Artemis Kellog - A History

8/12/2019 Artemis Kellog - A History

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As Much Protein as an Egg Seth Harwood

Artemis Kellog: A History

Artemis Kellog had once had the last name Kirkland. That was hisfathers name. His fathers people had taken the name alongtime ago

when they moved across the country at great expense and personal risk

of danger to find their fortune and make it Out West. Ultimately,

they ended up following a man named Kirk and settling in a small town

where they became school teachers and made no fortune at all.

Where Kirk led them became a town known as Kirkland.Some of the children that Kellogs ancestors taught grew up to

make a store, which grew and grew and eventually became an inland

empire called CostCo. Because these people were very proud of where

they came from, they named everything at CostCoafter their parents

hometownKirkland.

This was why Artemis Kellog had to change his last name: because

he didnt like his friends making jokes about his name and associating it

with a huge store where you could buy everything from filet mignon to

cheap underwear.

None of the people who shopped in this giant store of the inland

empire liked to shop there. They made jokes to their friends about the

torture of these trips, the size of the peanut butter jars they broughthome and how they could get lost in the aisles.

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They said things like, Ill have to get a new garage to store all this

toilet paperthat I bought atCostCo!

The brand of the toilet paper was Kirkland. Thats part of whyArtemis Kellog had to change his last name.

People went to CostCo and bought gigantic television sets they

could barely fit into their living rooms, and loaves of bread they stored

in their garages, and jars of peanut butter that didnt fit on their

shelves, and mounds of guacamole they had to freeze in separatecontainers, and tri-tip steaks that really were quite tasty. They ate pizza

on their way out with other happy visitors to CostCo who would all

go home and say that they never wanted to go back to that warehouse

again.

But they would go back again soon.

The secret to the huge stores big success wasnt the low-low prices

on everyday items. It was the tasty hog dogs and pizza. Once they

made their purchases, people had to file out past a low-priced food

emporium. At the windows of the food emporium, you could get hot

dogs, pizza with lots of toppings, and blackberry smoothies.

A smoothie is a fruity drink that people think is healthy but is

really about as good for you as a milk shake.Milk shakes are made from ice cream.

Ice cream contains large amounts of fat, carbs and sugar. None of

these things will impress the dietary application on anybodys Smart

Phone.

Once anyone saw the pizza with all the toppings and smelled itslovely aroma, they couldnt help but stop on their way out of the store

to buy a slice or two or a whole entire pie.

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A pie was another name for a pizza.

The pizza pie came in a big, round circle that looked like a full

moon. It was covered with sausage and pepperoni and black olives andonions and mushrooms instead of craters and flags that once-famous

Americans had planted there. The pizza really was quite tasty.

But its dietary information would not convince anyone of

upcoming success or happiness. If it was labeled or advertised with any

of these things, people wouldve stayed away. Instead, it was just the

aroma that people smelled and the sight of other people eating the pizzaand looking happy that made them buy it.

The pizza made them happy for approximately a half-hour. This

was enough time to get back to their cars, load up their purchases and

drive half-way home. When they got this far they realized how much

of a pain it would be to unload all the things theyd bought and to find

places to store it all.

People were often heard to say things like, Oh, crap! and What

the hell was I thinking? when they got home from CostCo.

Still they went.

Artemis Kellog came from a family of school teachers, as I have

said. One of them, his grandfather Themis, had left the school teaching

business to open up a hardware store in Kirkland. He called it KirklandHardware, because of the town name,notbecause it was his last name.

I can tell you on good authority, and Artemis Kellog always swore

to it, that Themis Kirkland had named his store after the town. He

really was not a vain man and didnt like to self-promote.

Artemis Kellog, on the other hand, wanted to self-promote. Kellog

wanted to be a famous movie director one day. He hadnt directedanything yet. He hadnt done any self-promoting either. But he wanted

to, one day.

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For a long time Artemis Kellog had wanted to be a famous writer,

but then he wised up. Once you wised up, you realized that all the real

fame and money was indirectingthese days. This was really a nobrainer, as people liked to say.

Before he could direct, though, Kellog needed to write a good

screenplay. That would take work.

Back when Kellog wanted to be a writer, his favorite living author

was a man named Kurt Vonnegut. He had always wanted to go visitKurt Vonnegut. He had planned to seek him out and meet him. Then

Kurt Vonnegut went and died in 2007, which was twenty-six years

after Artemis Kellog was born.

Kellog had been born in a small city called Ottumwa in Iowa in the

year 1981, which turns out to be the same year that Kellogs all-time

favorite no-longer-living writer passed away. That writer was a man

named Kilgore Trout.

Ottumwa was a city named after a word used by the particular

people who lived in the United States before any white people came

along and displaced them with guns and boats and competition and

greed. These people had lived in Iowa way before Artemis Kellog or

any white person had even seen it. Way before Kellogs ancestors everstarted west.

The name Iowa came from a word that the people there used.

To them it meant, What did you say?

It was actually pronounced Ohio, but the people who displaced the

Iowans werent very good at listening.

Ottumwa was a word the people used to ask one another. To themit meant, Where did you just go to the bathroom? Of course, they

didnt have bathrooms back then. They really meant where did you

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just poop, but we say bathroom now because its more polite. Back

then, you were in danger of stepping in someone elses poop or shit or

whatever you want to call it, because everyone used the facilities outof doors.

They asked each other, Ottumwa? with very grave concern.

Themis Kellog ran his hardware store in Kirkland, Washington, a

state named after a word used by a different set of people who were

pushed off their land, until he was eighty-seven years old. This is reallya ripe old age. He passed on the hardware store to his son Cherubin,

Artemis Kellogs father, who ran it until it was put out of business by

the joint efforts of Wal-Mart and CostCo in the state of Washington in

the United States.

Wal-Mart and CostCo put Kirkland Hardware out of business by

taking all the customers and getting them to shop out by the highway

in a Big Box Store. Turns out nobody wanted to shop downtown

anymore because it was easier to drive out to the suburbs off the

freeway and fill up their cars with big containers of peanut butter and

large groupings of toilet paper rolls that they bought at low-low prices.

They liked the cheap pizza too, which I wont get back into.

When Cherubin Kirkland, Artemis Kellogs father, lost his lease on

the downtown location of Kirkland Hardware, which was the only onethere ever was, the store his father had left him to run, his legacy and

inheritance so to speak, he killed himself by swallowing a handful of

sleeping pills he bought at CostCo.

The pharmacy at CostCo was another thing people hated about

going there because the lines were so long. Still they went. What can

you do?Cherubin Kirkland bought his sleeping pills at the pharmacy inside

CostCo because it was the only pharmacy that would take his Cheapo

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State-Issued Health Insurance. He did this even though CostCo basi-

cally killed his dreams.

Health Insurance was what kept you from going Bankrupt whenyou had an Accident.

Accidents happen. Thats what people said. They even made

bumper stickers attesting to this fact.

So you had to have Health Insurance, which cost a lot of money.

That, or you had to find ways of getting your state, like Washington,

to help pay for your medical expenses, and then you ended up going toplaces like CostCo to buy your prescription sleeping pills. Thats if you

were lucky.

The reason for Health Insurance was because without it, getting

sick was the most expensive thing you could do. Dying could be really

expensive too.

Have you heard the story of Patty Keene? Her father died of

cancer, leaving her deeply, deeply in debt. She had to go work at the

Burger Chef in Midland City after that, certainly not what shed

aspired to do.

In a country to the north of the United States, called Canada,

everybody had Health Insurance. It was free to them, provided by theirgovernment. This was a very good idea, but the Americans laughed at

Canada and didnt take it seriously. Canadians didnt spend enough

time worrying about how much money they had. They didnt try hard

enough to make more money than other people, either.

For some reason Canadians didnt know that trying hard to make a

lot of money was theAmerican Way. This wasthe bestway.Another reason people in America dismissed Canada was that it

wasvery coldup there for a large part of the year.

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So why would you want to live there? they asked.

Certainly not for Free Health Insurance. You could dismiss any

place if it was too cold for a big part of the year.

The real reason Americans didnt have Free Health Insurance was

because most of the richest people in the country didnt want it that

way. They thought it would cut into the money they had.

It would, but mostly a part they werent using. For people like

Patty Keene, Cherubin Kirkland and even Artemis Kellog, whowanted to direct, Free Health Insurance would really be a big, big deal.

It would be a big, good thing.

The people in San Francisco and other places would really get a lot

out of Free Health Insurance, too. Same for people in Oakland. That

was an even bigger problem for the richest people: they did not want to

help darker people. They wanted the darker people to pull themselves

up by their bootstraps and succeed.

Nobody had any bootstraps anymore.

Once Cherubin Kirkland ate the handful of sleeping pills, and they

didnt seem to be working fast enough, he went into the garage, put the

barrel of a shotgun into his mouth and fired it. This splattered the

entirety of his brains and whatever else belonged in his head onto theinside wall of his garage. It left a terrible mess for Artemis Kellogs

mother to clean up and, really, she was never the same again after.

If the family business hadnt just gone under, they could have

afforded a professional cleaner to come and do the job to spare her the

trouble. This would have been a much better idea.

Incidentally, Cherubin Kirkland had notoriously short arms. For

this reason, he had to use the big toe of his right foot to pull the trigger

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on the shotgun. He took off his shoe but not his sock to do this. The

policemen who first got to the scene found it very questionable and odd

to discover this man with his head blown open and only one shoe.When the autopsy revealed a significant amount of sleep-inducing

chemicals in Cherubin Kirklands stomach, the police concluded it was a

suicide case after all.

They had no idea that the sleep-inducing chemicals were originally

Kirkland brand sleeping pills or that CostCo was mainly to blame for

putting Kirkland Hardware out of business and ruining the financialfuture of Cherubin Kirklands family.

Yes, even the prescription sleeping pills at CostCo were called

Kirkland.

Artemis Kellog lived in San Francisco. He was a reader and a

schoolteacher. Hehadwanted to be a famous-living-writer for a time,

but now he wanted todirect.

The way his father killed himself, with the shotgun and not the

sleeping pills, was the same as how Ernest Hemingway, another of

Kellogs favorite no-longer-living writers killed himself in Ketchum,

Idaho in 1961, exactly twenty years before Kilgore Trout passed peace-

fully away.Kilgore Trout, for what its worth, did not kill himself. Thats the

benefit of him having the right combination of chemicals, insanity, and

love of his pet parakeet whirling around in his brain.

Idaho is a state east of Washington that Artemis Kellogs family

passed through on the way to finding their fortune and making it

Out West. Kirk led them right through Idaho.

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By now you can guess who came up with the word Idaho. But

did you know that Ketchum was once a tasty tomato spread that

brown people in that part of the country used to put on their food?Its true.

Now we have something thats called ketchup, which tastes

nothing like a tomato at all.

Artemis Kellogs top-five list of favorite now-dead authors goes like

this:1)Kilgore Trout

2)Kurt Vonnegut

3)Elmore Leonard

4)J.D. Salinger

5)Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway actually used to be higher on this list. But he

had dropped

to number five.

This was because Kellog decided at the age of twenty-three that

Ernest Hemingway was too strict and rigid. Even though he loved the

sex scenes inFor Whom the Bell Tolls, Kellog decided that he wanted

to expand his use of odd words and widen his vocabulary, so he forced

himself to put Hemingways books on a shelf.One of the odd words that Kellog decided to use was epistemolog-

ical. He had yet to find a sentence where he could fit that in.

One thing Kellog did love about Hemingway was the fact that in

Hemingways bookThe Sun Also Rises, the main character, Jake

Barnes, has something like a missing penis. Either that or war-inducedimpotency. Artemis Kellog himself was a particularly virile man who

never had a problem with getting or keeping an erection until 2006,

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when he started using a combination of pills to reformulate the chemi-

cals in his brain and make him more happy.

Sometimes he wondered if hed be happier without the pills if hecould just get himself some Washboard Abs.

But really, he knew hed never accomplish that. Washboard Abs

werent for everybody, he was smart to realize.

Since he started taking these pills, he had been much happier in

general, except for the occasional problem with getting his sex drive to

match what he would like. By sex drive, what I really mean is an erec-tion. An erection is when a mans penis becomes engorged with blood.

You might even call it tumescent.

Engorged and tumescent are two words that Artemis Kellog

always wanted to use.

Kellog eventually told a doctor about his problem, who then

prescribed a different chemical for him to take to get his sex drive

pumping and his penis engorged right away. This chemical worked just

dandy, except that it was a big problem if his erection lasted more than

four hours. It never had.

Every time Artemis Kellog saw the commercial for this chemical on

the televisionthe one with the guy smiling as he jumps into a cold

swimming poolit made him laugh, smile and think about having anerection. He liked having an erection. Most adult males in the human

species did.

Recently, Artemis Kellog read that J.D. Salinger, his #4 favorite

no-longer-living author, had a problem like Jake Barnes, the hero of

The Sun Also Rises. But he didnt believe it to be true.

One writer who did not make his top five list of authors was oldJim Thompson. All the same,The Griftersis really quite a great novel

and one you should read. You probably already saw the movie, but

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still. You could do worse than to go read that book. Its about bad

people doing bad things, which is all any really good book could ever

hope to be about.

As far as living authors go, Kellogs top five list would include

mainly people you havent heard of. Dont worry about that. Just the

fact that youre reading this much is really a big testament to the power

and sustainability of the written word. Im really just happy about that.

What more could I want?Maybe you havent realized that you could be spending this time

just watching a movie. Its something you can do with your sweetheart,

after all. Did you know?

Pretend I never said that.

The one name in Kellogs top five list of living writers worth

mentioning is Bainbridge McGee. I say this because hes another impor-

tant character in this book. Bainbridge McGee was the oldest living

relative of Kilgore Trout, which wasnt saying all that much in terms of

age. McGee was only forty-seven, fifteen years older than Artemis

Kellog and seven years older than I.

Kilgore Trout had been his father.

Bainbridge McGee was such a famous living author that ArtemisKellog thought if he could ever meet him, maybe even spend time with

him, hang out or whatnot, something might rub off and make him,

Artemis Kellog, a famous writer as well.

He wanted to know precisely why he couldnt write the Next

Great American Novel, which, by his reckoning, Bainbridge McGee

had done not just once butthree times.His favorite Great American Novel by Bainbridge McGee was

calledBlack People.

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Yes, thats what it was called. He got away with it.

To Bainbridge McGees count, the number of Great American

Novels he had written was seven. That is, seven out of the elevenbooks hed published.

Give him a break, hed tell you,even the best of us have a bad day

once in a while. Even a bad year.

People all over the place were all the time writing the Great Amer-

ican Novel. Lots and lots of Great American Novels were written andthe majority of them never got read. Sure, some of them got published,

but these were a minority and mostly just reviewed on blogs and in

unread newspapers.

Blogs were places on The Internet where anybody could write

whatever they wanted.

Whod want to read that? Nobody did. And they didnt read most

of the published Great American Novels, either.

So it goes.

To get your own Kindle copy of the full novella As Much Protein as

an Egg, click here.

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Artemis Kellog - A History

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