Shop-IN

Posted on by February 25, 2020

Caroline has reached an age where I don’t post everything she does online. Sam’s still young enough that pretty much any exploit can be attributed to age when viewed in retrospect. My baby duck, though, is growing up. Which is why it surprised me today when she said, as we walked out of JC Penney together, “You’re going to put this on your blog, right Mom?”

“Well, yes,” I said. But I hastened to add, “I’m not going to say what we bought.”

Mostly, I wanted an entry about this Sunday’s shop-in. I haven’t even attempted to explain this to her in any depth, and she, unlike me, loves to shop, yearns for more opportunities to do so, and doesn’t really care about the excuse. The girl likes to buy.

For those of you who haven’t been keeping score, after Penney’s hired Ellen Degeneres as its spokeswoman, some anti-GLBT group who thought they had ownership of motherhood protested on behalf of a million moms. I’d love to see the actual number of women behind these supposed million mothers. I doubt it numbers so high. Or anyway, I hope it doesn’t. I hope the million is hyperbole.

Haven’t we come far enough since Stonewall to admit that love itself is such a strange institution that none of us really understands it completely? Haven’t we got better things to do than protest against other people’s civil rights? Clearly not.

I’m a noisy supporter of GLBT rights, but typically this means that in order to put my conscience together with my pocketbook, I have to boycott an institution. I do my best, for instance not to eat at Chik-Fil-A. I make exceptions to this for school fundraisers that I can’t avoid attending and when there is absolutely no place else the kids will eat near the exit we stop at while travelling. I’d rather not eat there at all, but my current circumstances don’t allow me to be as hard-assed as I’d like. I need to support my kid’s school and its parent association. And I sometimes need to feed my kids in the middle of nowhere on the road.

Anyway, I will not post a link to the million-assholes-who-think-they-own-motherhood here. I refuse to be responsible for driving traffic to their site and cause. I’m sure you can find them without my help. But their claims imply that Penney’s is against families if it has a gay spokeswoman. As if a family might not have two parents of the same sex.   Or two grandparents of the same sex. As if a straight mother might not celebrate a lesbian daughter.  As if their closed-minded perspective represented the ideas of all parents.

It is very rare that I have the opportunity to put my wallet where my mouth is by patronizing an institution. So the JCPenney shop-in appealed to me, even though, as a rule, I hate shopping. I like it because when Penney’s retained Ellen as its spokeswoman, it didn’t just issue some mealy-mouthed statement. No. The president of the company said boldly that Degeneres’ values are the company’s values. That’s a corporation taking  calculated aim at the homophobic backlash and not just doing the right thing, the very fucking right thing, but doing it with an order of ‘fuck-you-and-the-sanctimonious-horse-you-rode-in-on’ on the side. And oh hell yes, I’ll get behind that.

And I thought it would be best to shop with my daughter, to emphasize that there are plenty of Moms raising their children with open minds. (I might have taken Sam for that reason, but really, I’m not stupid enough to take my little hellhound to a department store just yet.) So I went out with Caroline. With whom I needed to do a little shopping anyway. And as we left the store, she replied to my, “I won’t say what we bought”  with, “Why not? I’m proud of my first-ever bras. I can’t wait to wear them to school.”

Street Scene

Posted on by February 25, 2020

“Well, that’s a first.” Caren added the last of the bound carpet strips to the furniture piled at the curb.

Todd grunted an answer, but she couldn’t hear him, because he was hunkered behind the sofa, while she stood in front of the recliners. They still needed to flip those up onto the couch in order to fit the whole mountain on the narrow grass stripe between sidewalk and street. These tenants left so much that hauling it and the carpet out took them well into the night.

“We ought to get a management company,” Caren went on. “My back isn’t up for this kind of lifting.”

Todd came around to join her. “Costs more than it’s worth,” he told her. And she thought he was right. Probably.

He stood behind her, and she leaned into him while he slid one hand under her shirt to rub the base of her spine. Above them, the moon waxed heavy and low, some optical illusion driving it down towards the earth.

Caren complained, “I ache.”

“Me too,” Todd agreed. But his voice suggested a different kind of ache entirely from the one caused by lifting too much without a proper dolly.

“You can’t be serious. Here?”

He didn’t answer her with words, but instead pulled their bodies together tight, front to back.

“Here then.”

They tumbled awkwardly over the couch arms and left their clothing on the sidewalk. The chairs in front of the couch and the late hour promised sufficient privacy as long as the tenants didn’t suddenly return wanting their possessions.

They wrapped themselves together, one into the other, coiled so it was hard to see where she ended and he began. They bore down on each other like the earth-driven moon. And that moon. Oh the moon. How it yearned to reach the ground.

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This week, the Trifextra prompt asked us to write a love scene 3 to 333 words long that neither turned Trifextra in to TrifeXXXtra nor used any of the following 33 words:

Before and After

Posted on by February 25, 2020

Before

After

Ooooh. That felt good. Let’s do it again.

Before

Aaaand After

I couldn’t get them all, as a Sam’s club manager kept hovering. He knew I was up to something. But as I never actually TOOK any books, and he didn’t seem to notice that they flopped around an awfully lot, I could at least remove the worst offenders.

Just doing my civic duty.

My Life In Music February 14

Posted on by February 25, 2020

I’m so excited! Bella over at If This is Motherhood and I are teaming up to present a new Meme every other week. Here’s the story. A few weeks ago, Bella posted an entry about her favorite group, Nickelback. I gotta admit, I’m no Nickelback fan. But her post showed so eloquently why she loves the band that while I was reading her entry, I WANTED to be a Nickelback fan.

In that post, she said she would someday do a series about her life in music, and when I read that, bells went off in my head. I e-mailed her fast saying something to the effect of “ZOMG I want in!”

It’s a few weeks later, and now Bella has designed our awesome logo, and we’re ready to go live with our first link-up, below. Here are the (very loose) rules.

The linky will open up on a Thursday and stay live until time for the next edition. We’ll run this every other week, so people have a long time to submit. (That means that if you submit early, we’d love it if you could come back and comment on the posts of those who come after you!)

We’ll establish a theme for each session, and we ask that your post fit within that theme. This first week, for instance, we’re doing

But that is all. As Bella says,

       Just follow the prompt! There is nothing else.  You can post a list of songs, a music video or even just the lyrics of a song! Any genre, any song.  Tell us what it means to you — why it is significant in your life.  That’s all there is to it! Let’s have some fun sharing our lives through music!!.

We’d also be really happy if you would grab a button and link back to us so others can play. So, get ready, get set, share.

Feel free to grab a button and link back up. You can just copy and paste the picture and include Bella’s or my URL in your linkback, or you can grab the following code:

Jester Queen
<div align="center"><a href="http://jesterqueen.com" title="Jester Queen"><img src="http://i1064.photobucket.com/albums/u378/jesterqueen1/Jester%20Queen%20Buttons/lifeinmusic.png" alt="Jester Queen" style="border:none;" /></a></div>

Why I Love Winter In the South

Posted on by February 25, 2020

Because it’s February, and the daffodils are already in full bloom.

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Participating in my first ever Wordless Wednesday hosted by the ladies at Spilled Milkshake and My Own Little Corner.


Cruel Summer

Posted on by February 25, 2020

Billy Squier crooned “In The Dark” on Trevor’s boom box. Trevor lay on the top bunk, while across the room, Paul pounded a joystick. “Be careful with that thing!” Trevor warned.

Paul said, “It’s gonna die soon anyway.”

He was right. When the boys opened the gaming console at Christmas, they gazed unbelieving at the box. The machine inside was used, but very real. Nonetheless, one of the joysticks had been broken within a month, its red button jammed down until it wouldn’t spring up anymore, and there wasn’t any money for repairs. The second stick was held together with duct tape. Both boys knew it wouldn’t be with them much longer. Still, they enjoyed it while they could, and Trevor hated to hear Paul abusing the thing. But Paul had always been the nervous one, and Trevor understood that need to expel energy.

For his own part, he reached above his head and turned up the radio. He wanted to get up and pee, but Miss Anna had been clear. Trevor’s job was to concentrate his wishes down to the yellow-haired dead man in the bottom bunk, and to not get up for any reason whatsoever until the trouble started. The body had to remember who had killed it, had to remember its own animosity towards its murderer. And it could get that from Trevor, who had watched his stepfather shoot it when it had still been a man. Trevor and Paul had been trapped in their shared bedroom with the blonde corpse for a whole night now, a night when neither of them slept.

“What’s that horrible smell?” asked Mom from the doorway.

Paul jumped to his feet, standing so his body blocked the bed.  Paul’s job was to keep Mom out of the room when she came home from work. “Where’d you come from?” Paul demanded. “Get outta here! And knock first.”

Trevor propped himself on one elbow and made a show of looking at their mother. In fact, even that motion was a little difficult right now. Those tendrils of concentration that he had been sending down were also wisps that held him in place and made moving a heavy burden.

“Can’t you ask how a lady’s night went at work?” Mom said, and then continued without waiting for an answer, “You aren’t hiding some other smells, are you?”

“Mom, we’re not smoking pot, now let me finish my game! I have to get to the Mothership before time runs out,” said Paul.

Mom stood silhouetted in the doorway, leaning on one raised arm. The backlight hid her features, hid the bruises, so that for a moment, her sons saw her as men must have once seen her, a wasp-waisted goddess crying out desire with her very figure.  Paul flinched away from the sight, but he stayed between her and the bed.

“I’m just telling you, if that smell isn’t gone by the time your Daddy wakes up…”

“Randy’s not our father,” Trevor snapped. “Not mine and not Paul’s.”

“Don’t you let him hear you say that,” Mom warned. Randy was asleep in his kitchen chair, sprawled backwards in front of an unfinished beer.

“Okay, fine, just let me finish my game,” Paul insisted.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do with you boys,” Mom said. “It’s absolutely putrid in that room.”  But she was retreating down the hall now, and Paul stepped forward to close the door behind her. They knew she was too tired to investigate.

“How are things coming down there?” Trevor asked, his voice sounding as heavy now as his body felt. When the subject wasn’t their stepfather, he didn’t have much energy for speaking.

Paul approached the bottom bunk and rustled the comforter. “Still dead,” he reported to Trevor. “I hope he hurries his yellow head up. Mom’s right about the smell, and if Randy wakes up and comes in here …”

“Is she? I guess my nose has kind of adjusted. I hardly notice anymore,” Trevor told his brother. “Anyway, it will work. Miss Anna said we had to give it a full twelve hours, and we’re at eleven and a half right now. And Randy’s going to be sleeping awhile yet. I got the pills in his drinks.”

Paul nodded, moving away from the bed. Then he picked up his joystick and resumed the task of navigating an alien home to its distant family. “I hope Mom doesn’t decide to want the TV back,” he said.

“That’s a stupid game if she does” said Trevor. “But she can’t come in, and right now, you shouldn’t go out.

Paul didn’t answer.

“In The Dark” faded out, and the DJ put on some girl band, The Bangles or Bananarama. Trevor groaned and reached behind his head to fiddle with the dial without looking.

Out in the living room, the same song Trevor had just turned down came on louder. Mom keeping herself awake long enough to get some breakfast. Or dinner. It was hard to say which meal was what  with a third shift job. Mom sang “She’s got it” while Trevor fumbled through stations on a slow-to-tune dial.

“I guess she doesn’t want the TV anyway,” said Paul.

Mom must have been dodging around Randy’s sleeping form, because a couple of times, she stopped singing, then apologized, “Oh! So sorry hon, just getting myself a little dinner, then I’m heading off to bed.” And Paul pounded a little harder on the joystick.

Then a bump, and Paul threw down the joystick and spun around. Trevor sat up too fast and smacked his head on the ceiling. AC/DC crackled on the boom box, “Back in Black”, and Trevor rubbed his skull. The logy feeling  let him go as those hundred thousand directed thoughts finally finished their journey through his mind and into the yellow-haired man’s body. “Get the blankets off it, Paul,” Trevor hissed, as he vaulted down the bunk ladder. The trouble was started.

Paul snatched the cover back, removed the comforter jerkily, then backed against the television. Trevor studied the former man and stood beside his brother.

The corpse’s eyes were as yellow as its hair now, and  they were glowing. It sat up a little unsteadily, then swiveled its head to look straight at Trevor. “In the kitchen, right?” the dead man rasped.

Trevor nodded, then swallowed hard and spoke. “Asleep at the table. Not Mom. Not even if she gets in the way.”

The corpse nodded, rising until it seemed to fill the small room with its rank smell. “Not Mom,” it repeated in that same growling voice. “But when she starts screaming, you be ready to grab her and run. It’s going to get ugly when I take that bastard back down with me.”

Then, the zombie kicked the door down like it was made of cardboard, while Trevor and Paul huddled together against the TV. “One bright chance,” Trevor said. “God almighty, one bright chance.”

And then the brothers held on to each other, waiting for their mother to scream.
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For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, Jay Andrew Allen challenged me with “Bananarama. ” and I challenged Grace O’Malley with “Deftly, he wove in and out of the cones, letting the wind rush across his body, holding himself coiled for the moment when he could pick up speed.”

This is also part two of the story I started here yesterday.

Shallow Grave

Posted on by February 25, 2020

“Pick your glass,” Miss Anna said. “There’s three, all alike.”

“Oh, no ma’am. We trust you,” Trevor said quickly.

Miss Anna laughed. No music in her voice, but no needles, either. “No you don’t” she said. “Nor would I in your shoes. Pick. But don’t drink. Not yet.”

“Did you really hex Mark for what he did to those cats?” asked Paul.

Miss Anna didn’t laugh this time. Just shook her head.

“But you could have,” Paul continued. It wasn’t a question.

Miss Anna nodded.

The choice in beverages suddenly seemed very important indeed. Trevor closed his eyes and picked blind, then Paul did the same. Then, Miss Anna said, “Now, which one of you saw it?”

And Trevor said, “Me,” without hesitation. They weren’t talking cats now.

“Shut up!” said Paul.

“It’s all right,” said Miss Anna. “I won’t call the police. We all know that stepfather of yours would have your mother dead before they’d finished digging up the grave, and he’d do it if she was at work and if work was a hundred miles away.”

Miss Anna had just repeated exactly what Randy said to Paul and Trevor’s mother after she and he came back to the trailer from burying the yellow haired man. Paul sucked in a breath and looked at Trevor. Miss Anna lived too far away to have overheard.

“Me,” Trevor repeated. “I saw. Do you need me to tell you?”

“No.” The old woman shook her head. “Now’s when we drink, by the way.” They did, and Miss Anna continued, “I saw it, too, but I don’t have any personal enmity in the matter. This must be done by someone who saw the thing, and who carries it with anger, and maybe a little bit of hatred in his heart. Is that you Trevor? Go deep now, before you answer me.”

Finally, Trevor said, “Yes’m.” Just the one word, but it satisfied the woman.

“Good,” she said. “Then we’ve something to discuss.”

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Part two of this story is now up here.

We’re going deep this week over at Trifecta, where we’ve been tasked with using the third definition of ‘deep’ from the Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary in a story of between 33 and 333 words.

The wagon

Posted on by February 25, 2020

Hello, my name is Jessie Bishop Powell, and…

Well…

This is hard. But they say that confession is good for the soul. I’ve been on the wagon since early January, and I’ve done well. So well.  This week, though, has been a humdinger. I’ll tell you about it another time. Suffice to say, it’s enough to drive anybody to revert to old addictions.

But I held out until last night.

It doesn’t matter what happened. It only matters that I surrendered. I woke up this morning determined to do better. When I set out for the grocery store, I was looking for shoe insoles. But then, I saw my dealer trying to blend in with the Redbox machines.

And I had the cash. I had the cash on me, and that was my downfall.

Impulsiveness, and cash, and all I know is My name is Jessie Bishop Powell, and up until yesterday, it had been 32 days since I ate a cookie.

Damned Girl Scouts.

So dry

Posted on by February 25, 2020

Salty waves beneath. Parched sky above. My love, I will die on this ocean.

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This weekend, those crazy crazy editors at Trifecta want us to write a story in three sentences. Those are mine. Up there.

Friday Fluff February 3, 2012

Posted on by February 25, 2020

Friday Fluff, Friday Feb 3, 2011

As always with Friday Fluff, this is just one blog with a grown woman answering questions written by a weird teen. These questions come from here, and there’s a linkup at the bottom to Lisa over at Seeking Elevation. Oh look. I just put one up top, too. Because that’s how I roll. Now let’s get this hoss moving.

Have you ever flirted with your best friend’s bf/gf?

I don’t flirt with myself. Too weird. And yes, I’m married to my best friend. And I’m his girlfriend, too.

Do you think that you’re all that and your probably really not?

If I thought I was all that, would I really notice that I wasn’t?

 Have you gotten beat up before. Tell the truth.

No. But I’d love to put a beat down on your ass.

Are you smart or are you dumb?

Fucking brilliant.

If you’re a girl, do you scratch your boobs when nobody’s looking?

Clearly, you are a guy. Boobs don’t itch the way balls do. Women don’t get overcome with the need to just clutch our bosoms and dig around to get rid of that scratchy feeling. Just because breasts and balls both are danglies, that does not mean they serve the same function or behave in the same manner when confined.

 Have you ever wanted to have sex with your own gender?

You can get fucked because of your gender, but I never knew of anyone ever who could fuck a gender, their own or anyone else’s.

Are you liking this survey so far?

Ask me in a couple of beers.  Oops’s survey’s over. Still got plenty of beer. I guess you’ll never get your answer now.

Do you have alot of friends or are you nobody at school?

Go visit Allie Bosh at Hyperbole and a Half. NOW. If you survive the attack of her alot, come back for my answer.

What? You’re still living? You must be too stringy to eat or something.

OK OK. Nosey fucker.

When I was in elementary and high school, which was a long fucking time ago TYVM*, I was less than nobody. It was an ugly time in my life, and I would love to erase it from my life.

Are you annoying to most people?

Only the ones too stupid to go away.

Can you take the truth, no matter what it is?

Yes. I steal truth all the time from people and put it to my own nefarious uses.

Would you go suicidal if someone in your family died?

No. I would not go anywhere if someone in my family died, except possibly to the funeral. I wouldn’t become suicidal either. In spite of all the other shit I’ve gotten from my bipolar, the urge to die has never been one of those problems. I’m too pissed off to die, and I would be angry in grief, too. Though I’ll knock wood.

Is there somebody in your life you hate at this point?

They aren’t really in my life, no. We aren’t even frenemies on Facebook. But we do see the fuckers out in public from time to time, and I want to roast them in boiling holy water, so I guess that’s a yes.

Are you dreading something right now?

Ugh. Yeah. Sam refused to get out of his pajamas, colored all over his face, and then cut up some other kid’s shirt today.

This is not SPiderman. No. This is Iderman, which, in Sam's mind, is EYEderman. And, according to the superhero himself, EYEderman uses a lot of EYE makeup.

He’s had so many good days. But when you’re walking the line, that one bad day may be the end of all good ones. I’m just terrified that when Scott takes him in tomorrow, they’re going to say it’s his last day, and he can’t come back Monday. Yeah. I’m dreading that pretty hard.

While taking this, did you start thinking about your true self?

No. If you want me to think about my true self, ask writing questions.

Would you date somebody on Valentine’s Day just to get something for Valentine’s?

No.

 Have you ever broke somebody’s heart and didn’t care?

“broken”. It’s ‘have you ever broken’, and I married the first guy I ever dated, so no.

 Did you go to Pre-K?

Yes, only then it was called Nursery School.

And, to round out a solidly dorkilicious quiz, here is a gratuitous shot of Eyederman in second position.

Though I guess the arms look more first-position-y

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*Thank you very much. I just made this up. I don’t know if it’s real text speak or not. Onward!

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Linking up with Lisa over at Seeking Elevation! Come play with the rest of us fluffers. And yes, to quote Lisa, we do know what a fluffer is.