Mozart in the Mysterious Five-Sided Kitchen Sink
I took a trip to Lawrence Kansas. What follows is my account of what happened there with all the tawdry bits left out because I don't want you to think about me doing tawdry things although you might already and if you do I apologize. This sentence is over and the next one begins my tale.
Saturday morning at 4 AM, my neighbors, had they been awake, would have seen a comical sight as I hauled several white plastic bags to my car; after I had them safely stowed, I hopped into the driver's seat, quoted Blues Brothers to myself and was on my way. The white bags were not full of drugs or stolen babies; rather, I had loaned out my primary travel bag, a handy canvas number with a 'Universal Studios' patch on the side. Since I lacked any replacement bags, I had to make due with disposable bags and a Hello Kitty diaper bag I borrowed from my mother. Since I was just going to Lawrence, KS, for a couple days, I doubted anything could go awry.
The trip itself was the height of driving monotony. As the sun slowly came up, I found my mind wandering dangerously into realms of possibility that included things like "How badly could I mangle my car if I wrapped it around that sign post?" and "How many dead hobos could I fit in my closet?" Fortunately, my bladder soon distracted me with thoughts of needed relief and my brain hitched on the simple idea of how far away from the highway I'd have to run to avoid being seen in a personal moment by my fellow early morning drivers, of which there were several. All this rumination soon proved moot as I discovered a gas station in the middle of nowhere; despite the facility's relative isolation, there were four elderly gentlemen seated at a table who would probably remain there or within its relative proximity for the next eight hours. One of them had a John Deere hat on.
I used the facilities in the usual manner and exited, stopping to buy a bottle of Fuji water, which normally retails for $1.29 but was inexplicably 99 cents at the gas station. My brain soon resumed its previous machinations, this time plotting a huge Fuji water haul back to Tulsa where I could sell each one for $1.19, netting twenty cents of pure profit with each under-cutting transaction. Before I worked all the kinks in my plan out, I was in Lawrence at the Haskell Indian Nations University, which my girlfriend Abigail attends based on her one-quarter Cherokee heritage. I parked near her car, waited twenty minutes, then drove to Checkers to call her and say, "I waited twenty minutes and you didn't show up so now I'm driving back to Tulsa." Despite my threat, I returned to Haskell, where she was waiting. 'Checkers' was the name of Richard Nixon's dog so I normally wouldn't give them any of my money, but I wagered the majority of my fifty cents would go to some phone company conglomerate.
Abbey and I went to a film festival at Haskell after a nap; the first film on the docket was Riding With Ghosts. The movie chronicled the hardships of Native American life amidst the urban blight of the 'Washichu,' a term denoting either the white man or the all-consuming disease of rampant capitalism depending on which of the three film-makers is speaking. I have to admit that I spent a lot of the movie wondering why anyone would name their club 'The Warlords' and then be surprised when people thought they might want to perpetrate some random violence rather than, for example, pass out baskets of fresh fruits to invalids and shut-ins. When I tried to tell Abbey this concern of mine about what had been a driving point in the ensuing suffering of the men central to the movie's themes, she said, "Maybe you'll understand after the next two movies." I said, "No, no, look, if I get all my friends together and we decide to call ourselves 'The Destroyers of All That Is Good and Noble in This World,' people are going to be wary of us. If we follow up our club meetings by collecting weapons of any sort, even blunt clubs or dull swords of dishonored samurai, folks are going to want to keep an eye on us." Needless to say, I still don't get it, but my next book club is going to be 'The Warlords' and we will discuss Infinite Jest with gusto.
After our lunch break (for wheat pizza!) and lengthy conversation about Riding With Ghosts, Abbey and I returned to the film festival where we watched Alcatraz: Not Just An Island, which was moderately to very depressing, and then a glorified slide show about the Lawrence KS wetlands currently threatened with development of a new highway. Since this video consisted of white words floating on variably colored backgrounds, I couldn't glean much information from it; Abbey marked out, though, so it must have been another thing I just didn't get. When I later marked out because the video maker's name was 'Ryan Redcorn' (he sells t-shirts!) which reminded me of 'John Redcorn' from King of the Hill, Abbey didn't understand so we ended up even.
Next up were two Haskell made films: Wife Beater: The Fall of Krazy Karl and Gitamu Squirrel. One movie featured a man randomly shooting people and the other dealt with shadows of squirrels milling around a lone human figure with sinister thoughts in their mind; both included random cuts to people in white laboratory gear, including goggles. Both also were thematically similar to Catch-22, although that could have been my mood; I'd been commanded not to titter.
The final film was Trudell, which followed the life of activist John Trudell from the heights of social relevance to his current career doing spoken word out there on the scene, man. His presentation reminds me of all the good bits from Bill Hicks; I think my personal bias against spoken word prevents me from not saying something snarky about the movie, which was quite well made and made me think that a documentary detailing the rise and inevitable obsolescence of the compact disc data storage format would be quite fascinating. I'm not quite sure how I ended up there though.
After the film festival, Abbey and I headed to the Merc for more sustenance. On the way, we had
Near Death Experience Number One
Abbey's not supposed to have guests in her dorm room so we had a time limit to contend with. Rather than defensively drive, I hustled my vehicle to its destination and, when I thought I was ready make the left turn into the parking lot, disaster struck: I tried to enter one turn too early and was stymied by a one-way situation that lead to the entrance I'd intended to use actually being an exit currently filled by other cars. Since I'd committed totally to the turn, my car was stretched across two lanes of on-coming traffic; all I could do was gun it into the enlarging headlights and use the next available entrance. I made it with less fanfare than one would expect, but I spent a few moments trembling like a delicate flower on the aisle with the nut butters.
We selected our grub and returned to the dormitory, which I snuck into like a Washichu ninja. After some television watching and a serving of frozen Amy's tofu lasagne, we slumbered. Ironically, this dove-tailed right into
Near Death Experience Number Two
I woke up. I blinked. Abbey said, "Is that a tornado?" to which I replied, "I don't know." We both sat up and leapt into our respective actions; I dressed myself (I'm not dying in pajamas) and turned on the television. Abbey ran outside. Later, she told me that she'd only run outside a moment and then headed to the front desk to pass on a warning she oughtn't have needed to since the wind outside was rumbling like a freight train. However, I was enraptured by the television's reassuring moving colored map and so didn't realize how long my girlfriend was missing. I perked up as, first, a warning came over the PA (inspired by Abbey, who I guess didn't mind dying in her pajamas) and then the Lawrence sirens sounded, barely audible above the roaring wind.
This wasn't as near death as the car thing since the tornado, if it was actually a tornado and not just another of the 90 mph winds that ransacked the city, hit in the northeastern corner of the city and I was safely curled up in front of the television in the southeast corner. Once the storm abated, we toured the campus and found, among other things, trees toppled and windows shattered. The safety glass of a bus stop glistened with a particularly beautiful artificial inner luminescence as the sun occasionally peered through the slowly dispersing dark storm clouds.
Abbey and I later went to downtown Lawrence to eat; the power on one side of the main street was out so we amused ourselves pretending to really want to go into certain stores until people walking by informed us of the lack of electricity. "Oh, that's quite a predicament," I'd say and nod. Abbey would concur and we'd stare at the interloper until they quietly slunk away.
On the way back to the car, I saw a helicopter take off from the middle of a park and fly over me. It was like every episode of every show with a helicopter taking off I've ever seen.
If I'd had my camera with me, I'd've returned with photographs of a lifetime but, since I forgot it entirely, all I have is the second volume of Newsradio I bought at Best Buy when we pulled over there in case of further deadly storming later that night and, while I can't post it, it's good enough for me. There is one shot of a tree flattening a blue Jeep that I should have taken that will haunt me forever; it spoke on levels I can't normally hear on. Alas, the world sings to us all, but rarely do we have the chance to capture the tune.
Monday, I woke up at 5:30 AM and drove home, where I shaved and showered, then drove to work, where I remained until 1:30 AM doing inventory. If I do write about that, it'll be later since it's bedtime again. Goodbye, Lawrence! Thanks for nearly killing me!
Saturday morning at 4 AM, my neighbors, had they been awake, would have seen a comical sight as I hauled several white plastic bags to my car; after I had them safely stowed, I hopped into the driver's seat, quoted Blues Brothers to myself and was on my way. The white bags were not full of drugs or stolen babies; rather, I had loaned out my primary travel bag, a handy canvas number with a 'Universal Studios' patch on the side. Since I lacked any replacement bags, I had to make due with disposable bags and a Hello Kitty diaper bag I borrowed from my mother. Since I was just going to Lawrence, KS, for a couple days, I doubted anything could go awry.
The trip itself was the height of driving monotony. As the sun slowly came up, I found my mind wandering dangerously into realms of possibility that included things like "How badly could I mangle my car if I wrapped it around that sign post?" and "How many dead hobos could I fit in my closet?" Fortunately, my bladder soon distracted me with thoughts of needed relief and my brain hitched on the simple idea of how far away from the highway I'd have to run to avoid being seen in a personal moment by my fellow early morning drivers, of which there were several. All this rumination soon proved moot as I discovered a gas station in the middle of nowhere; despite the facility's relative isolation, there were four elderly gentlemen seated at a table who would probably remain there or within its relative proximity for the next eight hours. One of them had a John Deere hat on.
I used the facilities in the usual manner and exited, stopping to buy a bottle of Fuji water, which normally retails for $1.29 but was inexplicably 99 cents at the gas station. My brain soon resumed its previous machinations, this time plotting a huge Fuji water haul back to Tulsa where I could sell each one for $1.19, netting twenty cents of pure profit with each under-cutting transaction. Before I worked all the kinks in my plan out, I was in Lawrence at the Haskell Indian Nations University, which my girlfriend Abigail attends based on her one-quarter Cherokee heritage. I parked near her car, waited twenty minutes, then drove to Checkers to call her and say, "I waited twenty minutes and you didn't show up so now I'm driving back to Tulsa." Despite my threat, I returned to Haskell, where she was waiting. 'Checkers' was the name of Richard Nixon's dog so I normally wouldn't give them any of my money, but I wagered the majority of my fifty cents would go to some phone company conglomerate.
Abbey and I went to a film festival at Haskell after a nap; the first film on the docket was Riding With Ghosts. The movie chronicled the hardships of Native American life amidst the urban blight of the 'Washichu,' a term denoting either the white man or the all-consuming disease of rampant capitalism depending on which of the three film-makers is speaking. I have to admit that I spent a lot of the movie wondering why anyone would name their club 'The Warlords' and then be surprised when people thought they might want to perpetrate some random violence rather than, for example, pass out baskets of fresh fruits to invalids and shut-ins. When I tried to tell Abbey this concern of mine about what had been a driving point in the ensuing suffering of the men central to the movie's themes, she said, "Maybe you'll understand after the next two movies." I said, "No, no, look, if I get all my friends together and we decide to call ourselves 'The Destroyers of All That Is Good and Noble in This World,' people are going to be wary of us. If we follow up our club meetings by collecting weapons of any sort, even blunt clubs or dull swords of dishonored samurai, folks are going to want to keep an eye on us." Needless to say, I still don't get it, but my next book club is going to be 'The Warlords' and we will discuss Infinite Jest with gusto.
After our lunch break (for wheat pizza!) and lengthy conversation about Riding With Ghosts, Abbey and I returned to the film festival where we watched Alcatraz: Not Just An Island, which was moderately to very depressing, and then a glorified slide show about the Lawrence KS wetlands currently threatened with development of a new highway. Since this video consisted of white words floating on variably colored backgrounds, I couldn't glean much information from it; Abbey marked out, though, so it must have been another thing I just didn't get. When I later marked out because the video maker's name was 'Ryan Redcorn' (he sells t-shirts!) which reminded me of 'John Redcorn' from King of the Hill, Abbey didn't understand so we ended up even.
Next up were two Haskell made films: Wife Beater: The Fall of Krazy Karl and Gitamu Squirrel. One movie featured a man randomly shooting people and the other dealt with shadows of squirrels milling around a lone human figure with sinister thoughts in their mind; both included random cuts to people in white laboratory gear, including goggles. Both also were thematically similar to Catch-22, although that could have been my mood; I'd been commanded not to titter.
The final film was Trudell, which followed the life of activist John Trudell from the heights of social relevance to his current career doing spoken word out there on the scene, man. His presentation reminds me of all the good bits from Bill Hicks; I think my personal bias against spoken word prevents me from not saying something snarky about the movie, which was quite well made and made me think that a documentary detailing the rise and inevitable obsolescence of the compact disc data storage format would be quite fascinating. I'm not quite sure how I ended up there though.
After the film festival, Abbey and I headed to the Merc for more sustenance. On the way, we had
Near Death Experience Number One
Abbey's not supposed to have guests in her dorm room so we had a time limit to contend with. Rather than defensively drive, I hustled my vehicle to its destination and, when I thought I was ready make the left turn into the parking lot, disaster struck: I tried to enter one turn too early and was stymied by a one-way situation that lead to the entrance I'd intended to use actually being an exit currently filled by other cars. Since I'd committed totally to the turn, my car was stretched across two lanes of on-coming traffic; all I could do was gun it into the enlarging headlights and use the next available entrance. I made it with less fanfare than one would expect, but I spent a few moments trembling like a delicate flower on the aisle with the nut butters.
We selected our grub and returned to the dormitory, which I snuck into like a Washichu ninja. After some television watching and a serving of frozen Amy's tofu lasagne, we slumbered. Ironically, this dove-tailed right into
Near Death Experience Number Two
I woke up. I blinked. Abbey said, "Is that a tornado?" to which I replied, "I don't know." We both sat up and leapt into our respective actions; I dressed myself (I'm not dying in pajamas) and turned on the television. Abbey ran outside. Later, she told me that she'd only run outside a moment and then headed to the front desk to pass on a warning she oughtn't have needed to since the wind outside was rumbling like a freight train. However, I was enraptured by the television's reassuring moving colored map and so didn't realize how long my girlfriend was missing. I perked up as, first, a warning came over the PA (inspired by Abbey, who I guess didn't mind dying in her pajamas) and then the Lawrence sirens sounded, barely audible above the roaring wind.
This wasn't as near death as the car thing since the tornado, if it was actually a tornado and not just another of the 90 mph winds that ransacked the city, hit in the northeastern corner of the city and I was safely curled up in front of the television in the southeast corner. Once the storm abated, we toured the campus and found, among other things, trees toppled and windows shattered. The safety glass of a bus stop glistened with a particularly beautiful artificial inner luminescence as the sun occasionally peered through the slowly dispersing dark storm clouds.
Abbey and I later went to downtown Lawrence to eat; the power on one side of the main street was out so we amused ourselves pretending to really want to go into certain stores until people walking by informed us of the lack of electricity. "Oh, that's quite a predicament," I'd say and nod. Abbey would concur and we'd stare at the interloper until they quietly slunk away.
On the way back to the car, I saw a helicopter take off from the middle of a park and fly over me. It was like every episode of every show with a helicopter taking off I've ever seen.
If I'd had my camera with me, I'd've returned with photographs of a lifetime but, since I forgot it entirely, all I have is the second volume of Newsradio I bought at Best Buy when we pulled over there in case of further deadly storming later that night and, while I can't post it, it's good enough for me. There is one shot of a tree flattening a blue Jeep that I should have taken that will haunt me forever; it spoke on levels I can't normally hear on. Alas, the world sings to us all, but rarely do we have the chance to capture the tune.
Monday, I woke up at 5:30 AM and drove home, where I shaved and showered, then drove to work, where I remained until 1:30 AM doing inventory. If I do write about that, it'll be later since it's bedtime again. Goodbye, Lawrence! Thanks for nearly killing me!