We live in Louisville, KY. We drive cars and pay our taxes. Generally speaking, a man will only marry his sister here if he already got her pregnant. In other words, we try to maintain a certain appearance of civility.

However, if you were to attend the Kenwood Drive-In Theater, you would see some of the people that time forgot. Most of these folks haven’t quite got the hang of walking erect. They are Cro-magnon movie goers, if you will allow me to coin a phrase.

But, we’re there almost every weekend during the summer. Mostly because we can talk to our friends during the movie if it is boring and not have to worry about bothering anyone else.

Also, the general feel of the drive-in is not stuffy or restrictive. You can go shoe-less. You can go shirtless if you’re male. You can sneak people in. You can drink beer. You can smoke pot or cigarettes, whichever you prefer. Most importantly, teenagers can have pre-marital sex in their cars and use the money they would have otherwise had to spend on a motel room toward their college tuition.

But, like I said before, the crowd can be a little apish and rude. If the movie doesn’t start on time, they will start blowing their horns and bouncing on their cars. This amuses me. What’s the rush? Where are they going when the movies are over at 4 a.m.? For my part, I wish they’d wait until it’s dark to start the film so that we could actually see the first 10 minutes of it and not just guess at which characters the vague shapes represent.

I think the crowd is just looking for a reason to riot and loot. There is always an underlying feel of unrest. I sense that it won’t take much provocation to work them into a frenzy. I fear that, if the concession stand ever runs out of food, there might be wanton destruction and maybe cannibalism.

Speaking of cannibalism, we saw Wrong Turn last weekend. The theme of the movie is hillbilly cannibals who trap and terrorize motorists. It didn’t scare my husband. It bothered me, though. Not because the movie itself was scary, but because I know how relatively close those mutant hillbillies live to us.

Of course the degenerates in the movie were simply actors dressed up and playing their parts, but I have seen the actual degenerates that the characters were based on. Well, ok, I’ve just seen the house. I know they were in there, though. It couldn’t have been anyone else.

My yard needs a lot of work, and I do it until I get bored or tired, then I just put it out of my mind. So, I am by no means snooty about the way people maintain their yards. It’s just when I see gas cans, car parts and dead animals lying about in someone’s front yard that I start to get a little nervous.

I can get lost within two miles of my home, a fact I am not proud of. It was on one of these rather embarrassing occasions when I saw the house that surely must contain this very scary sort of deviant.

I was lost on a dark, winding road, and I pulled into what I assumed to be a deserted lot to turn my car around. It was almost completely bare of grass and had junk all over it. Parts of the area looked like they had been bulldozed. Really.

Then I saw the shack. It was set back off the road. It shocked me when I noticed there was a dim light in the front room, because I would never have imagined that anyone actually lived there. To this day, I can’t be sure this house even exists in daylight hours. It could be some sort of otherworldly trap for all I know.

But, I did not leave the relative safety of my car to investigate the house, nor did I even think to do such a thing. Unlike anyone you have ever seen in a horror movie, I took myself out of danger and into a more lighted area of town.

I used my cell phone to call my husband for help with directions only after I found an area that appeared to be cannibal-free. I think this was a wise decision on my part.

Isn’t there some kind of mora
l here? Like maybe: Don’t ask cannibals if you can borrow their phone. Of course, that will need to be reworded and polished a bit, but I think it is good solid advice.

My husband insists on wearing a bucket hat when we travel out of state. It is the most essential part of his vacation wardrobe, because it serves a dual purpose. It protects his shaved head from the sun’s harmful UV rays, and it drives me crazy.

He has little souvenir pins stuck in it. Lots of them. It probably weighs about five pounds with all the pins on it. But, it’s not quite tacky enough for him yet. (No pun intended.)

No, he thinks he needs to attach a string to it to ensure that it won’t fly off of his head on a windy day. I would be more concerned about that possibility, but again, it weighs five pounds. It would just about take a hurricane to knock it off his head.

Make no mistake, I am completely at peace with the fact that my husband is a geek. It’s just that, for safety’s sake, I would like to blend in to some degree when we are in other cities. But, I fear that looking like complete goobers is such a part of our nature that we can’t overcome it even for a few days.

Geeks will be geeks. If it talks like a geek, and walks like a geek and wears a hat with pins in it….

Anyway, in addition to the stupid gape-mouthed looks on our faces whenever we see anything of interest and the huge camera we carry around everywhere, he insists on wearing that nightmare of a hat. I’m sure this is a universal sign to muggers that we are not only out of our element but also mildly retarded.

I don’t quite grasp why we haven’t yet been robbed at gun point. Maybe we look like such easy prey that would be attackers wrongly assume us to be undercover cops. Or, maybe they suppose we’ve been robbed already or we wouldn’t be wearing Planet Hollywood T-shirts in public.

Oh well, who can guess? Maybe they simply fear approaching a man with big enough uh, bon bons to go out in public wearing that hat. I mean, it looks silly, but I guess it demands a certain amount of respect. I just know I’m not going to lose any sleep over it if it should get blown off in a hurricane.

My child is going to need therapy. I just asked her if she was getting a cold and noticed that there was accusation in my voice. How loony is that? As if my daughter were out looking for trouble and caught a cold.

She wasn’t hanging around a doctors office asking people to sneeze in her face. If she has a cold, she got it by accident like we all do.

Apparently, there is a certain element of insanity in the motherhood gene. I remember my Mom telling me that my great aunt used to spank her kids if they hurt themselves. I’m not quite that far gone yet.

I know my child’s instinct is to explore and learn about the world. She should do this. It’s healthy. My instinct, on the other hand, is to prevent her from doing almost everything, because if she does it she could get hurt or catch a cold or marry someone who is just not right for her.

How has this parents having children thing ever worked out? It seems a recipe for disaster.

I can’t think of anything she does that I actually approve of – including going to school. I’m sure the school is trying to stifle her individuality. God forbid they should do that. My job as her mother is to stifle her in general, but unlike them, I am only trying to protect her.

Hogwash. The best thing for her is to be who she is.

The best thing for me is to protect her from becoming anything like me. I just don’t want to witness the same kind of travesty twice.

Isn’t it sad, really, that I’m trying to prevent my daughter from making the same mistakes I did, when the only tools I have to accomplish this task with have so far only made a neurotic?

If your parents screwed you up, what did you learn from them that made you capable of raising a more stable adult than they did?

The only advantage I have over my parents in the child-rearing area is that my husband is a completely different kind of parent and keeps my “stifling instincts” in check to some degree.

Charlotte is only nine. We have a long road ahead of us. I can’t wait for the first time she says, “I hate you and I wish you were dead.” I’m trying to think of a good comeback for that. I have a few years to think about it. Maybe something witty like, “Yeah, well you just added another week to your punishment, Smartypants.” You can’t beat the classics.

My only saving grace is that I know that I know nothing. That fact might get me some points in a philosophy class. But, I’m sure it won’t take long for my daughter to figure out that I am the biggest jackass on earth – and she’ll be certain of it.

“In the twilight glow I see her blue eyes crying in the rain.” – Willie Nelson

Well, I have indeed looked at clouds from both sides now. I used to actually like rain. I liked the pitter-patter on the roof. I liked the smell of it in the air. I even liked walking in it. Now, rain stirs in me an unrestrained feeling of fear. Fear that my electricity is about to go off and not come back on for two days.

Our gas and electric company, LG&E, have apparently ignored a problem in our area, because every time it rains we lose power. If the wind blows we lose power. In fact, if rain is predicted, I should just call them up and tell them my power is out, because it will be soon enough.

As soon as I woke up today and noticed it was raining, I ran down the stairs to turn on my coffee pot so that I could make coffee before our power goes off for the day. I’m not a pessimist. My glass is half-full, so to speak. But, my glass is half-full in the dark quite a bit lately.

So, yes, I have looked at clouds from both sides and discovered that LG&E sucks. This has to be a quick entry. You can guess why!

“…but by-and-by she let out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so, then I didn’t care no more about him; because I don’t take no stock in dead people.” – Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

No, this isn’t about my husband. Even if he does seem dead at times, when you try to take the t.v. remote away he perks right back up. If I honestly believe my beloved husband to be dead, and the first thing that occurs to me is grabbing the remote – well, is that wrong? Does that seem callous of me?

If so, I’m sorry, but I haven’t been allowed to watch anything I want to watch on t.v. for five years. So, judge me if you want, but I’m going to grab the remote and call 911 – in that order.

No, the dead man I love is Mark Twain. He speaks very well for himself in spite of being deceased since 1908.

Some Quotes:

“There has been only one Christian. They caught him and crucified him – early.” – Notebook, 1898

“Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But I repeat myself.” – Mark Twain, biography

My favorite of Twain’s Writings:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn I have a hard time just linking to this without commenting on the stupidity that has surrounded this book. I hate to preach, but here I go:

It is not racist. Twain paints for us a picture of life during the time of slavery. So, yes, he uses the “n” word in order to honestly depict America at that time. We could change that word or blot it out. But, the word he used was commonly used back then. We could also substitute “freedom-challenged” for the word “slave”. But, slavery is what we had. By the time we are done making Twain’s work “politically correct”, we’ll have a book about a cute little bear cub who finds a home, and it certainly won’t resemble the original work. There is not one savory thing about Twain’s subject matter, so we’ll have to change it all if we change a single word of it. Or, we could just leave Huckleberry Finn as it stands. Yes, I think that’s a good idea. Too much work the other way.

I am stepping down from my soap box now. Oops, I tripped.

Letters From the Earth – We get to view Christianity through the eyes of Satan.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Good clean fun. I tried to read it to my daughter, but she didn’t really understand the dialect.

A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court – I read this more times than I want to admit. It made me laugh. A lot.

The links here are links to the works themselves. I love the internet! And, if you are craving more of Twain’s quotes, go here.