19

Monday, 26 June 1995 (Susan's 19th birthday)

We went to breakfast with Eric Oblivian and most, if not all, or the Royal Pendletons at this cool anachronistic home cookin' place right next to some old railroad tracks. The Royal Pendletons had to sit at a separate table cause the tables weren't big enough for all of us, but they kept coming over to our table in shifts. They'd sit there for a while and talk and be funny, then they'd leave and another one would come over. After breakfast, Eric took us to the Wooden Indian Giftship across the street from Graceland so we could get stuff to bring back for all our friends who wanted Elvis shit. I was really low on cash at that point, so I only bought one souvenir, a gold bottle of "Love Me Tender Conditioning Rinse." I am not kidding. On the way back to our hotel, Eric told us a hilarious story about taking Guitar Wolf on a Graceland tour the previous year.

When we got back, we packed up the car and split town. We had decided to go to New Orleans for the night, then cruise home the next day. But we didn't make it that far. For reasons still unknown, the transmission decided to go out just north of Granada, Mississippi, between Memphis and Jackson. After a bunch of grief, the details of which I will spare you, we resigned ourselves to the fact that we would be spending the next three or four days in the Holiday Inn in fucking Grenada, Mississippi!

I think the penance for any roadtrip, fiasco, party, good time or disaster that leaves you with a good story to tell is that you have to tell the story thousands of times even if you're already sick of it or you just wanted to forget about it in the first place. That's why most of this story is about the fun we had in Memphis and not about the fun we didn't have in Grenada. But I'll tell ya what, everytime I see "Blind Willie's Johnson]] and they do "Mississippi Dirt," I think about all the mosquito bites I go in that fucking swamp of a state and when they got to that line at the end of the song, I'm ready to scream along, "Yeah, New York City's bad, but Mississippi's WORSE!"
-Jennifer Geek

Cartoon caption: "The rebel yell that was heard throughout the world"