Jabberwocky

I’m at a house near the end of a cul-de-sac. If I kept going, I’d be in the parking lot of an apartment complex. I knock on the door, and suddenly get the funny feeling someone’s watching me.

Something that cracks me up about delivering pizzas: people seem to think their windows are built using two-way glass, as if they expect me to not notice them staring at me. And they also think they’re soundproof. What really gets me is that they don’t answer the door sometimes. They just stare. This window to my left, where I can clearly see several small fingers holding the blinds open, it doesn’t have a screen. In fact, the glass isn’t even there. It looks like it broke sometime in the past, and not even all that recently. It’s got dust and cobwebs attached to various corners of broken glass. Like this kid thinks I can’t see his fingers sticking between the blinds.

“Jabberwocky!” He whispers loudly, if that’s even possible. “Jabberwocky!”

What I wanna do is toss the pizza at him through the window. Or at least tell him to get his mom and dad and open the fucking door. He obviously has no idea what he’s saying. He goes out and sees a poor adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s work and thinks it’s something original simply because he’s never seen it. And it’s not that I hate Tim Burton’s version of Alice in Wonderland. It’s that kids are gonna grow up thinking this is the real story, and when they inevitably encounter the real story, they’re gonna think, “What the hell? That’s not Alice in Wonderland!”

It happened to me when I was told that whenever Ariel walked, it felt like she was walking on knives. And that her thick-headed love interest never figured out it was her all along, the one who really loved him. And she didn’t get her man. And she died and turned into sea foam. At least, that’s how the story was supposed to go, but this is, as Propagandhi once called, “a Disney-fied history.” Things have been fluffed up for today’s audiences, who apparently can’t stand a sad ending.

Even when the dad finally answers the door, even when he’s standing there handing me the money, this kid never shuts up. “Jabberwocky! Jabberwocky!” He whispers it over and over again. Dad’s acting like he doesn’t even notice. I hand him the food and go back to my car. Some day this kid will encounter the real “Jabberwocky” poem. What a shock it’ll be when he sees how drug-induced imagery actually is.