Of COURSE I blame my mother. My addiction is totally her fault. Not in an esoteric blame-the-mother-for-everything kind of way, but in a real "Cathy you should play jellies" way. She might as well have started me on heroin.
My name is Cathy Olliffe-Webster and I am a fecking jellies addict. No, not Jell-O. (Who in their right mind is addicted to Jell-O? Other than those kids in Bill Cosby's Jell-O tree, which is plain weird if you ask me, a grown man with a backyard full of trees with kids in 'em.) Jellies. As in "the jellies," aka Candy Crush Saga or something on Facebook.
She told me about them a few months ago because she needed her FB friends to play the game and give her more lives. She was like a junkie, my lovely, otherwise elegant mother, with this jellie gleam in her eye. (If she looked like that on The Walking Dead, she'd get a shovel to the head, and I say that in the nicest of all possible ways, Mom.)
"I am NOT playing that jellie game," I told her. "I know what I'm like. It'll take over my life."
"Just play it for a little while," she wheedled. "Just long enough to help out the woman who was in labour with you for 48 and a half long, painful, excruciating hours."
OK, forget about The Walking Dead look – at this point she looked more like Puss 'n Boots on Shrek.
At first I ignored her. "Just say no to jellies" is my motto. But Dave couldn't. "I can't believe you won't help our your own mother," he said, turning the computer on to Facebook.
"DON'T DO IT," I screamed. But he went down to the basement by himself, figuratively, and started playing The Jellies.
Next thing I knew, I was a Jellies Widow. Every spare chance he had, Dave was on the computer playing The Jellies. After a week or so of that he needed something stronger so he was on to some Pyramid Solitaire game, and then he was rescuing pets and planting crops in Farmville and I was a lonely, lonely woman. I'd lost my mother and my husband to the addiction. You'd think it would be enough incentive to stay clear, but I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. After all, it looked stupid. So one day I started with The Jellies, just an experiment you understand. I was only going to try it. Just once. Just ... once ....
It's hopeless, now. I've got jellie tracks all up and down my arms. I ignore my husband, my children, my blog, my writing – everything that ever meant anything to me. I am not interested in anything other than The Jellies, the beautiful Jellies ...
Depends are the best way to get maximum time with The Jellies. I don't need to eat. Caffeine is injected in an IV and I haven't slept in four days. My Precious Jellies. My Precious ...
