Ethics

What is worse? Publishing a photo I took from the upstairs window at my friends house of their neighbor's mysterious freshly dug grave OR actually digging a grave in your back yard?

Now people, that hole is people size. Something is about to happen, right? ST told me that there are laws about burying bodies. But we couldn’t really think of any. What part of your civic education covered human burial? What is going in that hole?!

I am house-sitting at my friends place. She is an anesthesiologist. She has a bunch of unsexy medical magazines. The theme for April is ETERNAL SLEEP.

Out Like A Lamb.

See you later March. March on out of here like the death troupe you know you are. If you really are spring, then I am Greta Garbo. (Not actually a fair snarky comparison because I am a handsome woman just like GG)

You know what I have enjoyed the most this month? Reading articles about who should fix the auto industry. I totally agree that if GM workers just went vegan and switched to auto-renewing clean coal and used more recycled post-consumer waste on their presentation documents, things would be different. They should all build mini-cars. Actually they should all build mini-razor scooters and we should narrow all of the roads so that there is just one skinny, razor-scooters-only line to Best Buy. We would take the extra concrete from the old wide, greedy roads and build a stronger border, not on the Mexican border but on the Canadian border, to stop any further hippy competition coming in from the Canadian tundra.

I just think it is so cool that someone who specializes in Social Media or Green Fuel and other five-minute old specializations has come up with a solution to fix this crazy complicated mess of the century-old industrial word. Never mind that the auto industry (and assembly line) has more to do with the air we breathe than our own mothers.

We can just design our way out of this using the same principals of Dyson Vacuums! We can teach the displaced line workers Arabic and put them to work for the war on terror! We can build more Priuses using windmill technology and toxic batteries and hide all the SUVs in Wyoming!

Catsup

There is a web service called Plinky where you can get a question of the day to help you with your blog content. Today’s question is “What book have you read that has affected you and how?” 

I think that kind of thing is a bunch of bullroar and should be left for Facebook updates and remedial Journaling for Healing type classes. Top five favorite Kayekilla Blogposts Widget coming soon to your homepage.

I want to talk about my favorite topic of conversation: ADVICE. Partially in honor of my friend Derek’s new advice service and mostly because I love to give advice and even more mostly because I love to think about the shitty small-town-hay-bailing-KKK-worshiping advice I got as I grew up in a little agricultural village in southeastern Michigan.

Aside from the, “boys only want…” and “owning your own home is the greatest accomplishment a mediocre person can ever achieve” type of advice, I would say that by far the most repeated advice I got in my youth was, “enjoy it now, this is the best time of your life.” I got this radical advice from:

1. A 300 pound 35 year old lady and small town high school graduate (same one I attended) at local bank (I was 6 and waiting for some free Brach’s candy while my mom was depositing a check from work).
2. Basketball coach(es) in 8^th, 9^th, 10^th, 11^th, and 12^th grade
3. Art/HomeEc teacher (in most small towns the cooking/sewing/oil change teacher is also the fine arts instructor)
4. Priest at St. Agnes
5. Dairy Farmers (two)
6. Countless middle age divorced mothers of school friends (advice given while gazing at the legs, chests, and underdeveloped deltoids of the FHS boys JV basketball team through crêpey crows feet)
7. Four auto plant workers
8. Boss at Fowlerville Farms restaurant
9. Manager at Franks IGA
10. Butcher/Bottle return supervisor at Franks IGA

The reason that I like that piece of advice in particular is because everyday I discover even more ways that it is worthless.

I like to imagine how each one of these people would go back and enjoy their young life in a more enjoyable way. More cake? More fun? More… banking? What?

Out Collecting Data

Check tumblr if you need a fix.

In Progress

Garage at Lane Motor Museum, Nashville, TN

Boycotting (non-Irish)

It’s closing in on midnight. I just downed some Alka-Seltzer – the traditional antacid/fever reducer kind. The kind that – yes – Don Draper has with his morning mail. So let’s just say that what Don Draper feels in the morning, I have already reconciled by midnight.

I stayed indoors; either inside of a house or car for the whole day – spent the first part reading, the middle part with Billy Blanks, and the other part with E and because E is boycotting everything that has to do with the weather because Michigan people think the spring equinox should guarantee the end of snow even though every single March throughout the history of time AD has provided snow,sleet, and bluster, we had to stay enclosed. I figured I’d go along with the boycott of everything since I am, as I mentioned in a previous post, just an ethnographer here.

We drove past the Rouge Factory and broke our boycott for a short moment to get out and check out this magnificent vehicle for sale:

1,200 bucks and you can have a low-mileage 1990 Mercury Gran Marquis V8 – perfect for a demolition derby or for the frequent craft show vendor.

The added bonus of stepping outside was that I let a little bit of the Rouge in my car for good. By opening your doors in that area you let a little bit of Henry Ford in. Those pink downriver sunsets? They look great but they stink like sun-heated-three-day-old-broccoli-in-plastic.

Other highlights: lavender colored Hostess Snow-Balls (if only they were lavender flavored) , pictures from Bobby M and texts from Bethany in Texas, my new car stereo, tinted windows, Emma’s FLWright House tales, peepin, creepin, and emails from my sister.

Pennisulation

These days, these sunshiny days are my marker. The ethnographical reason why I moved back to Michigan for the season. I don't want to ever forget how after a long, gray and snowy winter, any day pushing the fifty-degree-Fahrenheit mark calls for jhorts. It is cause for not only celebration but for condemnation; What? inside? I can't see a movie on a day like this! There is sun out there. It is a beautiful day. We have to put on performance wear and breath fresh air.

Y'all cackling about a beautiful day this is like its the first thing that has ever happened to anyone. Like god ordered us to work indoors, like the Tigers are in the World Series and Meijers is handing out orange hand towels, like it's opening day for rifle hunting season, like they are filling the potholes on I-96...

Move to Florida already. I'll watch a movie or read a book or learn how to play world-of-warcraft - all indoors on the only sun-filled day in a year. I'm not a dirt-worshipping pagan. That bright orange ball would kill you if it had the chance and in fact it's coming this way - inch by inch, light year by light year just waiting for the opportunity to turn your skin into molten snot.

Designers on the Fringe

From the kids section at the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Vice Presidentially Fashioned

 

Helping myself to seconds at the Dan Quayle Center, & The United States Vice Presidential Museum in Huntington, IN

Project Next

I think I took some promising notes last night:

SKL's Handmade Hotel Room Weapons

• Ironing board in closet – use as shield/body armor.
• Lamp – heavy handled – most are bolted down.
• Iron – probably the best – a kind of Cat-and-nine-tails
• Ice bucket? Not very useful but you can use the top as door jammer.
• Glassware – check for lightbulbs (might be too messy – would you just smash over head? In eyes?)
• Coffee pot is best – class with handle – what more could you want? Fill with pebbles from...?
• Think about filling bathtub with water and having a blow dyer plugged in nearby - electrocute perp. Be sure to leave sign to remind self...

The State of Affairs. In Kentucky.

My broken toe was irreparably damaged by the 7 hour drive to L'Ville, the bruise no longer cute or shapely, just bogus. The main thing I notice about being, maybe-a-lil-bit, older now is that any drive longer than six and a half hours makes me feel like I slept on a futon.

Ain't nobody sleeping in Derby City tonight though. After complaining about the toddler sacrifice and loud teenagers on floor 16, the front desk people put me on a high, higher floor where, as the women tells me there is NO ONE else occupying ANY rooms. So, the facts are that I am on an odd floor containing the number 9 and I can't shake the distant echo of hotel doors opening and closing and horses galloping and ladies fainting and bookies booking - all just far enough down the hall to not investigate. It all has me convinced that I am on a haunted floor or in a bad John Cusack movie or both.  The view from my foggy top floor window at this rancid has-been hotel on the banks of the OH-Hi-O River may be my last.  They say there are only two kinds of people that die in Ohio; one's going to hell and one's already there. (I totally made that up)

When I let him in, I told the room service guy that, I've got a hooker in the shower, lets not make a thing about it. I'd tried to  prevent opening the door at all by screaming, JUST LEAVE IT OUTSIDE but he couldn't hear me or didn't think he'd get a tip that way. So I turned on the shower and shut the bathroom door to give the appearance of another person in the room just so he wouldn't notice that the glasses-of-wine-to-people-in-the-room ratio was way off base. Street smart solo travelers know how to 1) Travel Defensively 2) Confuse  3) Divert.  But do they know how to stay alive?

Travelers Justice

Dear Priceline,
I just checked into the Galt House Hotel - a facility that you list as 3PLUS stars. I feel it is my duty to tell you that this place is like a middle age woman still ordering jack and cokes at the bar through her pack-a-day prune lips.  It is old, damp, dirty, loud, and the amenities are half-open - the ones that really count (that Liquor store you mention? Completely CLOSED). The place is much too large to navigate making it more of a refuge hostel, not a respectable hotel. Not only did I have to wait seven times as long for an elevator because of the scads of unsupervised doughy teen boys (there for the KAAC Governors Cup) farting around on the elevators, I had to move my room because there was a family of five having a ritualistic child beating right next door! (If it helps with your records - it sounds, from the wailing, that they were first pumped full of some kind of Kentucky sugar and then beaten with a hand-tooled belt).  And on the other side of room 16XX? An Ice machine! And you know how much ice teen boys need. What a racket. I'd have better luck getting a good night's rest by setting up a rucksack headrest under the fountain pop rig at at any Speedway gas station. Also, the club sandwich is made with a croissant. Please, take this hotel down a couple stars.
Sincerely,
SK

Wet, Dim, and Early: A Spring in Memphis

I froze my ears off on a late afternoon walk.

 

Famous Irish Grudgeholders

boycott [boi'kŏt'] - “refuse to do business with with someone.” From Charles C. Boycott (1832-1897), the Irish land agent for an absentee landlord. Boycott refused to conform to land reforms supported by the Irish Land League. The League acted against Boycott by preventing his access to stores, postal service and other economic necessities. Boycotting is an important tool in campaigns of passive resistance to unjust social conditions.

Top Guided Tour Experiences

A list so far.

1. National Park Ranger at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C.
2. Shady Personal Driver Ocho Rios (and inland), Jamaica
3. Ron at RCA Studio B in Nashville, TN
4. Tie with Rail Engine Repair Shop and Newsprint shop at Greenfield Village Detroit, MI
5. Old Bus Driver Catalina Island, CA
6. Chubby young fella at the Motown Museum in Detroit, MI

Reminder - I'm on the road so check the Tumblr Site for pics.

Memphishead: The Only Downside So Far

I have sent word out that old fashioned medications are better than new fashioned ones. No, this is not part of my "Revive the Quaalude" campaign. It is entirely separate.  But I hope that this explanation helps.

I got a migraine with aura this morning and it pissed me off. Migraine with aura sounds like something you order up, "I'll have one falafel tart with aura and thank you." All it really means is that you can't see past the lightening bugs in your own eyes. A visual freak out.

I'm telling you the best thing to do is take four Motrin and one Midrin with a short glass of whiskey (aged less than 12 years) and then follow in hour with a bottle of Dr. Pepper. You will feel better in three hours as opposed to Imitrix which just makes you feel like you are suffocating for five hours.

Road.

I'm out and about on the Tennessee Highways. Check my Tumblr if you want to see pics or send me your snail mail and you can get a postcard. Will update soon.

Colors. Colors.

I like green. This book BB bought me at a record shop (in Chicago) says that it means I am normal and balanced. Obviously the book is out of date. MY new book on colors will state that if you like green... you are a money machine!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(And on the visual aesthetics of drug culture: acid culture was so much more visually pleasing than today's pot culture... or yesterday's E culture..or tomorrows Adderall culture...)

 

Inside that book I found this:

Sister Ponchita! Tell me: What does the future hold? I like green, yellow, audiobooks, mechanical pencils, RainX, and museums. What does it all mean?

I'm Trying To Eat

I overheard a couple well, one part of a couple, talking in the booth next to me at Potbelly today. They had just come from the baby doctor.

“Kaitlyn…call me back I have good news…”

“Jess… call me back, I have good news….”

The guy sits cross from her, eating his toasted sub.

The phone rings, once….

“Hi? Yes… It’s a boy. Hheehee… I know.. yyyeeah. Yyeahh.”

That’s her good news? I imagine her voice mail if it was a girl, Kaitlyn, call me back…I have something to tell you…  Jess, call me back…we have to talk…

The new mom is foil-highlight-blonde, wearing white Kswiss sneakers, and a smart knobby knit pink sweater, probably from The Buckle. She dreams of Kate Spade bags. Her husband eats sub sandwiches, wears plaid, and has XY-dominant sperm.

“I know… uh-huh.. yeah… well his mom has all brothers.. five of them.. so that’s probably where it comes from….hehehe… yeah…”

“Beck, call me back.. I have good news…”

Can’t you just say, we got our ultrasound and it’s a boy? Isn’t this a good topic for Twitter? Who is this good news for, you freaky obnoxious goodnews gatekeeper? I would be pissed if I went through all the trouble of checking voicemail and called someone back and this was all they had to say:

“Hello, yea-awh… it’s a boy…we got a CD of the ultrasound pics. You have to come over and see them.”

I hope she is talking to the adoptive parents.

The guy gets up to refill his pop. He has not let out a peep.

He is not on his phone.

“We are thinking, Michael… no middle name yet.”

“Jen… call me back..I have good news…”

“Rach…call me back..I have good news…”

"My toy poodle was in a sci-fi movie," and other things from the dog show.

Our Dogumentary motto at the Dog Show this weekend was, Every dog has a story, what's yours? We heard countless divorce and ex-lover tales. One woman told me "oh we have stories," and pointed to her friend and said "this one here had to breast feed a puppy..."

I can imagine only three circumstances where you would need to breast feed a puppy. One of them involves being rescued on a huge, snowy mountain by a pregnant Saint Bernard who, after giving you whiskey from the wooden barrel around her neck, goes into a violent labor and gives birth and your only chance at getting down the mountain is to nurse her three puppies to a size where you can hook them up to their dead mother (with scraps from your mountain climbing performance wear) to ride the furry corpse of their dead mother back down the mountain.

Those women didn't look much like mountain climbers.

Take a look at my terrier racing montage: