Grey Orbison

My photoblog is suffering because my digital camera has once again, been possessed by the gray orb (check post on 02/07/08). I used to be able to get it out of my camera by gently dropping it on the ground (concrete at a high angle). Now I think I just have to wait it out and hope that the next time I turn my camera on it will be hibernating or maybe I should just stick in the freezer or bowl of rice.

Is anyone else suspicious of that “girls rock” camp where parents pay dirty indie rockers to dress their little girls up like Joan Jett and make them perform rock songs? Isn’t it just a GenXification of the old Jean-Bonet beauty pageant system? Dress girls up to mimic male rockers and perform in the band that mommy never could – grody. Show them how to play instruments and write their own songs and play in their own Geranimal clothing – groovy. Additionally, all instances of toddler faux-hawks and toddler Sex Pistols T-shirts should also cease to exist. Dressing children up in sportsfan gear is ok because they are your ticket to get on the jumbotron. If you have any other questions about raising children consult the Bible or shoot me an email.

What are you doing reading this? Go watch the State game.

Don’t

Yesterday I asked a CVS clerk how she was doing and she said, “ oh.. not that good. I just started to feel sick a little while ago.” And I said something like, “Oh no, I’m sorry that stinks, I think its allergy season.” Or something – I mean who cares – work makes everyone sick. And she says “No its like my stomach. I started feeling bad after I got here. I didn’t eat breakfast so maybe that is why. I came here and my stomach started hurting.” This is where she grabs her giant mushy paunch. “So I bought a dollar twenty-nine bag of pretzels and I ate 8 of them. But I feel worse. Like REALLY sick. To my stomach.”

I like the part of Conde Naste Travler magazine where it goes over customs for different countries. All travel guides for the US tell foreign tourists that, “it is common for Americans to ask how you are doing. They do not want a reply longer than okay or fine. This is strange to many visitors but you will get an odd response if you go into detail on how you are doing.”

They should also include this information in the CVS new employee guide.

Listless

Things that will work around the house in place of sleeping pills:

• Drain cleaner (2tbsp)
• Milk (warm in microwave, do not drink more than ¾ gallon in hour)
• Asprin, Ibruprophin (take more than 20)
• Oven (have canary nearby or set timer)
• Sharp corner of coffee table
• Lincoln Biographies
• Waiting for boyfriend to call

Any Occasion, Really

No update on the home-dug grave but, I bought a cool gift bag (it’s big, like 40inches by 30 inches) from the Hazel Park dollar store today and the clerk asked, “what occasion do you use this for?”

“A male birthday or winter solstice.” I replied.

Also, my sister called with this horrific, heart wrenching tale of modern loneliness that ended in her telling me about an unwelcome advance from a older, gumpy male coworker. She said, “all I ever did was smile at him.” And I scolded her, “you know the power of the L*@#%N smile! Don’t be tossing it around like it is some piece of copper in a have a penny, give a penny cup!”

These are things I said today. If you would have seen me on my walk, maybe you would have gotten something to blog about too.

I love lavender everything:

 

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.