Brinkley, Satire Parody

RIP Heritage Inn

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RIP Brinkley Heritage Inn…

No sane person wept about the loss of the Brinkley Heritage Inn a couple of weekends ago. It burned on my birthday, which is a cosmic sign of some sort. I didn’t hear of the loss until yesterday. Some people report they witnessed Lucifer’s shadow escaping the billowing columns of smoke and flame. Most weren’t looking up, however, as they were undoubtedly watching the ground closely for whatever might run out of the fires. For every good thing that might have come from Brinkley, the presence of this horrendous reputation-killing hotel confirmed every stereotype for such places. This hotel should have been fire-bombed by the Air Force at least ten years ago. I can’t imagine the firefighters called to contain the blaze really wanted to do anything to stop the burn. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see them throwing additional materials into the flames to ensure nothing rose from the ashes.

True story: you know the place is rough when you hear a gunshot and everyone with a concealed carry permit or even an illegal handgun runs toward the building, hoping to find an excuse to fire back and kill someone inside the hotel. It looked like the first take of a Quentin Tarantino film. (This hotel was one of the few places you get both meth and bedbugs within 5 minutes of entering.)

Even though thousands of people made the grievous mistake of attempting to stay there over the years, the Heritage Inn won’t be remembered as a quiet place of peace. It could have easily been used as a training ground for police needing to learn the urban tactics of the common criminal or by the ATF doing raids. GhostHunters wouldn’t film there – even the unfortunate ghosts residing there were armed and perfecting their own brand of meth. It is true that places like this need to exist, but I was in awe through the years that this particular Hell was allowed to exist directly off the interstate, openly defying Health and Safety laws and being the source of so much human misery.

Among the amenities of this hotel, one could experience the joy and passion of needing to climb through the window to get into your own room when no key was available. Dog lover? Stay near the room dedicated entirely to holding other tenants dogs, left loose and clawing the walls down to the studs. The scent of the area was quite fragrant, too. Several people reported feces in the bathtub when they got a room there. I’m not sure what level of crazy you have to be in to relieve yourself in the bathtub – or how a hotel would fail to notice that particular thing and then fix it. I guess they at least picked up the missing fingers and soaked up the pools of blood before renting the room?

You could sit in the back where the RV area was, watching the police drive by slowly, but never stopping. If you watched closely, you could watch drug deals, domestic abuse, and all the activity you would normally see on “Cops” the TV show, with the exception of the police not actually daring to climb out of their vehicles. It wouldn’t be uncommon to get a flat from a hypodermic needle or hear random screams – and not the pleasure kind either; no, these screams were snatched from the bowels of deepest human misery and amplified on the dirty concrete walls.

To the rear of the property behind the RV area was the abandoned hull of the saddest Wal-Mart to have existed in the history of retail. Not incidentally, that Wal-Mart had the distinction of having the worst bathroom I had ever personally experienced, and that includes even the time I was helping dad with a septic tank and fell in up to my waist. The Wal-Mart closed, leaving the Heritage Inn to remain, holding forlorn watch over the exit from I-40.

To those who accidentally pulled off I-40 from exhaustion, hoping to find a peaceful place to lay their heads, I say “thank you” to all of you who wrote some of the best reviews over the years. Your horror and disgust at some of the things you complained about was amusing. I’m sorry for your suffering of course, but be gladdened that your abject terror was enough to make me laugh. I could never write satire better than those who shared their horror stories disguised as reviews.

Now that the building has burned, if you read reviews online, most of them express joy that the place finally died. Most echo the sentiment that burning was the perfect end to such an imperfect and hideous business.

Here are review excerpts:
“…In summation, if you’re into sketchy sex, killing things, and a grim, hopeless, overall disconcerting vibe, maybe this is totally the place for you…” – “…I got back in my van and kept driving through the storm. I’d rather risk lightning than a stray bullet any day…” – “…Do not stay here. Avoid it like the plague. Because you might actually catch the plague at this dump…” – “…I opened the room door and was startled by the resemblance to decor right out of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I count myself among the survivors of the Heritage Inn….” – “…Go here, if you dare or are writing a horror screenplay…Heritage Inn at Brinkley, Arkansas is alright if you like fighting. And crack deals and homicide…” – “While I am interested in crime scene investigation, I had never dreamed that I would be able to sleep in an actual crime scene…” – “Two of the filthiest prostitutes I’ve ever seen walked passed me and two kids. My little boy literally screamed a little when he looked at them. I watched one of the other long-term tenants kick the rat-trap around as I unloaded my car… We stayed in our room for about 15 minutes, long enough to hear dogs howling in pain and what sounded like a gunshot followed by screams and then muffled crying…” – “…and the lobby attendant looked like he was from a dumpster…”

I know what you are thinking: “X is exaggerating again.” But I’m not. Because of my mom, I spent time near this hotel. The picture on this post is of a Housekeeping cart. It’s an old Wal-Mart shopping cart. You can see the vacuum cleaner, which they rarely used, on the back. The towels in the top are dirty and the ones in the lower basket are ‘clean.’ This picture conveys everything you need to know and allows you to extrapolate the sheer magnitude of crazy that the Heritage Inn conveyed. You can google the pictures and reviews if you want.

I hope that Brinkley decides to allow nothing else to be built upon the ruins of the Heritage Inn. It should be memorialized as a disaster area, left vacant, serving as a warning to travelers and citizens alike.

Social Rules

Old People Love Volunteering The Young For Military Service

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Apologies for my little side rant here. For whatever reason, the quantity of old farts pontificating about the need to do something about all the alleged issues young people are causing has been on the uptick lately. The cacophony of dentures clicking in complaint has been deafening.

Why is it that the people most likely to complain about today’s youth being spoiled and needing mandatory military service are also the very same people who rarely served in the military themselves? Or didn’t force their own children, college-bound or not, to serve? I’m generalizing, but most of these self-righteous people also had behaviors that would not have survived military service. My skin crawls when I read some older person crying and pounding the table about great it would be if all young people had to serve in the military.

It is not the young people who have messed up the world- they haven’t had their turn yet. It is us, the generations already making questionable decisions, who currently own the problems of society.

Don’t point at the current young crop of people and demand they be held accountable for what we’ve done wrong. The military is there for anyone who chooses to be a part of it, for reasons of their own, whether economic or self-improvement. Requiring military service won’t necessarily breed a generation of conservatives like you would hope. Military service isn’t a magic pill to require conformity or agreement.

The same tired group of people demanding mandatory military service are also the first to whine if society or government tells them what to do, even for social benefit. It is so strange to watch them object to everything based on their own ‘freedom,’ yet immediately want to volunteer others for duties they haven’t chosen for themselves. Everything government-related is dangerous to them, yet they claim to idolize the virtues that military service would instill.

This isn’t a great post, I realize. And it could easily be misconstrued to make arguments I’m not making.

Holiday, Satire Parody, Whimsical

Best April Fools’ Day Story Ever

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A Bill Qualls Baseball Story as told by X

I remember this day as if it were thirteen Thursday ago. It was the perfect late-April day for tomfoolery. That day was one of the best pranks ever perpetrated by any person in the history of the world. April Fools’ Day comes and inevitably evokes memories of this epic day. Had I not been there, I would have never believed such a prank was even possible.

Bill Qualls (top row, first on right) had come by and picked me up to go watch his friends and family play ball. Even though their jerseys all had “A’s” emblazoned on them, judging by their apparent prowess, I would have opted to name them the “B’s” or “C’s.”

Since all the adults were tired from working, they voted that I should be the pitcher for both teams. Because Miller Lite had interfered with a few of the adult’s speed and balance, they had moved me to within 15 feet of home plate. I felt like the Germans must have when the Allied Forces burst into Berlin, facing the barrels of a million rifles.

I decided to play a prank on the batting team, given the volume of ridicule and mockery they were lobbing my way. As I gestured to those playing the field to come up for a conference near the mound, everyone in the infield and outfield ran up to me and I told them my plan. We never imagined it would possibly work. We were like a motley group of idiot savants, embarking on a road trip in which no one knew how to read a map.

Kenny went up to bat and at my signal, I threw the ball as fast as I could. Or I pretended to. Like a game of distract-the-dog at the park, Kenny didn’t realize that I had in fact not thrown the ball at all. Jake, who was the catcher, hit his fist into his glove as if the ball had landed there. Bill yelled “Strike 1” from the side and then laughed. I reared back and threw another pretend fastball. (The batter should have noted that no one had the thrown the first ball back to me. I guess Miller Lite had loosened his reasoning skills enough already.) Kenny swung with all his might, spinning around home plate dizzily. Bill again yelled and shouted “Strike 2.” Kenny then demonstrated his command of every dirty word in the English language and several from Central America. He had already bragged that his batting average was “7,” whatever that meant.

As I threw the ball the third time, Bill was ready and waiting behind the plate and to the left, next to a wooden utility pole holding the electrical wire leading to the box behind the bleachers. As Kenny swung, Bill solidly hit the wooden pole with his own bat, mimicking the echo of a hit at home plate.

Everyone in the outfield starting screaming “Home Run,” or “Fly Ball.” Kenny, who hadn’t hit anything at all, couldn’t tell where the ball was. (It was still in my glove.) His own team hollering “Idiot” was drowned out by ‘my’ team, all of whom were running back and forth, looking upward to the sky, trying to get a bead on the nonexistent ball that was both going over the fence for a home run AND about to be caught for an out against Kenny. The guys looking skyward and prancing around under the invisible baseball now remind me of a ballet company being slightly electrocuted.

Kenny threw his bat and started running the bases. Even as he rounded second base, he didn’t seem to notice that the ball must be in Earth’s orbit at this point, given that so many seconds had passed since he ‘hit’ the ball. He ran even faster, although his idea of a straight line looked more like the stream of water coming out of a hose on a summer afternoon – that is to say, all over the place.

I stood between the pitcher’s mound and home plate, amazed at the spectacle of a grown man being duped into believing that he had hit a home run just by the sound of a bat thumping on a wooden pole.

In what seemed to be two minutes of Kenny running the bases, he rounded home plate. As his foot touched the base, I noticed that Bill had been standing near the utility pole along the fence, holding another baseball in one hand and a lighter glowing red with flame in the other. (This was not part of my plan.) The flame was burning the side of the baseball against his glove. He then quickly hurled the burned baseball as far as he could to right field. John caught it lazily and shouted, “I caught it. My god that thing must have been half a mile in space.”

Kenny stopped a few feet away from home and turned toward John, who was now running toward him, waving the ball he had just ‘caught’ after about two minutes in the air. John started excitedly shouting, “Look, I caught it! It went so high it got burned in the atmosphere.”

Kenny just stared at him, unable to comprehend what was happening. John tossed him the ball as he jogged past me and neared home.

Kenny caught the ball and stared in wonder at the white ball, now covered with black streaks and feeling extremely warm. He sniffed it and said “No way, man!” in a voice resembling both that of Rod Serling from “The Twilight Zone” and Cheech Marin.

We watched in awe as Kenny turned the ball over and over in his hand, his head turned slightly sideways, as if he were holding a chicken with four heads.

In unison, we all burst out in laughter, watching as Kenny admired his “Ball From Outer Space.”

Bill took a bow and smiled.

 

Art

Clint Eastwood Painting…

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I had this Clint Eastwood painted piece as a special request for me. It’s 24X30, much bigger than what this picture appears to indicate. I haven’t hung it yet, but each time I pass it, I solemnly swear I hear Ennio Morricone’s “The Good, Bad, and The Ugly” waft through the air, causing the hair on the nape of my neck to stand on end.

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The piece of furniture in the top picture is about 7 feet long, which skews the perspective of size for this painting.

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In the above picture, the 16×20 Doc Holiday painting to the left gives a better perspective of size.

 

Holiday, Whimsical

April Fools’s Day Should Be More Often

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Sometimes, I wish every day were April Fools’ Day. With enough creativity, hilarity becomes infectious and we fall into our respective pillows filled with shaving cream, believe fantastical stories without regard to reason, and remember that life itself is one continuous prank on each of us. It is the best thumb-in-the-eye to this stuffed-shirt world.

The world would be both more interesting and tolerable if tomfoolery flourished with greater frequency. I’m not just saying this because I evidently am built with nothing except goofiness in mind.

I don’t usually do much, but I admire any attempt to catch someone off guard.

Earlier, I called the warranty manager for my home-builder and slowly told her I had an awkward situation. “Well, the heating technician who came to our house was outside without protective eye-wear and got his face full of dust from the unit. He came inside to use our bathroom and flush his face clean. He left his glass eye in a cup next to the sink. And I think he forgot he left it there when he was done.” It wasn’t until she started typing that it hit her that she probably ought to reconsider sending that email. It was good fun and she laughed.

Everyone should get a laugh like that one.

Whimsical

A Small Post

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The words “accidental” and “cooking,” and “reasonable” mean different things to different people. – X

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Trump will do for education and fairness what he has done for the color orange.

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” No matter how they smile when they say it, if someone gives you the nickname ‘McGriddles,’ it probably is not a compliment.”

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‘Due to the lack of praise in the household for my culinary skills, I am proud to announce that I will soon open my first eatery, “Minimally Edible.”   ‘

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Art, Springdale

Doc Holliday Art…

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Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday.  I finally got one for myself and framed it, although the simplicity of the painting lends itself to placing without a frame. My wife convinced me that the silver frame would offset perfectly against the orange and black – and she was right.

I’ve bought 5 of these, as well as a few others for friends and family.When people see the painting, they invariably react with “Cool” and ask me about it. I think it would be a huge hit and surprise for most guys for their birthdays or Xmas.

I’m having a Clint Eastwood painting done and I’m sure it will be just as big a hit as the others. My latest is 16X20, although other sizes are available.

 

“Down by the creek, walking on water.” That’s where I’ll be.

Music, Personal

A Song I Wrote

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I made this strange song. It’s intended to be both metaphor and actual. I wrote the music, added the effects, and decided that a traditional approach wouldn’t work for me.

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The woman’s voice is that of my mom. She had her demons and those shadows still silently creep up behind me. She was more than what plagued her, as are we all.

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This is as personal as it gets. It’s not intended to inflict harm.

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I fully expect people not to “get” it.

 

 

Satire Parody, Social Rules

Jury Duty At Last

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When I was very young, I tried repeatedly to get jury duty. Probably due to my asinine name, I couldn’t manage it. I remember the look of incredulity one of the federal court employees gave me when I asked her how to get on jury duty. One would have thought I asked her to cut my hair by peeling the scalp off my head. I guess asking for jury duty wasn’t something a normal person aspired to? The same result occurred at the county level. I’m pretty sure they were laughing at me when I exited the clerk’s office after inquiring.

No one wanted me. I felt like Spiderman must have felt when he showed up at the crime scene suffering from terrible diarrhea.

After years of thinking nothing more of it, I got the dreaded Jury Duty Notice in the mail recently. I could also hear the universe laughing maniacally at my shock when I opened the notice. I’m not sure the government knows what kind of nutcase they are inviting to be a part of the process, but if they want me to play the part of dutiful citizen, I will vainly try to keep a straight face while doing so. I may very well be wearing a fake mustache, but I will have a straight face.

Let’s be honest, would any of you want me sitting in a jury deciding your fate? I didn’t think so. I would come in 5th in a three-man race for ‘Most Reasonable.’

In what universe is it sensible to invite ME to jury duty? If called to trial, I am going to object loudly for both sides, bring my own handcuffs, as well as consume large quantities of beans for every meal. I may also chew on garlic tablets at every opportunity. To paraphrase Zach Galifianakis, I might also sit quietly with my eyes on either the prosecutor or litigant’s attorney and say “Oh bullcrap” quietly each time they make a point. I’m also going to wear a different wig each day until someone notices.

I have a real problem deciding a person’s freedom. Monetary claims are one thing, but I have always said I’m not comfortable being involved in cases where jail is a possibility. (For the defendant, not me, although given my irreverence, I may very well be behind bars for a big list of reasons, the least of which might be contempt of court.)

Anyone with a critical eye can see that money is the single biggest determinant of outcome for lawsuits, whether criminal or civil. Eyewitness testimony is unreliable, our memory is nothing like we imagine it to be, and impartiality is what we claim we have all the while believing in nonsense such as horoscopes and the political process being fair. The ability of our legal system to restrict our ability to see and hear all the evidence is almost total. As in life, we think we know what we are talking about because we saw a two-minute clip about it on the Ellen show one afternoon. We’ll all seen too many courtroom dramas and heard too many cases where nothing turns out to be as it seemed. Trials are massively complicated affairs that should be left to the experts.

I feel very sympathetic to those without means being required to perform jury duty. Not all employers encourage or treat those chosen for jury duty appropriately. It disrupts one’s life, the ability to care for one’s family, not to mention gives some of those who can’t get out of it a terrible attitude. Remember that when you are watching a real jury sitting in the box, frowning and fidgeting, desperately waiting to get behind closed doors and find a way to give someone the death penalty. Just for not returning a library book.

There are too many people who are retired, independently capable of duty, or not able to work but who possess the mental faculty to be on juries for us to continue to mandate jury duty.

And it will be me, confusing the perplexed jurors stuck in the room with me, who is to blame when a one-day trial results in a six-week jury deliberation and $12,000 dining bill for the county.

We’ll all finally come out of the jury room and then quietly line up in the box. The judge will ask with great solemnity: “Have you reached a verdict?” At which point the fatigued foreman will rise, open a crumpled envelope and say, “Yes, we the jury find X Teri guilty of gross ignorance and stupidity and sentence him to jail instead of the defendant.” And a great applause will erupt while all the jurors weep in relief.

And as the judge commences to bang his gavel to close the proceedings, I will jump up to the bench and hold a single nail underneath his gavel, so that when it arcs down and hammers, it will drive the nail halfway into the judge’s desk. It’s something I’ve always aspired to, especially when I used to watch Judge Ito in the O.J. case. I could then gleefully say “He nailed it.”

I really did get a 3 month sentence (I mean to say ‘term’) of jury duty. I’ll do the best I can and although I am joking about it, I will do what I can to follow all instructions from the court. Like the Army though, my motto is “Be All You Can Be.” That’s dangerous advice for weirdos.

I will faithfully listen with great caution and remind myself that we are wrong about so much that failing to take it seriously can cause harm to people who have done nothing to injure me. But if the prosecutor paces in front of me too much, I am going to lick my lips provocatively at him or her until he or she forgets what in blazes was being said. And if he walks to close, I’m definitely going to trip him or her while mumbling, “That was for Marcia Clark.” Thanks

 

Whimsical

We Are Waving Silhouettes

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If we are lucky, each of us remembers grandma on the porch, waving, watching us depart. We felt diminished by our departure. All of us now take turns being waving silhouettes, although we are often oblivious. Time is whispering at each of us, reminding us that there is always a last time we will wave with love and turn away.

 

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