Potential Road

Roads to Tunica lined with blank billboards for a mile:

Gurley road in Marks, MS lined with old tractors (the sky is full of dustbunnies on my camera sensor):

Empty pumps at gas station in Marks, MS:

Dandy Heart

Did you hear the story on the radio about Emily Dickenson and her dandelion garden? They are growing weeds at the New York Botanical Garden in her honor. She said she herself felt like the wild flower and used to give people bouquets of flowers with her poetry tucked inside (sounds like all the emails I send). I’ve actually been using the mature dandelion in an informal de-puffing ritual to bring about all of my wishes and hopes for years now. It is my most sacred superstition.

I found this on my walk today – over half the wishes left on it:

A woman walking by asked “oooh does it have a ladybug on it?”  Please. Nobody is THAT lucky.

Wheels on Wheels

Don’t you want to live forever?

That’s what I ask my car every time before I turn the key. The ignition lock cylinder is kind of like a ready-to-retire lady of the evening – a little too loose for use. These things wear out after a lot of turns so each ignition could be the last (or the last until I come up with the lordalmighty knows how much cheddar to fix it). Great White, as she is known, is fifteen years old and needs inspirational talk every day – mostly with open-ended metaphysical questions. She likes to be driven around on Sunday mornings so she can listen to Car Talk (I told you she was old) and she loves Steve McQueen and H.B. Halicki.  She  hates any new VW Bug customized with flowers and is unimpressed with tailgaters and bikefreaks. What can I say?

I was behind this sculptural masterpiece on my drive home today:

One blue, one black, and a push broom.  Gorgeous.

Web (of) Abuse

Once I see something compelling, or once I have one of my compelling thoughts (that come to me so often if I updated this blog as they came I would blow up the internet), I have to fight off the urge to start a whole new website or blog – why can’t I just keep KayeKillA as a catch-all? This is why one of my goals is to tidy up what they call on Fast Company and Wired my web presence. But it isn’t a habit easily broken. Just today I had two truly great ideas for two different truly great websites.

The first one would be another submission based blog – it would be or WILL BE called “Bugbite or Blemish?” and it will be a comparison kind of blog like “Homeless or Hipster” but on a close-up level. People can send in photos of strange bumps on their skin and the audience will have to determine if the bump is an insect bite or just a blemish (aka: pimple – god dang it - I love the word pimple).  This would be stepping outside of my comfort zone because I usually leave gross humor to aspiring comedians and men (usually no diff). But it wouldn’t really be that funny if one of the featured bites was from a cottonmouth or black widow now would it?

The other blog/website would be creative nonfiction reporting of child abuse sightings. Stay with me here, I don’t mean the really really bad kind, I just mean the arm-pulling and back-of-the-head swatting that happens in retail areas. The kind that is uncomfortable enough to make you take note and scary enough to make you stay quiet. Quiet until you get home and take up the mightiest weapon of them all! The PEN! Or in this case – the keyboard:

She didn’t plan on squashing her child in front of me. Otherwise she wouldn’t have bothered putting a cute ball cap on little toddler Timmy and neglecting her own appearance before making her Target run. If you want to look like you know what you are doing when roughing up a kid in public, you should dress in bruncheon-to-business casual and NOT a tie-died t-shirt with terrycloth shorts. Wardrobe is at least 75% of parenting credibility - sense of humor, haircut, and body weight make up the other 45% and this lady was a failure to the nth. Had she hit Timmy on the side of the face while wearing slacks or jeans with pumps, I would have thought the little bugger deserved it. Instead, she made her first smack across the side of the poor kids face while her fupa, draped in purple, orange, and gold rubberbanded-Rit glory, was wrestling with a mass of plastic bags full of consumer goods in the back of an SUV. When she turned to make sure little TimTim was good and hit and damn scared, the look on her face broke all the security cameras and headlights in the parking lot. Car alarms went off, glass shattered and fell on red plastic shopping carts and made the sound of sixteen hobbits asking in a rhythmic whisper, “have you ever seen a face so ugly? have you ever seen someone so fat?”  And I wondered what the three year old did to get cold-clocked by his jumbo momma and I saw him crying and noticed his orange drool and then the answer came to me: Timmy ate a piece of candy. And from the looks of his mother, she is supposed to get ALL the candy.

After she emptied the shopping cart she focused her attention on emptying the face of her criminal son. My view was partially eclipsed by an ass large and true as the bumper of a Suburban, but I still saw little Timmy’s face transform from innocent tot to Lemonhead posterboy under the unbridled wrath of her ferocious face-pinch. She could have squeezed China up from the Memphis earth with the way her thumb raked into his cheek I tell ya and it still wasn’t enough, she had still not produced any proof. So she used the sausagey pointer finger on her other hand to scoop out a small, wet orange ball of candy. She scooped  and flung it out across the parking lot in one pissed-off-to-holyhell swipe, leaving Timmy with a tear-wet, abuse-red perplexed face watching the coral cannonball sail across twenty car lengths, though a cracked window in a honda four-door, and into the lap of a belted-in tyke named Teddy.  Who grabbed the treat, showed it to his mom in the front seat and popped it in his mouth.

They drove off but no one could hear because Timmy was crying and his mom was overdoing her point by screaming about how she already told him something about not doing something and no one stopped to tell her if she was so good telling him stuff then maybe he wouldn’t have to get pinched in the cheeks like that. I certainly didn’t. I thought for a minute to use some Flip video HD space to catch the live drama but thought better of it because I kind of think I have TMJ and can’t have people pinching at my face in the cheek/jaw area – why risk it. So I just sent a telepathic sympathy message to the kid: “Sorry lil Timmy, thems the breaks. Shouldn’t have been born to a bad mommy. What were you thinking?”

Ummmm-hmmmming for Arkansas

I took a bus full of delta elders on up to Little Rock for a day full of tourist fun on Friday.  Our tour guide met us at our first museum stop sweating in a wrinkly golf shirt and texting on his cell phone. His professional guided tour was focused mainly on the following historical topics; the double-decker McDonalds where Clinton used to run to get his Egg McMuffin, how well he (the tour guide) takes care of his three babies, and the problem with all the deadbeat baby daddies today. It was a very authentic Arkansas tour. My crew was clapping and ummm-hmmming for him. I think they would have been happy having lunch back in West Helena at the Burger Shack but it’s good that we spread some sunshine around the state capitol and, besides, now I can confirm that Bill Clinton is in the Arkansas Black Hall of fame:

Sameness

Vastly different lives, marketably similar biography book covers.

High drama notes (including Gossip Girl spoiler) from the past few days:

Weekend: Too much brunch and beer. Zero unpacking. One load of laundry.

Shell Show: Big Star plus guests like Brendon Benson and lots of rain.

Netflix: Rather liked "Tetro" and the DVD extras about the real life radio show put on by the crazies in Buenos Aires. 

Gossip Girl: Chuck Bass is bleeding!

Literature: Reading a little book called The Great Gatsby - interrupted constantly by B showing me some Andy Kauffman video on youtube - so I have decided to finish the second half by reading this classic out loud because I was inspired and because it is harder to interrupt an out-loud reader.

Lunch Today: Spent an hour on the phone with the appetite-inducing IRS (multi-task alert: ate PB&J and made bed while talking to agent - didn't have chance to read any Gatsby to her but tried to slip in a few references to the roaring twenties and called her Daisy - hey - confusion to the enemy.) 

S Kaye


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Check Please: Lunching Ladies

I was at one of my working-people-strip-mall lunch joints sitting by myself in a booth when two ladies (ladies meaning middle-aged gals pushing all the buttons in Ann Taylor Loft cardigans) sat in the booth next to mine and exchanged fun gift bags for whatever occasion they were celebrating (the new SATC movie? I do not know). Then they prayed. Prayed and gave sincere thanks for the blessed seven dollar lunch and their blessed lives and their divine luckiness and the sacred spirit that consecrated their gift bags and the holiness that they share in their friendship and their blessed certainty of not burning in hell.

Then, naturally, the discussion shifted to Facebook and texting. I’m testifying here that the conversation went from prayer to gossip in half a bite of a burritto.  I would write exactly what they said for the sake of entertainment but I didn’t catch it all - I’m pretty sure it was just,  “Facebooked…facebook..texted me… texted her…then facebooked….then texted. ..toxic people…oprah…facebook.” 

The day before and nearly a hundred miles south on the riv over in Arkansas I was at the Burger Shack because they claim to have the best coke* in town when a gal (meaning skinny old woman in jeans with smoking wrinkles) came in and asked for a bag of ice. The worker grabbed a plastic bag and took the big metal scoop from the ice machine and started filling it up while the gal took out her checkbook and scribbled out a check for a dollar twenty-nine. The whole thing went down like they had done this before many times. Like there was a cash register slot for small checks.

Such are the midday habits of gals and ladies.

*Note: It was a delicious Coke but I think that the check writing gal is on to something and the secret is in the ice.

The Road to Friars Point

One New Thing a Day: Outside the Box

B is back and he bought me a note card set, a bracelet, and a Sprinkles cupcake bake kit. So obviously I forgave him for leaving me alone for a week to deal with the boxes, slow heating shower, and the At&t Uverse/CIA Surveillance people (they have been to our new place five times). I did tell him the cupcake kit was positively worthless unless we had brightly colored mixing bowls so we went to Williams and Sonomoa and filled that gap too. My life is complete. For now. I do still have to work.

Forget the money, there are many meaningful differences between my old corporate/sales job and my new office/nonprofit job. In a good sales job, your company will send you an inspirational book (and maybe an ipod) every month or so -- stuff like Zig Ziggler and Spin Sales and Who Moved My Cheese and all other kinds of books made out of those posters with pictures of eagles and waterfalls and single words like “courage” and “endurance”. All of my coworkers had florescent white teeth and a pre-programmed conversation about how they just  “love to learn” and how they even go so far as to “learn one new thing a day.” At first I thought, who needs to verbalize this sh*t?  What are we going to talk about next? Stepping outside of the box? Thinking creatively? But now I understand – they are not to be blamed. Once you learn that learning is marketable, therefore desirable, its like lip plumper or a full bleed business card.

So can I help it if I have carried over my own undeclared, unselfconscious love of learning new things to my southern-state-paced non-profit job?

Today on my drive to work I learned that there is an old cemetery (with a name that seems to be missing vowels) on Airways that I never noticed before AND there are two small patches of bamboo near my beloved industrial park. Bamboo can grow three fet in a day! Those patches could have been planted two days ago! I also learned that Jello cups can have as little as ten calories no matter the flavor, the Mississippi River raised eight feet this weekend, my officemate doesn’t do movies, and there is a new tv series staring everyones favorite Scientologist skater as an Elvis Impersonating Memphis cop.

What did you learn today?

Wasted by Haste

A wise old bluesman once told me (in a documentary video) that if you in a hurry, you in a hurry to die.

I found that out many times over last week, and it is a miracle that I lived to write. If you rush around, terrible things will happen, like you will open a door on your foot or lock yourself out of your house or sign up for the Army or smack a neighbor in the face or pick a bad ice cream flavor.

Soak My Hospital Gown in Awapuhi, it’s Summer in Memphis

The other day I wrote of the memories triggered by sound. Today I tell the tale of memories triggered by scent. The smell of Paul Mitchell Awapuhi Shampoo reminds me of being in Jamaica when I was 12. Drakkar Noir reminds me of my first dozen (or so) boyfriends. Coconut reminds me of happy sunny beach times (ages 10-present). Burnt oil over gasoline and dirt sends me back to the Livingston County Figure 8s. Jasmine and Honeysuckle remind me of the hilly walk to Dodger games. And the smell of hospital gowns reminds me of terrible horrible smelly barfy times.

I had to put on a gown yesterday (to get an ultrasound of veins in my arm) and as soon as I lifted the shapeless country-kitchen-hued fabric to my body I smelled it – the smell of high-pressure industrial rinse, alcohol swabs, latex gloves, and the remainder scent of hundreds of sick bodies trapped in flocked cotton. Ooooh eeeww. What a smell. I nearly tossed my cookies on the spot. It’s a good thing the ultrasound tech was an anti-social mute - I had something to focus my hatred on. Her makeup was the icing on a hostess cupcake. The yellow ones.

Turns out my veins are full of red gold and everything is pumping like an oil rig in the Gulf so I continue on my path to eventually getting institutionalized for phantom migraine auras with no known cause. At the very least I take comfort in knowing that you can wear your own pajamas (and not hospital gowns) in most looney bins.

Another thing on my mind is the upsurge in people riding in the backs of pick-up trucks now that the weather has gone from sunny to fire. Save full exposure for hayrides or convertible Miatas people. It is uncomfortable to get caught at a red light or in thick traffic behind a bunch of dudes looking right at you, truly worse than a school bus full of teens traveling from a band competition. Teens are easy, you can ignore them or toss your hair or flip them off or wave your Chauncey Billups bobblehead out the window so they will have something to text about for days. The white t-shirted dudes in the back of a F-150 are another story. Their only interest is leering and they don’t care who knows it, “I’m standing up in the back of a pick-up truck – yeah- whacha gonna do bout it. Might do some lawn work. Might have a drank.” You know the look. It’s the look of early summer in Memphis.

92 Ain’t a Short Life

Ernie Harwell passed away while I was catching up on Gossip Girl. That is a shame. He hasn’t broadcasted a game for years but that changes nothing - his voice is the sound of everything I (and probably a few million other Michiganders) remember about being young; summertime living, lakes, horseshoes, drives home from the grandparents, getting shushed by my father, bless you boys-ing, crackling AM radio, pop-up campers, and Kirk Gibson.

Camera Test One

I took the D90 for a walk today. I really wanted to get pictures of people and their dogs (particularly people walking around holding little plastic bags of their pet’s doo – that kills me!) but I only had time to get used to the camera's easy-peasy settings – so I stuck to street trash and trees – taking one picture with the fancy camera and one with my little snapper, a three-year-old Lumix DMC-FX3. Here are my findings:

Socks Found in Street

The Nikon on top and the lil Lumix on the bottom:

 

Embossed Wallpaper

Scraggy Magnolia Tree (Pre-Blossom)

And a Lil Blossom

Nikon on the left, Lil Lumix on the right.

Things Are About to Change Around Here

I finally answered the calls of the incessant sirens:

 

 

Expect better things once this place dries up from Stormblast Weakend 2010. Well. I know that you can at least expect better pics.

More South

 

Back on the MS-AR River Road for work yesterday. The first picture was taken just moments before I was chased down by one of my senior citizen volunteers who was driving an entirely inappropriate SUV so I thought it was just a country thug trying to confiscate my camera (because people know how powerful these photos are). It is hard to explain to a seventy-five year old woman who was born and raised in a small Delta town that you thought you were being chased around her sleepy village in broad daylight by a crazed assassin and that is why you ignored her flashing lights and car horn. No, no. I told her my radio was up really loud.

And the second photo was taken because I pulled over to read this sign:

Eight Miles a Minute For Months at a Time

Getting stuck in traffic sucks, yes. I lived in Los Angeles for long enough to earn pish-posh rights over everyone that complains about traffic. But there are certain times, certain circumstances, incidences, moments where I love nothing more than a giant going-nowhere line of cars on the ol’ H-way.  When all the cars have gone from five to two and then to no miles an hour, when everyone has sat inside their cars for a few minutes cussing and craning or checking their radio or finishing up their text messages for just long enough – the most magical thing happens: people start to get out of their cars, drivers first  (then backseat drivers, eventually a passenger will step out, then moms, maybe kids if it' has been long enough) and the random characters you have been sharing the road with reveal themselves.

Seeing rows of people step outside of their cars on the highway (or the Interstate as they call it in Arkansas) still gives me the kid-giddies of having breakfast for dinner. I’m usually not the first, but certainly the second, person in my vicinity to get out of my car during a real jam-up. I have a special way I put my hands on my hips so that people know that I too want to know what the samhell is going on.

Today the hold-up was in Heath, Arkansas. I waited for a few minutes trying to find a radio station that had some kind of traffic report  but the only broadcasted information available in Arkansas on the I-40 is biblical analysis. Not post-AD traffic info around any side of the dial. After I  saw a few people flip uturns in the median, I knew the situation had to be big – like a traintruck full of armadillos (I like to imagine armadillos in Arkansas but I think they are more of a Georgia or ‘Bama thing). 

Lucky for the shy guy from Texas in front of me and the slow fella from West Memphis behind me, I knew enough to check in with the gent captaining the flat bed 18-wheeler next to me for the scoopdydoop. He told me that another flatbed has lost his load a few miles up and he jumped out and said, “Mites well check mine while we are restin.” And I thought about asking him for a Coors Light because he seemed like he might have a cooler next to him.

A young guy in a waiters black vest suddenly appeared and said “guess y’all better grab a book, we are going to be here a while.” And I told all my new friends that I had a class to teach at 5 in Forrest City and they laughed and I laughed and those of us that had watches looked at them and laughed again, “No sir-reee you are not goin to make it.” It was a road moment. I was sorry I had finished my PB&J made on skinny Pepperidge Farm bread before West Memphis because I would have shared it with them. I was about to share another recipe with this nice looking woman that finally got out of a Durango a few cars up when the line started to move.

“Bye y’all” I waived as we scurried back to our cars as if the line would leave us behind.  And for the next twenty five miles to my destination I looked at every car that passed and I thought, I know you.

Breaking Bad

You might have heard about the day of reckoning winds and flash flooding here in Memphis. Not a great day to change up residences, but we managed to move all of our belongings between the raindrops (more like rainbullets). That is how fast we are. Of course the movers helped and so did the intermitent storming.  We alternated between prehurricane and blistering southern sun all day. I acted busy covering wine glasses with the lightgreen foam Uhaul gave us.

I have a subconscious tradition where I break something I really like every time I move.  I move more than the average person and I have lots of things to be fond of so you can imagine how much I am affected by this.  Today I broke a handmade orange ceramic heart-shaped photo frame that I found at a Salvation Army in Lansing, MI about 14 years ago. It was the one trinket item I took with me on all of my hobo-light cross-country moves and today I let it fall to its death of a millionlittlepieces right near my car door because I didn't want to set a box down to get my keys out of my pocket.

The move out here I smashed a bud vase my mother gave me. The move back to Detroit from LA I busted up two tiny danish bowls (Pasadena garage sale find) that were shades of green and yellow only available during certain appearances of certain comets. And my move from Detroit I crushed one of a special pair of Arbys 1975 Astrological collectors glasses in the sign (my sign) of Cancer.  Oh and the list goes on, the next item being too painful to continue (sewing machine).

But it is usually only one item - just one. And this allows me to seek meaning in the loss. Like maybe the secret world of possessions is sending me life-changing messages.  For example, regarding the loss today, I'm starting to realise that unique photo frame was just a thing - a clump of earth glazed for decoration and for christsakes hearts aren't orange.


SK

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Helena-West Helena, AR

Don’t let these photos fool you. There’s actually people all around Helena. In fact I talked to a fella at the Delta Cultural Center for a spell. He kept telling me to feel free to look around but then would explain every photo, map, exhibit, drinking fountain and elevator entrance I encountered. But who can complain about southern hospitality?

Renovated Juke Joints and Authentic Tourists

There is enough to do at the Clarksdale, Mississippi Juke Joint Festival to fill up all of the four and a half days on the program schedule but we only had a day to spend this year – and we cashed it in yesterday.

The highlight of the whole day was the Birdsong Bus Tour of the area. We got on the air conditioned bus nearly twenty minutes early and it was already near capacity so the time allowed for some good eavesdropping about all the expectations of the other festival goers. Everyone was looking for real – real authentic juke joints. The outfit you wear when you are looking for real juke joints apparently is a Hawaiian shirt. Anyway, the talented tour guide Mr. Birdsong grew up in Clarksdale and had anecdotes for just about every magnolia tree-framed house and yard we drove by. It was thrilling for me to hear stories about the bold Mississippian Misses  (all named fantastic things like “Gussie” and “Money”) of the past and how Tennessee Williams took revenge on one of the kids that “beat the stew out of him” by writing him into a play. Who doesn’t want that kind of information?

In addition to multiple musical performances and southern culinary treats, the festival had many many fine fashionable offerings. B wanted to hunt down the 6th grader that drew this impressive chalk portrait of Paul McCartney (featured at the Festival art show). I wanted to buy a guitar tie for every guy I knew:

Our tour let out just in time to see the last of the three o’clock pig races:

Inside the dusty WROX Museum:

Red Top Lounge from the window of the tour bus:

And in a picture at the museum:

Authentic?

I had an authentically good time.

No Finger Biting Insurance

Suffering In Near Silence

Conditions I still need to have diagnosed and treated: Always having something in my right eye (and no sir, it’s not my finger), chronic paper cuts, glistening t-zone, numerical dyslexia, psychological aggression toward authority, email and text misinterpretation, slow-then-fast driving, fear of cuticle pushers, OCD/lip gloss hoarding, creaky right ankle, production of excessive tears while laughing or walking in wind, anxiety when around people biting their nails, generalized line anxiety, and fear of getting trapped in a drive-thru.

Scrumptious

Last night we were invited over to a friends house for a delicious home-made roast with asparagus, brussel sprouts, and succotash and this evening over at my east-side friends house, I enjoyed another home-cooked meal of bone-in chicken breast and polenta. I know that if I added the phrase “yummy” to any of that it would sound good enough for a Facebook update, but it is my real life. And food happens.

Here is more evidence:

Last week I ate one of these from the Lamplighter:

And some kind folks brought these back from an archeological rock interview (they are from the home of a rock legend – a southern gent –who else would use pecans?):

This is what they give you at the Indian place down the street when you get your check:

This is what my friend Emma’s in-laws call “Cinnamon Rolls CanyoubelievethisisaSingleServing”":

This is some weigh-it-yourself-yogurt my friend Cara made us get because she insisted it was the exact same as Pinkberry:

Hit Early, Jamd Late: On Track

(both winners by the way)

Gambling offers many metaphorical life lessons. For example, on Friday at the dog track I learned that it isn’t worth the money to pay for "Insider Tips" no matter how cheap. Your own gut instinct and love of funny names will take you just as far. This lesson also applies to dating and ordering off menus in foreign countries.

 

I liked the shorthand individual dog race recaps on the betting pages - like little epitaphs for each race:

"Late challenge ins"

"Almost fell first turn"

"Dead heat for win"

"Kncked arnd first turn"

"Much Improvement"

"Set Rapid Pace Ins"

"Never Gave Up Ins"

“Hit Early, Jamd Late”