Luddette: Kentucky Colonel

Among my honorifics--which include a Maui downhill coaster bike certificate and a helicopter ride award--I am in fact a Kentucky Colonel, an Honorable one at that (snicker, snicker). Since it's under my maiden name of Duke, maybe I managed to elude this claim on me when I got married.
     It was signed by then-governor Wallace G. Wilkinson and co-signed by his Secretary of State, Braner or Beaner or Bonnie Ehler.  I'm a little hurt that the Assistant Secretary of State couldn't be bothered. Sipping on a julep and gaily fielding calls about the following year's Derby, I suppose.

     I was commissioned on the 24TH day of OCTOBER in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and 88, and was conferred all the rights, privileges and responsibilities thereunto appertaining [of being a Kentucky Colonel].  I was a little irritated the rest of  the day that Frankfort just conferred a bunch of new and unknown responsibilities on me, when all I did was go on a stupid press trip to Louisville. But I had a pretty bad conscience in those days, and suffered habitual negative projection.
     As for the rights and privileges, I already knew about those: the right to get staggering drunk at the Kentucky Derby, the right to get mac and cheese for my side vegetable, the right to go out on a wild-night truck ride to smoke weed and hug trees with a gentle ex-con; the privilege of setting off an all-hotel alarm at three in the morning, and the privilege of being a human on the wrong side of an elephant cage at the Louisville Zoo (a relic of the Dark Ages of urban zoology). It remains one of the most depressing, sordid, hapless, and poignant few days of my drinking career.  If they only had known, they never would have made me a Colonel. Oh, the painful innocence of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Yet there you are. Such honor--however misplaced--cannot be undone.