Jewel; Or, Get Your Giggle Finger Out Of My Face

My blog isn’t just about my job. Actually, I’m not sure what my blog is about. I’ve decided it can sometimes be about Jewel.

Jewel rubs me the wrong way. It isn’t her jacked up grill. Strangely enough, I respect that she has the money to fix her teeth and doesn’t. I can feel like she’s part of some great dental protest, that her teeth are crooked for a cause. I’d take Jewel’s smile over Jessica Simpson selling me Pro Active any day.

No, my beef with Jewel is long-standing and deep-seeded and beyond cosmetic. It also involves some degree of self-hatred, because when I get drunk at karaoke I am the FIRST to fill out a slip for “Foolish Games” or “Save your Soul.” And a decade ago, in a moment of weakness, I bought a bootleg cassette of Jewel Live and spent the better part of a Fall cruising around Chapel Hill in my silver ‘84 Volvo with the sun-roof down, yodeling.

I hate Jewel for her homelessness. This doesn’t mean I hate all homeless people–just Jewel. She lived in her van for a year when she was 18. I still don’t understand if the van was parked in one place or if she could afford gas to drive it around, but either way, she never fails to mention the van in interviews. Being poor sucks, yup. But if I had my choice, I’d take my destitution all at once, undiluted, rather than have it spread out evenly throughout my twenties. I even think I would have been a little excited to live in a van when I was 18 because it would have felt no different than going off to college–leaving home for the first time, cramped room, not much sleep, potato chips in my bed. Jewel was homeless for twelve months and became an international sensation. I’ve spent a third of my life sharing shoebox apartments and qualifying for food stamps and borrowing heavily from the government and I still can’t publish a damn book of poems.

I hate Jewel because she published a book of poems.

I can’t explain it. That feeling I get when I wander into the Poetry Section of my local bookstore and see Jewel snug on a shelf between Randall Jarell and John Keats. I vomit a little in my mouth. For those of you who spent the late 90’s living under a rock or in your van, the book is called “A Night Without Armor.” That’s a stupid name. My friends had cool titles for their thesises, titles like “Fire May Be a Form Of Drowning” or “Monument Avenue” or “Greener.” OK, that last one was mine and I’m partial, but still.

When “A Night Without Armor” debuted in 1998, it was the only book of poems on the Publishers Weekly list, coming in at #22 for the year.

It isn’t that she writes crappy. Well, OK, it kind of is, but I’m all for Jewel jotting down Haikus in her private dream journal. It just isn’t fair that she gets to mass distribute them or star in public poetry service announcements like this:

I get it. She’s making poetry popular. But maybe it’s only her poetry! Maybe the poem we’re supposed to share with the one we love is called “Upon Moving Into My Van!” There’s a lot of bad verse out there in the world. Take, for example, these uplifting lines I found from a blogger in India:

I am nothing
I am nothing
I am nothing for I turn
I turn into nothing
no bleakness
no darkness
nothing

I don’t like “I Am Nothing,” I will never turn to it for comfort after a long day at work answering multiple phone lines, but I’m not losing any amount of sleep over it, either. Because this poem will never reach The People. This guy in New Delhi might recite it to a couple of friends while depressed and high but I won’t ever have to contend with it in Barnes and Noble.

Now, here is the Jewel poem, probably read and emulated by millions:

“Upon Moving Into My Van”

Joy, Pure Joy, I am
What I always wanted
to grow up and be
Things are becoming
more of a dream with
each waking day-
The heavy brows of Daily Life
are becoming encrusted
with glitter and the shaking finger
of consequence is
beginning to giggle
Grumpy old men
have wings
Burns sport Halos
and everyday dullness
has begun to breathe
as I remember the
incredible lightness
of living

Yeah, that year living in your van sounded tough, Jewel. And since when is an encrusted glitter brow NOT scary? Or for that matter, a finger that can giggle?

When you google “giggle finger” this is what you come up with:

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