Out The Window

Lots to do. I’ve had to make all of my observationals on the go. Nothing has changed really. Though, things are greener, it is the holidays, and I’m almost free from this semester.

BRB.

Welcome Home Weather

When it rains here it is as if a gigantic shipwreck from yesteryear turned the Mississippi River over while unearthing itself, spilling water on buildings and land, turning the paved streets to rambling rivers in order to sail again if only to seek revenge.  Rivers of revenge!!  Windshield wipers of wrath!

It really rained here.

It rained birds in Kentucky:

I lost an earring and a sweater on my trip, but I found a sock crumpled up in a boot  - as well as a box of old Japanese stationary (old as in 1990s – it wouldn’t qualify for A Collection A Day or anything). 

It all unevens out in the end, I suppose.

Decompressing While Compressing

Compressing time, that is:

Road Block

I haven't been able to post from the road.  If you can read this. It is a miracle.

Employees must wash their hands with dishsoap.

S Kaye

Connected by MOTOBLUR™ on T-Mobile

The Talon Times

Thanks to the time change, my drive to Arkansas in the evenings has changed considerably.

I am now headed due west right during the fall of the sun so I am essentially driving directly into a beam of shrill orange light. I am driving into a nuclear bug zapper for forty-five miles without rest. Straight into the center of a high-beam headlight, just face-first into a flame. Perfect for a sensitive migraineur like myself. And if you think sunglasses will help – well then send me some. I mean – you are wrong. Nothing helps because it is the sun and as we all agree - the sun is very bright. Perhaps it is the brightest object in this great sky we all share.

However, there is a sinister upside to the change in light and timing. Now that I arrive in the farmland right at sunset, it is feeding time in the fields. So I get to see at least ten times the hawks I usually do. (If you haven’t developed an appreciation for taloned animals I suggest you start with a horned owl or something before you move onto a hawk.) It is mass mouse murder for a good seven miles off the highway on my way to class so I am very relaxed by the time I have to lecture.

Not counting Thanksgiving week, I only have two more weeks left in this semester. It has not been easy teaching two classes while saving children during the day (day job). Last week I graded seventy-five essays and I don’t even believe in grades! Some students (the old fashioned and the obsessive compulsive) need grades so I can’t just walk in there and say “I don’t believe in grades, you will notice at the top of your paper is a swatch of color and a hand-written temperature, the color represents the general mood emitting from your work and the temperature is my actually body temperature while reading your essay.”

That wouldn’t work right now because, to be fair, I would have to calibrate the thermometer I use for “grading” at the very beginning of the semester. So I have to stick with regular grades through to the end. Things will be much different next semester I tell you! I will be arriving in the dark of the early winter night, the hawks will be sleeping, I will be using more classic essays for course material, and I will use my body temperature to determine grades. Like the light, we all change.

It’s not that I haven't been driving through Arkansas observing astounding sites and outrageous happenings. It's not that I haven't been working and dealing out justice and charity during the day. It's not that I haven't been watching Boardwalk Empire or planning road trips or having terrible headaches that I could write pages and pages about. It's not that I haven't started a new self-help program to wean myself off the television show Intervention (as I near step 8 I will have to apologize to my readers) - no, no I have been doing many things - I just haven't been able to write about them because I guess you can only keep your eyes open for so many hours a day.

Little Tokyo

…Los Angeles

Hospital Trash Cans

Bloggers Block, Blockers Blog, Blargh

This photo is from Shelby Park Farms. They were setting up the Christmas light extravaganza when we were there doing our Olympic Paddle Boat training last weekend.

Speaking of “we” - B asked me what on earth provoked my last post and I told him I had gone deep into my “Things People Say to Each Other and Things People Have Said To Me” archive and I found that one from my spring trip to Michigan. 

I keep all my notes in all different places – small notepads, large notepads, novelty notepads, envelopes, receipts, carved stones – whatever – sometimes I use a crappy notepad app on my phone. I miss my Blackberry – those are the best for typing/thumbing up some extensive notes.

The notes trapped in my phone rarely get revisited until I have a spare afternoon when I retype them all in a regular word doc and that is what I was doing on Thursday instead of grading papers. (I have not finished typing out the notes OR grading the humongo stack of essays still in front of me)

Here are a couple notes I made to myself over the past week and so*:

• It is not the coolest idea to be sick when you get home from vacation, but I guess I am not here to be cool.
• An older woman at a South Memphis thrift store stopped me in the overcoat aisle and asked my opinion on how a crappy tweed jacket fit. She told me that she had just lost seventy pounds and she heard Heidi Klum say it isn’t what you wear but how it fits. I don’t want to be looking like a fool, she said. She kept hunting me down to ask about the fit on some Kasper blazers. We were both in the check out line when she tried to buy me some green sandals and said they were the Caroline Herrera look. I declined and told her it was my pleasure to help. In the parking lot I saw her stop a roller-derby looking chick and her friend to take a cell-phone picture with her. She had a mini van and I wonder if that was the end of her shopping trip.
• I have more cardigans now than at any other time I can remember. I am counting shrugs as well. I no longer own any bolero jackets. I am successful.
• Fun food items: bundt cake and mini cheese in red wax.

 

  *replacing “or so” with “and so” because it is the new slang for almost a half.

The End of the Bar

The last time I was in a Meijer Thrifty Acres with my sister (the soldier) we were buying guacamole and beer and champagne and double stuffed Oreos for Easter. I recognized the woman ringing us up as the same woman you see chatting up whoever at the end of the neighborhood bar, the one that looks like she replaced beer and whiskey for daylight and meals long, long ago. That skinny eye-liner-ed biker woman with the clasp-lock cigarette holder and  million lines around her lips wearing levi’s and some kind of crystal somewhere – you know her. She’s friendly:

“How you guys doing?”

“We’re good. How about you?”

“Oh well ya know, I woke up this morning and no one was throwing dirt on me so I’m doing purty good.” She said it in a good natured, hey - shit-happens type of way, not the way your mother would say it. Then she continued to scan our stuff and said, “I’d rather go party with you guys….”

Let me tell you this - none of the horror stories of the supposed financial crisis hit me until I saw that this woman had to take a job at Meijer's. You can judge a society by how it cages its birds.

That is what I am thinking about right now. Yeah  sure,I woke up this morning and no one was throwing dirt on me (unless you count pledge week at WEVL) but I don’t like thinking about misplaced characters and empty barstools and someone timing our good lady’s smoke breaks. The unfairness of it all kills me. It is, as one would say, my dirt.

Night Wine

Anyplace, Michigan

 

I found a Gocco print machine at Amvets (here in Memphis) and this was on one of the screens. Proving further that Michigan is everywhere and with everyone at all times.

Our hearts are the peninsulas and Michigan is the water, surrounding us with sand dunes of comfort and petoskey stones of security, forever.

Actually Michigan is Michigan but I can think of no greater metaphor for circumferential obsession than the Great Lakes.

You’ve Been Steampunked

I didn’t know it, but the insides of my computer have gone steampunk. The motherboard turned to a cheese grater and the processor morphed into one of those stretchy sticky-hand things you get out of those gumball/cheap toy machines.  It’s victorian-futuristic on the inside but looks just like a regular ol’ HP on the outside.

I figured it out when it took an hour to recognize my hard drive and four years to open up a RAW file. I just hope I can continue this important work under these intense limitations.

Here is a wall in San Luis Obispo that has been GumPunked:

Imagine if this wall ran into this hair art found just down the street at the Mission SLO:

Yes, people used to do decorative things with hair. Now we just steal it from hair brushes for DNA tests or take it from barber shop floors to sprinkle on bank vaults after a good robbery in order to destroy and confuse the evidence team. 

(I saw it in a movie, relax)

Cover your head and pray -- More from the mission:

Focus on Frolicking

I’m back and still on PacTime. To fall asleep in time to get enough rest for my 12 hour day tomorrow I will have to hypnotize myself with the images of falling clouds over soft waters, palm trees in the wind, and brake lights.

Many Views and Cramped Shoes

It's good to be here. My eyes are windworn from being atop Griffith Park and my driving foot is cramped from breaking and gassing down nearly the entire stretch of Wilshire. Because if you are not in traffic you are not here. Or maybe you are inside one of the numerous gourmet burger joints or blow-out only salons.

Check this page for ongoing updates (often in the form of cell phone hisptimatic/android/ap pictures):   theskl.tumblr.com

S K

Connected by MOTOBLUR™ on T-Mobile (meaning I can't insert links)

Star Pow-Wow

 

Headed out and up in the sky for a visit to LA-la land! I will tell everyone there about freshwater pearls and fields of white gold:

And hopefully I will be checking in to tell of palm trees and expensive sneakers and pinkberry.

Semi-Precious, Partially-Rare

Gathered at the Freshwater Pearl Museum Camden, TN

The free tour of the Freshwater Pearl Museum included a short video of a CBS Evening News program circa 1987 that featured entirely too many close-ups of freshwater pearls being extracted from snotty mussel innards. It was nauseating. I don’t even like to accidently see people eat shrimp on a Red Lobster commercial.

We didn’t get to go on a tour of the pearl farm. The woman working the museum (and gift shop) gave us the rundown on the tours, the next one was in six days and she asked if we were interested in signing up. Well no m’am we weren’t planning on sleeping in the Freshwater Pearl Museum 1986 video viewing room for the next week, but thank you. You can’t fault her for being enthusiastic. Like any good tourist attraction, the tours had special names - one of them was called a “tweener” – meaning if you couldn’t afford the real deal you could be humiliated in front of your friends and family by being forced to say “we’ll just take the tweener tour.”

I think she was happy to have us in the shop because it validated her belief in the mysterious beauty and magical draw of the pearl farm and Tennessee River. “I came here on vacation and stayed here!” She said she wasn’t the only one – same thing happened to three other people in the area including the guy who runs the marina. I was beginning to think this is where people went on the lamb. Our gal at the jewelry counter looked like she was on her fifth life at thirty two. 

Before we left she told us we looked like Katie Perry and that every woman wanted a Tahitian (pearl). I’ve been trying to figure out the hidden messages ever since. I’m sure they are buried somewhere in the slimy mussel meat underwater in the pearl farms of the Tennessee River.

Been Gone

 

Our of touch and on the road. Back with tales of Tennessee trails quite soon.

It is Not Necessary…

…to say “I love to laugh".

Have I Told You This Story Before?

I’ve been having a mild to moderately hard time getting things blogged out because I’ve been writing so many letters lately. I see that in my students as well. Since they spend so much time away from them, they write elaborate letters to their friends and families (and maybe even to their enemies – those letters/vows of revenge can take a lot out of a person) so by the time they have to write in class they are spent. I guess they feel like they have already done all the telling that needs to be told. Not everyone is a performer or a standup comedienne or preacher or amnesiac or some other kind of person who takes pleasure in re-telling and re-telling and re-telling. 

So we must learn to compartmentalize and save certain stories for certain audiences. For example, I thought it would be a great idea to save a mention of the Subway Sandwich Artist, that loves to put just one black olive on the center of my sandwich when I say “extra olives,” just for this blog. It’s visual – just imagine a lone chopped black olive on a bed of shredded Subway lettuce - quirky, right? What if I told you the Sandwich Artist does not speak english very well? Now we are talking about how sandwiches and humor transcend language. What if you knew that the owner of this Subway was a mean ol tyrant who re-uses paper cups and times his Sandwich Assembly line? Now it’s a story about transgression and the mini-revolts of a disempowered wage worker.

I can’t put that in a letter now.

Arkansas Ankle Bracelets

The fields of Arkansas, hereby deemed Smokansas, are still burning. Outdoors has turned to indoors as the entire sky, corner to corner, looks like the inside of a breakroom in a tobacco factory. I keep the windows up but by the end of my 45 minute drive, my throat feels like I’ve been sitting on the wrong side of a campfire for about that long – and it’s not fabulous to lose your voice when you still have to lecture for a couple hours. By that time, the only cure for the scratch attack in my throat is whiskey or fritos - so I’ve been stopping off at the Exxon an exit or so before the compound to get something, anything for relief.

I prefer the Exxon because the Shell is too close to the exit and has a depressing layout and the guys that work there are always on their laptops or cell phones (completely destroys my image of gas station workers). The ladies that work at the Exxon have style (glitter nails and funky angel and jesus pins on their uniforms) and always something to say to me when I buy “Mad Housewife” merlot like, “I saw this in a magazine… makes a great gift,” and there was that time I heard one call the other “Big Booty Judy.”

Perhaps the greatest feature of the Exxon is that it has a very clean bathroom featuring one of those Xxxxcelerator high-powered hand dryers. You know the kind that nearly blow off the epidermal layer of your skin – very extreme hygiene.

So, anyway, yesterday I nearly toppled over a small skinny, skinny man with a long, long pony-tail and teeny, wiry mustache. He was just standing around like a creepy little troll with a bunch of larger ogre dudes waiting for the guys restroom. I started to say “Exscuuuu-uuse you…” when I noticed that his ankles were hand – or I guess in this case it would be - ankle-cuffed together. I looked out the window and saw the white US Extradition van, and the armed officer (sporting a gold hoop earring which made me think; private company) by the door, and I thought, I really hope there aren’t chickconvicts in the ladies room, I’m in no mood for a lipstick riot, but I decided to take a chance knowing Big Booty Judy would have my back.

The second I opened the door a woman screamed. (Yes, this is a recurring but very true theme – screaming in restrooms) I thought she was reacting to the mob of barely supervised prisoners just a few feet away, but apparently she was just startled because she’d put her hands under the Xxcelerator Dryer and was completely unprepared for not only the unmistakable powerful burst of air, but for an air dryer all together. She looked at me and said, “God dang! I expected paper towels to come out of here.”

I laughed. Travel amateur. So I told her, “I’m sure one of the guys out there will let you dry your hands on their pants.”

Welcome to Smokansas.

The Most Creative and Fun Blog Post on Earth

B got me a new yellow wallet. My money is much happier.

The retractable antennae is stuck on my car but the motor for it still goes for about 45 seconds after I turn my car off. It sounds awful, like the bones of a small - but tough - animal (like a hamster or squirrel) being crushed in the gears of a meat grinder. At least that is what I see on the faces of people walking by.

We went this place the other night on a suburban recon mission:

But it was not the most creative and fun restaurant on earth. There is already a place in Chicago where you can go and the wait staff is mean to you (but for fun, right, because that is fun – the most fun on earth) and draws on your tablecloth. That is creative. At this place they sat us at a crummy table, slapped down some greasy menus, and left us for fifteen minutes. Maybe our waitress could tell that I, myself was creative and would just take it from there.

It was not been my intention but my collection of  photographs of dead birds on sidewalks is growing. I usually just use my phone camera to capture the peaceful post-mortem of these poor sweet reckless creatures. I imagine that they thought just beyond the window was just another funky fly-able space – maybe even another galaxy – it is an easy mistake, sometimes I can’t even be bothered with trying to open the door to my office and I just bash my face into the glass with excitement. That might explain why there have been more than a few outside of my office building, though the most recent birdacide was outside of the gap. In this case, I blame the store’s attractive fall stripe collection and sale posters.

Who will take pictures of us on the sidewalk?

It’s a Metaphor

(taken at the Clanfamry the other weekend)

This Town

We saw that bank heist movie last night. The one starring Ben Afflick’s jaw and Jeremy Renner’s twitchy small town mug. A few hours after the movie I found myself in a strip mall parking lot waiting around while all the shops were closing up… the Whole Foods workers bundled up their green aprons and came out with brown paper sacks of groceries and got on bicycles and into metro rideshares and foreign cars. Perfectly normal. But the Office Depot crew came out like they were the original inspiration for Reservoir Dogs. The glass doors parted and light beamed through the forms of seven workers staggered in a majestic reverse-V - all of them dressed in workslacks and white polo shirts, looking uniform, clean, and purposeful – maybe even paper-cutter-dangerous. Their leader had red fuck-you-conditioner hair and a manager’s cell phone belt clip and she motioned for the OD Crew to pile in a white armored van featuring the Office Depot logo (modified slightly with a ammo clip in place of a printer cartridge). One of them did a reverse backflip into the rear of the truck and another kept one foot on the footbed of the passenger side so he could stand up as the driver, the shortest and oldest one of them all, drove them away. I am pretty sure I heard a couple of them barking and loading up their tech-9s in time to pick off a few Whole Foods workers waiting for their rides. You never know where professional take-down crews are assembling. Be nice to your retail worker.

The Traveling Woman

This photo could have been submitted to my other blog but I actually bought the book so it doesn’t technically qualify. I wanted to see if the weather guide was still accurate and to find out if the author is still alive because if not I would like to steal her name as my pen name.  I’ll report my findings soon.  - Dena Kaye II

Cement Rooms, Snot Floors: Dinner Convo

My sister sent me a letter from Basic Training with detailed drawings of her chemical warfare/gasmask training:

(All drawings 2010 copyright KML, Soldier, USA Army, America the Beautiful)

Now, nearly my entire family has gone through basic training except for me (and my mother, but I’m quite sure they wouldn’t let her in because she would scare the drill sergeants and say such passive aggressive things to the cooks they would be forced to secretly poison the entire battalion in a mass suicide attempt) and I have heard about this day in basic from my brothers and mostly - my dad, who suffered through it probably in ‘68 when they made gas masks out of bandanas and band-aides. It was and still is one of his more animated story presentations – he used to tell us stuff like that over dinner - “You think mom’s burnt Bisquick and tuna casserole smells bad – let me tell you about when I had to hold my breath for forty minutes while a bunch of pansies puked and cried all over themselves…”

According to K, getting tear-gassed is of course, extremely uncomfortable, and produces a LOT of snot.  So there’s just crowds of recruits doubled-over, choking, with eyes watering like supersoakers and strings of snot falling from their nose to the floor. And when they come out – the sadistic trainers (drill sergeants, captains, whoever) are all there to take pictures of people gasping for fresh air through their snot-covered faces. I think the photos are the modern twist to the old tradition. The image that stays with me (and one that I gathered from her letter, not a photo) is of my little sister standing in a pool of other people’s snot and barf waiting for her turn to suffah – suffah for our freedom! For Jersey Shore and blue jeans and automobiles and rock shows and corn mazes and liposuction and Linsay Lohan and booster seats and low airfare and genetically modified fruit and iPhone aps. 

Shine sweet freedom. Shine your light on me. (But keep it away from the floor of that cement room chamber thing – I mean who cleans that up?!)

Feet First

My drive across Old Muddy is becoming more dangerous every day. The bridges are crowded with impatient semi-trucks and everything is down to one lane while being earthquake-proofed and other things that spell commute disaster. Yesterday I was greeted with a doom cloud of smoke as soon as I crossed West Memphis. They (the farmers, the faceless industrial farmers) were burning the fields. Cotton is over. It’s been scooped and combed and sent to China for a chemical bath before being handed over to small children to make my Forever 21 clothes and now it is time to set the past on fire. Driving through the endless cloud of dead field particles with strips of fire at my side made me feel like I was plunging into unknown dimension, and I was, I was in Arkansas dimension.

The smoke lingered even after nightfall, I could still smell charred dirt when I stopped at the Exxon after class. As I was getting out of my car I noticed a young mom holding a lil toddler (the size of your typical novice walker) on her hip. The mom came around to the passenger side of an older mid-sized SUV and plopped the little girl in the front seat and put the seatbelt on her, shut the door and headed for the ice machine and nearly knocked me over because I was busy staring at her kid who was sitting in the front seat with the shoulder strap actually covering half of her chubby face. Just one eye and a babycheek looking back at me. She looked surprisingly comfortable so I could only imagine that she rode this way quite often. And although I am not a daily caretaker of small children, I know that breaks at minimum four known rules, three legislative and one moral, of transporting children in vehicles. In fact it might have been safer to tie her stroller to the trailer hitch. I’m sure if it wasn’t so smoky I would have seen a set up like that. I’m only telling you the things I COULD see in Arkansas.

In other doom observations:

Just yesterday during a productive lunch break, I found a great hand-crocheted black sweater dress at my favorite almost-scabies-free thrift store. I threw it on over my clothes to look in the mirror (I prefer not to go in the dressing room at this particular place because it also doubles as a toilet) and it fit! I turned to the side and thought, “This would be good for a funeral.” That’s what came to mind and then I bought it. If I show up to a holiday party wearing a black sweater dress that will tell you what I think of your party.

Darker still: I have developed a fear/fascination of death by black hole after listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson’s description of falling into one. He was on the last few minutes of the most recent RadioLab.

When your feet are being pulled at a gravitational velocity so intense that your body snaps in half and then half again and again and again until you are scattered particles of space, that’s when you know you are falling into a black hole (or Arkansas).

All Apologies

B’s Apple Cake went moldy:

 

What I know about this Jewish Holiday season (aka: The Days of Awe) is only what I have gathered from an episode of Entourage, some absences from students in my class, and an article about 10Q – that happened to inspire this awesome reader comment:

“What is something you would have done differently over the past year?”
I never would have answered a blogger on the internet whom I met once years ago who turned out to be a mentally ill obsessive stalker, harasser, and would be black mailer.
People are seldom what they represent themselves to be.
I vow not to make the same gruesome mistake in both the upcoming New Year or the next Lifetime.

— Perley J. Thibodeau

Perely, Perley! Are you calling me out? I’m not a would-be black mailer son, I’m the real deal!! Now send me your extra Bed, Bath, and Beyond coupons or the world will know your full name!!

Note: I would reclaim about 30% of my waking life if I could stay away from the filth and profundity that make up online reader comments, but I can’t stay away – the draw is stronger than all of the real housewives put together.

I only bring up the apple cake and the holidays because I like the idea of asking forgiveness – Catholics are into it, but you have to go through a messenger (usually an old man in a robe). I think I might prefer the ol’ once-a-year approach.

So I apologize to anyone I have wronged – especially those of you that count on this blog for exciting stories and fun photos – I apologize for all of those times you came to check for a new entry and there was the same old entry about my officemate. I’m sorry to all the Starbucks baristas that haven’t gotten a tip from me ever since I started to use the drive-through. I’m very sorry to both the Pistons and the Dodgers because I feel like I gave up on you when times got tough. But really it feels like we are headed into even tougher times and if you don’t pull your shit together I probably will just not pay attention until you get in the playoffs again (or when the Pistons play Miami). I’m sorry that I had to take a hiatus from my short-story chain. I’m sorry I didn’t get to visit with everybody in New York. I’m really sorry to myself that I didn’t get to touch a single Great Lake this whole summer. Sorry to my car for pushing that 3,000 – 5,000 mile oil change. Sorry to the guy at the drive-in movies that we told we didn’t have jumper cables. Sorry to the Department of Education for not having any intention of ever paying more than fifty dollars a month on my student loan. Sorry to the weddings and baby showers I missed this year. Sorry for giving up Diet Coke and Chick-Fil-A. Sorry to the several museums and docent-led tours where I took picture when I wasn’t supposed to. Sorry to my boyfriend for pretending I don’t know how to cook or wash dishes. I’m sorry I think that I have a psychological diagnosis for everyone.

And finally, in the spirit of forgiveness and healing, I also apologize for those of you who use, have used or plan to use in the future, the phrase: “I’m sorry you feel that way.” Because it is a phrase that makes me want to make you actually, really, and truly sorry, in the I’ll-give-you-something-to-cry-about sense of the way you can be sorry.

G-d. I feel much better.

In Dreams

Nylon for the War

I bought two pairs of knee-high nylons at the drugstore. Twenty cents a pair. I’ll probably wear them with a pair of slacks or something careerish, but there really is only one right way to wear knee-high reinforced toe nylons : with a skirt or over an ace bandage. It reminds me of gals in borrowed clothes at choir concerts and middle school award ceremonies and everything else I adore. Knee-high in good company.

Goat Cheese

Goat Chariot Races at the Millington Goat Days.

• Excitement Factor: 5
• Kitsch Factor: 9
• Speed of goat: Varied from 0mph to 3mph
• Crashes: 1 (at finish line)
• PETA Factor: – 75
• Pita Factor: + 50

The best part about the race was the local soldiers keeping people off the bales of hay. Homeland security indeed.

I immediately wrote my sister a letter at basic training and suggested she change her detail request to Millington.

Where Were You A Weekend Ago Today?

We took a tour of one of the several antebellum homes in Natchez and our tour guide, who looked put together in a blue checkered short-sleeved button-up shirt and khakis (the outfit of choice for preservationists and docents I suppose), scratched his belly a lot, was rather kind when a grown woman asked “how did they bathe in those days?”, dropped southern gems like “we don’t call it the Civil War down here,” and told me not to take pictures on the first floor after I had already taken a few.

We ate a one of the oldest buildings in the city, an English Pub that is supposedly haunted (you can buy t-shirts). They tell you that you can go ghost hunting upstairs if you dare. The six year old boy at the table next to us came running back down stairs with his brother and sister completely ruined. We were much tougher on our own ghost hunt. Or at least B was, I am not into haunted houses and it isn’t because of my fear of the undead. I just don’t like being surprised and frightened by items from Spencer’s Gifts.

We drove out to Ferriday, LA to tour the childhood home of Jerry Lee Lewis. I’ve read different reviews of the tour experience – so I expected something between Graceland Too and the Hank Williams Jr Museum. Jerry Lee’s nephew gave us the tour and unlike other tourists, we didn’t get to see the short video (too bad, I love short orientation videos) but he did let us take one picture inside. The place is packed full of some rare photos and clothing and also some completely random things like Brillo pad boxes from 1956. His nephew was a swell guy, he made sure to point out a humorous George W. Bush pin and mentioned several times that Connie Chung had been to the house. Not a whole lotta of additional Jerry Lee info but you could say the tour was atmospherically valuable anyway.

We also got a peek at the Jerry Clower Museum near Liberty, MS.  Lots of southern football paraphernalia and several impressive taxidermy items. I passed out when I saw a license plate for The Fowlerville Fair, my old hometown county fair where I battled for 4H ribbons and risked my life riding midway rides put together with carny spit. Clower’s son gave us the tour and I gotta say you can tell he was bornt of a master storyteller. His stories made the whole trip.

80 miles from home and on a busy highway, we got a flat tire, changed that, and the spare went flat. The truck from AAA showed up in 90 short minutes and it was actually just a guy in a truck. Like a standard pick-up truck with an extended cab. He stepped out smoking a cigarette, took a look at the situation, grabbed a giant hydraulic jack from his truck, jacked the car up, ripped the lug nuts off the spare, said “that ain’t gonna work”, threw the tire iron and the lug nuts on the dirt on the side of the highway, and told us to get in the truck and that he was taking us back to the Deer Lake or Deer Pond or Deer Guts service station. I could tell we were both thinking “you can’t just leave items out like that!” and he could tell we were thinking that so he said “I don’t think anybodys gonna take that" and we got in the truck. I got in the tiny seat in the extended cab and right away noticed a handicap hang tag on the rearview mirror with the name Rory McGurrery* and a small hatchet sticking out of a dollar store style gift bag. Handwritten on the handle: Attitude Adjuster. We pulled straight cross the highway and he gunned it for the median. “Shortcut?” I asked him. “Yes m’am” he responded in heavy deadpan. Not much of a joker this guy. B said something about how we were coming back from spending the weekend in Natchez and the dude gave B a once-over look like he’d said we had just come from maypole practice. He took us back to the service station, filled the spare up and hammered out the rim. We were back to our car in a few minutes. All of the lugnuts were still there. Rory was right. No one took them. “Should getchu to Walmart – if she goes flat again I’d just keep er running on that rim – you got nothing to lose.” We were going to ask him to follow us the two miles to WalMart but figured we wouldn’t risk showing any bad attitude for fear that it would get adjusted. We made it traveling 40mph for a few miles, praised WalMart and the southern states in general for not giving a flying rats ass about Labor Day or labor laws or driving with an open hatchet, and got a new tire (and some toothpaste – they have good deals there).

*name changed a bit

The Fabric of Our Lives

The older you get, the louder you breathe, chew, and open plastic packages. Old being over 70 if you’re average, over 50 if you look like you stepped out of Menopause the Musical and have spiky red hair and brightly colored reading glasses, and over 40 if you share an office with me and sing-song “Theeerre she iiis!” every time I come in the room. I am around a decent amount of old people on a daily basis. That’s probably why I was totally comfortable with us taking a little weekend vacation down in Natchez, where the mature crowd goes to have little buttered biscuits and Mint Juleps on the grounds of historically preserved antebellum plantations.

I used to know this girl named Amy back in my JC days who only had fat (not chubby) girlfriends because, and this is something she told me as if she was straight common-sensing about the right motor oil to put in a high-mileage four-cylinder, that way she is the best looking one of them all. Of course I saw many problems with her strategy but I must have adopted it because now we frequent places where we appear to be the youngest and hippest people around. But what is life or vacation without sweet, sweet self-delusion?

AAA Driver Comes With Hatchet

Made it home.  Barely.


S Kaye

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Pairings

Two Ladies, Across Town

One works in an abandoned office park. Never leaves for lunch, sometimes eats Chex Mix, always spends over half her work days cleaning up the office kitchen or rearranging the office furniture or rewriting the office calendar on the dry erase board. Always backs into her parking spot.

One lives in the historic Evergreen District in a lovely historic apartment building. Has stringy hair and a small dog, thinks everyone should be ok with the small dog running up to them, waters the plants around the historic apartment building at least four times a day wearing plant-watering clothes (in the morning; a robe, after work; sweat pants). Always backs into her parking spot.

I imagine them meeting at a museum/music/drink tasting event. I imagine theirs cars parked side by side, both facing front, under the car port, the dishrags in the office kitchen growing mold, and the plants around the historic apartment building drying up.

BTS (Back to School) TCB (duh)

Oh look – it became September. I was in the thick of the Great Grannie Caper so I didn’t notice. Y’all have no clue what kind of under-the-rock and over-the-river type of characters non-profit people have to deal with – in my case all of them disguised as Grandparents. Let’s just say of all the wisdom and colloquialisms and prayers and life lessons I’ve learned from them, the thing I know for sure, the opening line to my This I Believe NPR listeners, is that everyone turns Narc, Criminal, or Certified Saint if they live long enough.  ‘Course babbling curmudgeon is what I am aiming for but only time will tell what category that fits in.

I’m glad to see the change to September though. In Michigan I loved September, in Memphis (which is in Tennessee, but really it is not Tennessee like the rest of Tennessee is - you'd understand if you lived here) I don’t have the same love just yet. So far it has all of the trappings of a early fall month  - back to school and football games and Halloween Candy in Walgreens. But the heat says not really.

My classes on Tuesday and Wednesday nights are in rooms without any air conditioning. This past Wednesday night they were kind enough to bring in a fan that was five inches in diameter. I really could have put it on a headband and made a personal cooling system but I chose not to be selfish. While the prison won’t deal with the air conditioning (a student told me it had been broken since 1999) they do have a dress code, no sleeveless shirts, no sandals. It wouldn’t really be comfy wearing a tube top and flipflops in front of a room full of inmates anyway and usually I double up on the modesty but modesty is hot. As in temperature sweaty forehead, forearms, and armpits hot.

So for all of September and maybe even into October I will be sweating it out, losing my grip on the dry erase marker, wiping my brow with a zeroxed copy of a David Foster Wallace essay (that I have no permission to distribute) and walking out of class looking like I was trapped in the jade steam room at a Korean Spa with all of my dress-code clothes on. Anyone that has had to pretend like they know what they are talking about for three hours (anyone that isn’t my boyfriend) knows, it’s pretty similar.

Hello fall y’all.

Where Have I Been?

I’ll tell you later.