Joshilyn Jackson: The Upsidedown Unthankful Meme

IMMEDIATE pre-blog digression: I say this entry is PG-13 because it contains a word that rhymes with...well. Nothing. Unless pesticles is a word? I didn't think so. ANYWAY, you have been warned: Pesticles ahead! Maiden aunties and grade school children, get thee hence!

Because it is almost Thanksgiving, the memes of the day are tempting me to hurriedly say three things I am thankful for and then bounce off to Alabama to begin a three day slavering bacchanalia that centers around my deep, deep, deep gratitude for nut pies and savory roasted meats. I have bad priorities, tra la.

I could quite hurriedly say, for example, that I am thankful for my family, because, Lord knows, I AM. I could say, I am thankful for digressions, because without them, I would not have a blog. And I could say, as a person who woke up jonesing hard for Ghirardelli, that I am deeply, burpingly, satiatedly thankful for the ziplock bag full of freezer burned dark chocolate chip cherry oatmeal cookie dough I magically found while rooting lunchlessly around the six bags of Jolly Green Giant testicle corn* that have built up in my freezer.

*To digress again (thankful!) rather than save the asterisk for the end and risk forgetting I put it there, I should explain that testicle corn is actually a just a regular bag of frozen corn kernels. I THINK of it as testicle corn because it is the same kind of corn, brand and bag size, that a woman at Publix was buying a couple of years ago so that her husband, who had just had a vasectomy, could press the cold veg to his, er, meat and two veg. Making him technically have meat and THREE veg, but who is counting? NOT. ME.

I SHOULD NOT KNOW THIS INFORMATION.
I SHOULD NOT THINK OF CORN THIS WAY.
But I do and I do because the woman was loud, and on a cell phone, and had forgotten she was in public, and I am an enthusiastic and meticulous grocery store eavesdropper. (You should be careful what you say on the phone in the grocery. If I do not hear you and shamelessly steal it and put it directly into a novel, someone else will.)

The woman was saying to her friend, “Do you think he could put a bag of CORN on his testicles? The doctor said to buy him bags of frozen PEAS, but the peas are expensive and this CORN is on sale.” There was a pause where the other person talked---and truthfully, I would pay ONE HUNDRED FOLDY GREEN AMERICAN DOLLARS to know EXACTLY what the person said, because the woman listened very carefully and then said, quite earnestly, “No, it isn’t buttered.” <---TRUE STORY.

But everyone is going to do that meme. And then they shall ask YOU to say in the comments what YOU are thankful for, and you will say your family or your dog or your good friend (because, LORD knows, you are thankful for them) but that is EASY because your family, your dog, or your good friend are lovely things. What’s not to be thankful for?

Let’s you and I INSTEAD find one of our niggling little flesh thorns, the grating things that rub away at our tender nerve casings day by grinding day, and let’s find something to be thankful for in these …challenges. Can I say challenges without sounding like the perky comb-over dude who runs those corporate bonding weekends where you have to hold a spirit stick and cry at least twice? No? So be it.
CHALLENGES, I say, shamelessly.

I am going to look at a fly in my soup and call it protein. Or, perhaps I am going to look at the fly in my ointment and assume he is like the royal supper-taster of yore, helpfully making sure the ointment is safe for human topical application. Although I think the fly in that expression is actually dead, right? So perhaps I shall be thankful that he died in the ointment and can’t GET in my soup? Because I would rather topically apply a dead-fly-tainted ointment than eat a dead-fly-tainted soup, even if it was something really great, like crab and corn chowder.

Anyway, point is, we are getting jiggy with the THANKFULNESS MEME, and we are looking at something that drives us batcrap and trying to find a way in which we are Thankful for it.

Mine is Insomnia. My hideous insomnia has taken on a new form, in which I go right to sleep, but then wake up for at least fifteen minutes out of every hour. It sucks, but some good came out of it recently, and I am thankful for it. She said with gritted teeth. THANKFULTHANKFULTHANKFUL.

The good was because of this OTHER thing that makes me batcrap:

It looks NICE, doesn’t it? Lying in the dappling sunlight, dandling its lamb-like feet? HA, I say. It’s awful. I like most cats beyond all reason, but I do not like this thing you see pictured. This is mostly because if I try to TOUCH him, touch him in ANY way, even glancingly in passing, he rears back and gives me a PERFECT Charlton Heston “Get your paws off me, you damned dirty ape,” look.

He also will not play with me. He likes to take his furry mouse off alone and play. If I pull a string for him, he looks at me like he thinks I am demented. It’s quite patronizing. If he sees me WATCHING him play with his furry mouse, he stops, lest I suck some scant, vicarious pleasure from his solitary gambolings. I have courted him and courted him, courted with treats and love and kind voiced approbation, all fruitlessly, and after a SOLID YEAR of him not liking me I started to genuinely just NOT LIKE HIM BACK.

And yet he is in my house. Eating kibble I buy and racking up vet bills and shredding my furniture. Indoor cat life being what it is, I am obligated to support this little yellow jerk for a at least a decade, maybe two. So, since he is my responsibility until death takes him, I have been trying to find something to like about him, ANYTHING, really, because SURELY he cannot be a purely AWFUL little cat in all ways, right? RIGHT? RIGHT???

And then, THANKS TO MY NEW FORM OF WILDLY IRRITATING AND EXHAUSTING INSOMNIA, I found out that Boggart actually does like me. Secretly.

Boggart is a secret snuggler.

He waits until I am dead out, which with the old form of insomnia would have been about two am or so. When I am dead to the world, he CREEEEEEPS into my room on his insidious pink-padded feet, and he cuddles up as close as he can get to me, and there he stays, all night.

I have found him there every time I have woken up, limply and blissfully tucked into my neck or armpit or the bend of my knee. If I stir or move at ALL, he leaps away and hides and pretends it never happened. But then if I am very still, and feign snoring, he comes creeping back to press himself up against me and make sly biscuits and PURR. He STEALTH purrs, under his breath, and marks me with his scent glands by face rubbing. Insomnia sucks, but I feel much more warmly toward Boggart now that I know he is a secret snuggler…

SO what’s yours? What thorn can you find a reason to be thankful for this season? I really want to know. Put yours up in the comments here or on FTK, or blog it meme-style and link in the comments here or on FTK? Over-sharing inquirers (read: me) want to know.

(OH! LASTLY, because it is Thanksgiving and because Roxanne asked, I am linking you to the beautiful and bigger-butt inducing recipe for Pure Irish Love, also known as Fat Potato Fat Fat.

To your mouth, I say, “You’re welcome!” and a handwritten sympathy note to your arteries is in the mail. With that check. Yeah.)

Bestselling novelist Joshilyn Jackson lives in Powder Springs, Georgia with her husband, their two kids, a hound dog, a scurrilous Boggart-thing, three aging gerbils, and a twenty-two pound, one-eyed Main Coon cat named Franz Schubert. She wishes their neighborhood was zoned for goats. Both her SIBA award winning first novel, gods in Alabama, and her Georgia Author of the Year Award winning second novel, Between, Georgia, were chosen as the #1 BookSense picks for the month of their release, making Jackson the first author in BookSense history to have Number 1 picks in consecutive years. Her latest, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, is now in bookstores!