Author: Doug Jacquier

Uber Santa

/ Doug Jacquier / 2 Comments

A Christmas present. UK magazine Humour Me has just published my piece about the possibilities for booking a Santa just like you book an Uber. For some reason WordPress won’t let me publish the link, so here’s the piece.

Welcome to the Uber Santa website!

As busy modern parents needing to be available 24/7 to your employer/s, we know you don’t have time to go Christmas shopping.

And we know, you need your shut-eye, so you can’t be waiting up half the night to ensure the kids are asleep before you can safely stuff their stockings or build that swing set with instructions you can’t read after that second bottle of wine.

Never fear, Uber Santa is here and he’s just a few clicks away!

Just sign up with your credit card and follow these simple step-by-step instructions for a hassle-free Christmas Eve.

  1. Shop – Click the Shop button and select a budget for your Christmas spend.
  2. Recipients – Fill out the names and ages of your children and tick the categories of presents they will love.
  3. Review your order – See what we’ve selected and click Pay Now. (In the unlikely event that you don’t like or approve of our selections, go back to Step 2.)
  4. Delivery instructions – Please provide us with:
  • Your address and phone number
  • Names and bribes for any household pets that are likely to be aggressive.
  • Keycode numbers for your burglar alarm and/or details of which flower pot or mat your key will be under.
  • Diagram of your house marked with where you want presents left.
  • The preferred age, gender, sexual preference, nationality, race and voting record of your Uber Santa. (Note that we cannot guarantee to meet all of your requirements and substitutions may have to be made.)

(Don’t worry, your data is completely safe with us. Honest. Cross our heart and hope to die.)

  • Click Complete Order and then leave the rest to us.

What to leave out for Uber Santa.

Please be aware that your Uber Santa can sometimes have specific dietary requirements. We will send you a text on Christmas Eve advising whether your scheduled Santa is vegan, gluten free, lactose intolerant, Scottish, Asian, Jewish, Muslim or Mormon or has any other special dietary requirements.

What NOT to leave out for Uber Santa.

Carrots – If you haven’t had the conversation with your children before, now is the time to break it to them that Santa doesn’t have a sleigh or reindeer these days.

Suggested answers to those pesky questions

Leading up to Christmas, children will often ask difficult questions. Here’s some suggested answers to the more common ones:

Does Santa contribute to climate change with all that flying around?

No, he uses a solar-battery-powered rocket that burns no fossil fuels, so he doesn’t contribute to pollution-induced climate change.

How can Santa be everywhere at once?

His rocket travels at the speed of light. (For the little ones you might need to explain that’s faster than any Marvel super-hero.)

Is Santa real?

He’s real until you decide he’s not real. That’s when the presents stop.

How come Santa’s a fat old white man? Our teacher, Ms. Wildflower, says people like him have caused all the problems in the world.

Actually, nobody has ever seen Santa, so you can picture what we call Santa as anything you like. Your mother sees him a young, sensitive, slim man who likes poetry and yoga. I imagine Santa as being just like my Mum. Everyone’s different, just like Ms. Wildflower.

Story Chat II is live!

/ Doug Jacquier / 36 Comments

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Story Chat – Vol. II, is published and available through Amazon.com. The Editor, Colleen Cheseboro, has done a very professional job.

(In the interests of full disclosure, my work appears in it and I helped a little with the editing process.)

Marsha Ingrao’s achievement in establishing Story Chat, hosting it and publishing this collection from around the globe is nothing short of remarkable. What makes Story Chat and this collection unique is its invitation to join the chat and share your experience of each of the stories.

Story Chat started as a unique online blogging program for authors and readers. This second book includes a diverse set of original short stories by authors from almost every continent in the world. This collection includes sci-fi, comedy, and two non-fiction articles about the writing process.

This book is especially helpful for writers who constantly work to improve their craft. Each story has discussion questions that you can use if you belong to a book club or writing group.

All of us, known as Story Chatters, hope this book will make an impact in your lives.

My Review:

Marsha Ingrao’s Story Chat is an online reading discussion group. It’s like having a group of BETA readers who share their thoughts on what they enjoyed in your story or poem. Everyone is supportive. The comments are designed to help the writer make their story the best it can be.

This book is an anthology of short stories that cover various genres: humour, science fiction, drama, poetry. etc. There’s literally something here for everyone.

This is a great resource for book clubs and writing groups. At the end of each chapter is a section of questions for your Story Chat group, which is followed by the comments from the readers of the Story Chat blog.

Marsha runs Story Chat from her blog. She is currently looking for writers and poets who would like to participate in 2025. Find more information at Story Chat.

Limbo Rock

/ Doug Jacquier / 2 Comments

The wonderful Tarl and Bethany at On The Premises have given me encouragement again with this second prize winner in a mini-contest with a 50-word maximum.

This desolate rock is home to the Limbo of the Fathers. It’s close to the edge of Hell but we dead men can see Heaven in the far distance. Here we speculate endlessly on whether we were the best father we could have been. Eternity awaits our answer.

https://onthepremises.com/minis/mini_62/

Seeing Red

/ Doug Jacquier / 6 Comments

My story ‘Seeing Red’ has just been published by Sky Island Journal.

The editors, Jason Splichal and Jeff Sommerfeld, are a joy to work with and have the best personal touch I’ve ever seen. This is an extract of their acceptance letter: “Seeing Red” is stellar flash fiction. It resists the temptation to get in its own way, and the emotional transport it provides is astonishing. Your craft is tight; your dialogue is shockingly natural; your pacing is perfect, and your palpable imagery saturates every layer of this character-driven narrative. The ebb and flow of your restraint and revelation is so organic—and the tension you build is so incredibly subtle—that readers are deliciously unprepared for your dagger at the end. In many ways, this is Doug Jacquier flash fiction at its finest, and we can’t wait to share it with our readers around the world.”

They have over 150,000 readers in 150 countries and a family of over 900 contributors hailing from 50 countries and they send you an actual physical post card when they select your piece.

Shock and Denial

/ Doug Jacquier / 1 Comment

This piece has just been published by Culture Matters. https://www.culturematters.org.uk/index.php/arts/poetry/item/4702-what-rough-beast

Rufus Hornblower,
the ‘it’s only the flu’,
‘it’s your sovereign right not to wear a mask’,
‘vaccination’s a plot’ guy,
DJT’s favorite shock jock,
woke up on a hospital trolley in a warehouse.
He’d gone to ER.
Severe breathing difficulties.
A doctor wearing full PPE observed him closely,
taking copious notes.
‘Ah, Mr. Hornblower, you’re back with us; are you feeling better?
‘No, I’m getting worse by the minute,
maybe even dying from that plague thing,
so why aren’t you giving me any treatment?’
‘Oh, Mr. Hornblower,
you can’t die from an imaginary disease,
so we’re moving you to the big circus tent we’ve set up
behind the hospital,
or as we call it,
the Centre for Observing Victims of Imaginary Diseases,
or COVID for short.
You’ll enjoy your time there,
what with the clown school,
the acrobats teaching backflips,
tightrope walking lessons
and, of course, lyin’ taming.’

Care and Protection

/ Doug Jacquier / Leave a comment

by Doug Jacquier

This piece was just published by Meuse Press in Australia.


Dear ‘Bring Back The Lash’,
What is it that you want us to do?
To witness for the children
(who live with the ‘monsters’
that dwell in the mysteries
of mythical ‘other’ suburbs)
while saving the Family?
To seek remorse from the children
of beating, beaten fathers
for spraying your walls
like strutting, rutting tomcats
prowling your memory lanes?
To firmly guide the child-mother
to the double-breasted state,
in the secret hope of confiscation
of the child-father’s heir
for replanting in the middle ground?
To guide the steps of the dispossessed
to the paths of committee righteousness
where the swords of primal anger
can be beaten into submissions,
the ploughshares of the damned?
To muffle Black voices
and stumble into families
two hundred years in the breaking
and steal back black youth’s Dreaming
at two hundred k’s an hour?
To hear your rage in silence
as you birch us for our weakness
and hang us from the headlines,
while the raiders of the lost economy
brief lawyers in tax havens?
As we stumble to the millennium
doing more tricks with less,
we scan the darkness of your charity
and our own wounded, winding road
for a light to guide us home.

A Couple of Unhinged Poems

/ Doug Jacquier / 2 Comments

The wonderfully named Rat’s Ass Review just published these musically ratty efforts of mine.

BUS STOP DREAMING
 
Sitting at the bus stop,
the bleak midwinter arrived in
the middle of winter
and it was bleak.
Not moor bleak;
more bleak than that.
The wind was keen,
not in that American neat way
nor like mustard,
but sharp
and bleak
because it was midwinter.
I watched it being bleak midwinter
until I nodded off.
In my dream I saw her
through the glass darkly
of the doors of
the bus to nowhere
and I knew I had to
make her mine, make her mine, make her mine.
I leapt aboard and raced up the aisle
dodging the mardi grass dancers,
knocking over old men that looked like Keith Richards
and trampling on the children of the revolution
until I could see her
gazing out the window at Itchycoo Park.
I dreamed that I jumped off at the next stop
and ran through fields of wildflowers
as if in slow motion
until she fell into my arms,
heels in the air,
and we kissed in the heat of the night.
Later, we would perform Shakespeare in the park.
She would wear a yellow cotton dress
foaming like a wave on the ground around her knees.
I would sport a strip-ed pair of pants
and follow her in the dance
as the park began melting in the dark,
with pea-green rain pouring down and
our passion would flow like pea soup in the sky.
We would take a magic carpet ride
and travel with birds
like tender babies in our hands and
look down on old men
playing chess by the trees.
Until I awoke
and it was still mid-winter
on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
 
 
IN EXCELSIS
 
Patti, the Horses-faced harbinger of rock,
who was a girl named Johnny
who said let’s dream it, we’ll dream it for free, Free Money
who kept Mapplethorpe and Shepard a-muse-d
who birthed children and watched men die too young.
who wrote with Springsteen ‘Because the Night’ said so,
who lost the plot to ‘Hard Rain’ singing Bob at the Nobels.
Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not hers
People say “beware!” but I don’t care
the words are just rules and regulations to me
and her name is, and her name is, and her name is
G-L-O-R-I-I-I-I-A
in excelsis day-o.