February 17, 2012 scottcjones 0Comment

I’d booked a ticket to New York on the late afternoon train for the day after Christmas. As usual, on my last day home, my mother suddenly turned sullen and quiet. She spent most of the day mooning around my brother’s house with her arms folded, staring blankly out the windows, looking like she was going to start crying any second. She’s always this way on the last day of my visits. It used to make me angry and frustrate me, the way she would retreat like this. Our time together is short, so why would you waste it behaving like this? I’d think to myself. But over the years, I’ve learned to accept it. It’s the way she feels. It’s the way it’s going to be.

She’s sad that I’m leaving, sure. But I think she’s also sad that this visit home wasn’t quite what she expected or was hoping for. There were nice moments, yes, but there were also tense moments, and dull moments, and strange moments. I know how much she looks forward to these things. I know that she feels lonely with my dad sometimes. I know that she looks forward to seeing me, and my brother and his family.

I know that she starts listening to Christmas music in her car stereo on her way to and from work long before anyone else in North America probably does. After those weeks and months of anticipation, after the excitement she feels, the visit itself, Christmas itself, can only feel small and slight to her. It can never live up to the Christmas in her head that she’d spent weeks and months concocting and fine-tuning.

I think the Christmas in her head looks a lot like the old “Peter Comes Home For Christmas” Folger’s coffee commercial. It’s the one that opens with the college-age son being dropped off outside his family’s home by some hippies in a Volkswagon Bug. “Merry Christmas!” he says to the hippies as they drive off. Then he goes inside the house and quietly makes a pot of coffee for the family. The smell of Folger’s permeates the house, waking up his family members one by one. When they come downstairs, they find Peter–surprise, everyone!–in their living room, next to the tree. “Peter?” the mom always says incredulously. Then Peter’s handsome head pops up through the bottom of the TV screen. Then everyone drinks coffee together and opens presents. If you haven’t seen it recently, here it is.

There was a time many years ago when I actually shopped for a cable-knit sweater like the one Peter wears. No kidding, I have wished at times that I was more like Peter. I wish that our Christmas and my family’s time together could be as simple and pure as it is in the commercial. It never is. Instead, it’s messy and ugly. People crab at one another. The whole house smells of farts in the morning. Zombie-like deer come out of the woods. Dog turds are scattered like bits of punctuation–there’s an exclamation point; there’s a semi-colon–on the puppy’s training pad near the front door. No one has, in the history of our Christmas visits, ever really gotten a good night’s sleep. My brother and his wife let us into their home, which is nice, but you can tell after a night or two that they’re ready for us to leave. And, instead of Peter and his purity and his cable-knit sweater and his handsome head, my mother gets a sulking, unshaven middle-aged man sitting in the corner of the living room next to the Christmas tree, reading the newspaper and complaining about everything.

Stage 5-4. D.K. and Pauline have holed up in a small, well-protected penthouse bunker in the top lefthand corner of the screen. Note those spikes that they’ve tricked out their love nest with. Pretty intimidating and also cool, right? As usual, I’m down at the very bottom of the screen, which is practically the sewer of the world. Between us are a series of conveyer belts and ladders that extend and retract every couple of seconds.

Let’s begin.

Moving along the conveyer belts, as always, feels like I’m in waist-deep water and running upstream, against the current. Climbing the ladders is easy enough, as long as I time it right and begin my climb as the ladder is extending to its full length. Pro tip: If it’s already fully extended, don’t bother trying to climb it. (Insert that’s what she said-style retort HERE.) Why? Because you’ll never reach the top before it begins to retract.

Also complicating things: D.K. stomps his feet every five seconds or so, triggering an avalanche of…things. What sorts of things exactly? It’s hard to say. One thing resembled a tuba that had been run over by several large bulldozers. Another thing looked like a coffin for an elf. Suffice to say, when these things fall from the top of the screen, you’ll need to get out of the way, and fast.

I didn’t get out of the way fast enough on my first attempt to summit and I was crushed to death by what appeared to be several key parts of a hotdog cart. Also: D.K.’s stomps dizzy Mario, rendering him temporarily paralyzed. This causes him to passively get carried along on the conveyer belts, all the way down back to the goddamned bottom. Pro tip: cursing is OK when this happens.

Now, you can avoid being dizzied by jumping into the air as D.K. is about stomp his feet. As long as you’re in the air during his stomp, you’ll be fine.

Continue your ascent, climbing ladders and swimming upstream along the conveyer belts. The last belt at the very top is, as you might expect, especially tough. Why? Because there’s not a lot of real estate between you and where the avalanche of crazy sh*t originates from. You’ll have to be quick and somewhat lucky here. Press on until you’re within kissing distance of Pauline. That’s when D.K. will abandon his post, grab her, and do his climb-through-the-top-of-the-screen thing.

Totals for this series of stages:

Stage 5-1: 9 seconds

Stage 5-2: 62 seconds

Stage 5-3: 130 seconds

Stage 5-4: 110 seconds

Total time: 311 seconds. Number of Marios at my disposal: 36.

A brief animation plays showing Mario pulling off a two (or maybe three) bounce “super jump” across an incredibly wide gap. He bumps his head against some bricks at the top of the screen–ha, ha!–and the “I’m dizzy” music plays. Presumably, I’ll be making a jump of that caliber soon. We’ll all find out tomorrow on day 49, people.

 

 

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