Forget the screening, forget the stress, what’s important is that we had this enormous beast of a car.

which I drove

and drove

and drove

through the hills of Kentucky until we reached our final destination:

No joke, man, they had cheap beer and fried pickles and you could smoke inside, so I was in my own little version of heaven. And when we sat down we realized they were playing Resident Evil 2 on the unexplainably sweet plasma TV, so Katsumi was happy too. Not that beer alone *doesn’t* make him happy, but you know what I’m saying. Speaking of version of heaven, let’s talk about Smashburger:

We probably ate 5 meals here during the 5 days we were in town. They didn’t have fried pickles, but they made a good salad and their fried banana peppers were quite equitable. I love me some fried banana peppers.

Kentucky is actually heartbreakingly beautiful.

We, however, are not.

Here, Katsumi does his best Snow White impression with our friend’s Jack Russell puppies.

Our hotel had free wireless internet, which worked with a reasonable degree of reliability, and I got used to working from bed. Katsumi got used to acting like a moron.

Just kidding!

We were screening that day, and if this doesn’t make you nervous, I don’t know what does. that’s a thousand-seat theater, for those of you who lack talent at the “estimating game”.

Can you see the fear in my eyes?

Luckily, in addition to the free internet, our hotel had a very lax open container policy, and we spent a good portion of the evening drinking beer in the lobby.

At 2AM we decided to take a field trip to see my friend’s band’s practice space. You can go to the photoset to see the pictures of that, but in the interest of getting to the end of this post, I’m just gonna throw this one up here.

so yeah.

The next day Katsu and I got a tour of this holler called “mining camp” or “the mining camp” or something like that. So this is what’s fucked up about Kentucky – you go from this:

to this:

to this:

all in the space of like, ten minutes. I love it. I love it so much that I almost threw myself off the hill.

oh JUST KIDDING!! Did I have you there? Did I? Huh?

… didn’t think so.

So that’s KY. Believe it or not, there are several more pictures that I didn’t even post, so you can browse them via that link.