun-sounding Dixie Canyon Elementary, my first-grade teacher was one crotchety and terrifying Mrs. Ishihara. Whereas Miss Chan, who I'd had the year before, had liked to do things such as make stone soup and paint our faces with butterflies, Mrs. Ishihara had a more stoic, spartan, old-fashioned sort of teacher-sense. Her most confounding punishments would be doled out to students for a crime dubbed “getting ahead of the rest of the class"--which she seemed to define, mysteriously, as being already good at something that she was attempting to teach. For such an egregious offense the smarter, i.e., the hopelessly disobedient, children would be taken by the shoulders, gripped firmly, and shaken until they cried in bewilderment--or once, to Mrs. I's increased frustration, puked all over the place. Others, like me, who were merely insolent but not yet insufferable know-it-alls, would be sent to the corner routinely, to muse silently and privately about things that were invariably more interesting than whatever we were "learning" that day.

Wonderland Avenue was not like this. At Wonderland, the first thing we did was read a book about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Garb, I whispered to myself, devouring with my eyes the armored knights in velvet tunics, the ladies in gleaming, mossy silk, the gold circlets on the wizened foreheads of the grey and reclusive wizards. Scabbard. Merlin. Excalibuuuur. We went to the Medieval Times tournament in Buena Park, where a stadium full of other eight-year-olds with their teachers chomped on roast turkey legs without benefit of utensils and gulped juice served in goblets “fashioned”(molded) by “alchemists”(factory drudges) from “sacred pewter”(glittery grey plastic). We goggled and allowed tired-looking, yet lively actors to feint and charge at one another on modern-bridled horses, swing broadswords made of the same counterfeit material as our cups, and roar "thee" to everything and everyone, although even we, second-graders on a field trip, knew that Medieval people never said "thee" to common friends or enemies, but pretty much only to their sworn leige the King, or when they were pillow-talking.

Pappy, for Now and Ever

I have a picture of my father when he was seven or so. Here he is: my Dad, my Daddy-o, my one and only ever-lovin' Pap, in a tweedy striped blazer two sizes too huge on him, gigantic, patterned satin tie knotted a little askew, looking like an old man that's been shrunken down to child-size and doesn't know it yet.

His face looks different than it did by the time I knew him. He hasn't yet been bitten by the neighbor's trusted Rottweiler after he got curious about its eyes, hopped the fence in the middle of the night, put his hands on his knees and stared, as if to kiss it, full in the face. It hasn't yet happened that he was just sitting in a diner, having coffee, minding his own business, and a cherry red Mustang shiny and well-tended as Heaven itself came barreling through the wall-sized picture window, sending a constellation of jagged glass stars sinking into the skin of his cheek. He doesn't have an inkling idea yet about the love beads, the David Bowie haircut, the hours and hours of bleeding fingers hammering out melodies from a guitar, the fact that in a handful of years he will run away from home and stay gone so long his parents will move and leave no forwarding address. He doesn't yet know about my mother, and he sure as heck doesn't know anything about me.

He's got the unrumpled face of a child, complacent and curious, not yet confused or scared but still waiting for the rather interesting story he seems to be stuck in to unfold a little more. In his face are none of the chickenpox scars, none of the lines from smiling or from smoking that he had by the time that I was born and looked up at him and knew that he was mine, mine without end. But he's the same. He looks like my brother; he made my brother, and one day I'll probably be the mother of a little kid who'll look just like him. When I look at my seven-year-old dad, I miss him like a spurned lover, because I can't pick that adorable little boy up in my arms and hold him, tell him he's the cutest thing I ever saw and that I'll love him forever. I can't because he's long gone—he's grown into a man, and then turned into my dad. All that I've got of him is a picture.

I'll be surprised when I get to heaven if we aren't all born at the same time, and get to be together for our whole lives, from beginning to end. I can't think of any other way to finally know the entirety of it all at last; I can't think of any other way not to love people so much that you grit your teeth when you look at them and miss them tragically even when they're right there, still alive.

Staying At Mom's, or, Adult Orphanism, or, The Welled-Up Woes of a Washed-Out Waitress

Once I was a waitress, and I lost my job. I was not laid off from my job. I was fired, and I deserved it.

Waitressing had given me a mysterious shoulder injury that meant that I couldn't hold a tray or do much of anything without looking like there was a wooden nail buried in my arm, which was what it felt like. I had worked in restaurants for eight years, and suddenly at twenty-five I realized that I was no longer just messing around: my job had given me a disabling injury, it had become a part of me, and soon I would be thirty and have nothing going for me but the ability to act sweet for five seconds at a time to people who I'd rather eat nails than ever actually talk to. I wanted to go to college but couldn't figure a surefire way to eat if I quit, and so I just got surlier with every fruitless, hopeless, waitress day that passed. I was fired for this: for being a surly waitress, a mean waitress, a waitress with a sneer on her lips and a jeer on her tongue, a waitress who grimaced like roadkill every time she lifted up your drink, a waitress who wanted to be a respected author/scientist instead of a waitress, a waitress who was certainly not on the fucking dessert menu, a waitress who hated her life, hated herself, and hated everybody else for looking at her and thinking, "waitress".

I made my prayers by way of snippy comments and desperate feelings. But still, my prayers were answered. Verily, the message from God could not have been clearer if a white bull with golden horns had appeared to me in the salsa freezer, and yet, because I am a human, this divine routing of my plans made me madder than hell. I was like a monkey backed into a corner. The busted shoulder meant that another waitressing job was out. The way the management had wangled my hours down to nonexistence before I was booted meant that unemployment was also a no-go. The only other thing I knew how to do was go to school, although being forced to do so had not necessarily been in the plans. So, with the kind of terror that makes you grin like the aforementioned cornered animal, I took out $11,000 worth of student loans, let go of my apartment, and realized that I'd gotten what I'd wanted. More or less. Which brings me back to the point: Staying at Mom's.

I Stay at Mom's because I have no home of my own. My things stay here--the tables, sofas, and other accoutrement of adult life--and periodically, when my boyfriend, who I generally stay with, goes out of town, I join the things. I sleep on one of the sofas, actually. I like to think of this situation romantically as a variation on Adult Orphanism; although I have two parents, both of them quite nice, sleeping on a couch in a cat-infested loft at the age of twenty-six becomes more bearable when I imagine myself as some glamorous Oliver, perhaps in a rhinestone-lapeled trenchcoat, singing for my meals and scrapping to get ahead. More cats live here than do humans, and there's cat hair, cat toys and cat food on every available space where one would wish to place one's human paw. Dogs have died in this home. Teenagers have turned into college students and left most of their things behind, cramming the closets. Adult Orphans have returned home, bringing with them sofas; they have left again, leaving sofas; they have returned to sleep on those sofas once more amongst the dander and felt mice and squeezy toys and actual cats. They return to sleep now. They are going to have strange dreams.

The Big Shebang, or, The Author Gives a Semi-Explanation, or, A Possibly Illuminating Untroduction of the New Blog, "Harelip Prayers"

It's finally occurred to me that what the whole point of achieving something fabulous and earth-stopping has always been was to stop the earth—that is, to stop the flow of time. Somehow I thought that if I could do something awesome enough, I would not fall victim to those things that define me as a mortal. I could become, actually, immortal; though the delusion's never stretched far enough to blot out certain death at the end of the line, it did drop a comforting veil over a lot of other shitty certainties about living. I thought that time would stop for me, if only I could pull hard enough to get ahead of it.

This has been articulated many times, by many people who are much smarter than me. Maybe it's the kind of thing you have to see to believe. After so many years in a weird gritty torpedo implosion, though, one might realize that the center is oneself. Whether or not it sounds like bullshit when one writes it as one's first entry in one's anonymous online journal, which one has chosen not to preface with any kind of face-saving disclaimer.

Alternate entry titles:
Why I Kind of Actually Want a Farm and Seven Adopted Laotian Kids
Boringly Famous or Famously Boring
Household Drudging: Doing and Liking It
Non Is Not Under (Achievement) (No seriously!)
The Opposite of the Opposite of The Ten Thousand Things

The point is, although it's blasphemy in an American society to say that a plurality of experience is not the only way to be happy, I've begun to suspect that:

1. since there's no way to stop time, and life happens anyway,
2. and therefore the choices that you don't make affect the course of things as profoundly as the choices that you do make,
3. and eventually you just die, THEN the only choice you have is to
4. fumble around like a blind fool wearing a clownsuit, and
5. possibly tell stories (for myriad purposes), knowing
6. that things will "end up", albeit maybe not “like they should”, and that
7. someone ought to be keeping track of the marvelous patterns things tend to create when left to their own blind-fool-in-a-clownsuit type devices.

The final moral of the big shebang being: I want to be a writer, and publishing "works" on a blog, even an anonymous blog, makes me feel like a bumbling, stumbling, fumbling, silly blind fool in a clownsuit. But man, I am bout to give out if I do not. And I have a tug, a sort of obligation, that I don't know the source of, that says to watch and see what designs my stumble-bumbling might draw up. So watch out, Horatio Alger. These are my harelip prayers.