A Picture Worth Wetting Yourself Over

God love a dog.

Stay chill.

South Korean Crime Noir

I don't watch much television. But on Friday nights, I like a good movie. I'd ran the gamut of American crime and noir. Even some French. No, this ol' boy ain't very cultured, but I'll try most anything.

We have streaming Netflix. I kept noticing all these South Korean movies and by reading the summaries, it looked as though the South Korean's love their crime. I held off. The Asian language has always been difficult for me to follow (I know, subtitles). Still, I noticed they were getting pretty high ratings. I gave one a chance. Then two and I'm still going.

I started with a film called I Saw the Devil. Talk about blowing me out of my tighty whities. Great production quality. Good story. Great acting. Brutal and beautiful.

From there I went to The Chaser. Not quite on par with I Saw the Devil, in my opinion, but still very good. My wife was even interested and this type of movie is not her thing. She's not much for subtitles, either.

I don't do reviews, so I don't expect you to glean much information from this post. Still, check 'em out if your bored off your ass this weekend and are willing to try something different. Yeah, I know, the playoffs are on. But, we all know the Packers are going to take it all again this year anyhow.

Stay chill.

Working Man Blues

I hate the 9-5 grind with an unmeasureable intensity. I've never even discussed the workplace here, because I like to separate work (job) and writing (passion). And I will continue to do so. But every now and then, I get one of those phone calls from one of those customers/idiots/a-holes...well, I think the illustration above says it all.

Man, I feel better.

Stay chill.

For My Friends...

I hope you know who you are and what you mean to me.

From sunny Florida—Happy New Year!

But before I go, here's a little story my mother in law told me. If you're an old movie buff, you'll get it. If not, well...

My wife's grandmother fried chicken at the famous Brookville hotel, back when it was actually in Brookville (a few years ago, they relocated it to Abilene due to sewer issues). People came from all around Kansas to eat Brookville chicken and corn and coleslaw and my mother in law said her mom always came home smelling like fried chicken.

Back in the mid 50's, they filmed a movie in Salina, KS called Picnic. Maybe you've heard of it. Starred William Holden and Kim (sigh) Novak. One day William Holden came in for dinner. My mother in law can still remember that day when she was probably about 12. I'm paraphrasing, but it went something like this:

"They were shooting Picnic over by Salina and Bill Holden came in one evening. He'd heard so much about the fried chicken that he just had to try it. He came in the kitchen and I was back there with my mom. It was so hot. And Bill Holden came in and put his hand on the back of my head. My God! I said I'd never was my hair again. He was so handsome."

My in-laws and my own parents—none of them had much growing up. Sometimes, all it took was a touch on the head to make life a little more bearable. How simple. How real.

And below is a sunflower from the Sunflower State, out by Kanopolis Lake in Kanopolis, KS, where my wife grew up. If it's cold and a little dreary where you are, then this brief pictorial is my simple little gift to you.

Stay chill.

A Warmer Climate

Unseasonably warm here in this part of the country. Note the sweat on my back and the shorts and t-shirt. But we do have a cold front coming through and tomorrow it may only get up to 70. The crap I have to put up with.

Had a great Christmas. Hung with a few friends. Spent a lot of time with the missus and the dog and pounding the keys. Right now, life is pretty damn good.

Stay chill.

Down The Street

Looks like I may be losing another muse. Tina's Angel's, a few blocks away down on 34th street, is for sale. An old hotel turned strip club, flophouse. This is one of those deals where you struggle with cleaning up a city, versus the city maintaining it's identity. And I'd be stone lying if I said seeing this murky beacon didn't make my day, every damn time I set eyes on it.

Stay chill.

Hard Years. Hard People.

My Grandpa Wilkerson was, by all accounts, a hard man. Had to be. An oilfield man in Kansas during the 20's, 30's, 40's and beyond had little other choice. The genes were passed down.

Grandpa Wilkerson passed away some twenty-five years ago. Grandma Wilkerson, a stout woman of Austrian and Russian descent, would tack on around 15 years more before she left us at 92 years of age. While I was just getting to know my grandpa when he passed, the following years would put me closer to my grandma.

My favorite story of hers involved life in the dust bowl era. Grandpa worked for Standard Oil and from time to time he did some roustabout work. Grandma told me how they had to wrap wet towels and rags around their faces to keep from smothering in dirt, then drive from around the Hays area to the Zurich area- some 35-45 miles depending on your route. When they arrived at the well in Zurich, the dirt would be a foot high on the running boards of their vehicle.

Hard times

I hadn't thought about that story in years until I saw the above picture of Zurich, back in the dirty thirties, while buzzing the web one day. Grandma Wilkerson's words came flooding back to me. And with those words came something much harder to deal with: I miss my Grandparents- on both sides. I just miss them so damn much. The things I want to ask them now as a man...I just didn't know to ask them then as a child situated far below the learning curve of life.

The photo proceeded to punch holes through a membrane enclosing my brain's diminished filing cabinet, where other fragments of information are pieced together and stored away.

About his father, Grandpa Wilkerson would only say he was an Englishman, preacher and a horse trader (horse trader, I've recently discovered, was a loose term when employed by the Wilkerson clan, if you catch my drift). About her father, Grandma Wilkerson would tell me stories of her father hitching up the team, bells on the horses and rigging shined to a high luster, then proceeding to march the rig through the burgeoning town of Hays, my grandma in tow. He was a hard working man proud of his accomplishments. Grandma was simply embarrassed.

The above is partial recall of what I have left of them. Pictures, of course, exist. But for a family who's done very little in written preservation of live's lived, those oral histories are all I've left. And I hang on to them. Desperately.