BOOK: Motel of the Mysteries

This is one of my favorite children's books as a child adult and as an adult. (...who thinks liek a child most of the time.)
The idea is that in the future, this guy discovers the ruins of an old motel, and makes assumptions of what each thing he finds was for. (...most of them wrong but very rational making total sense even to a child reading the book.)

It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of USA has been buried under many feet of debris from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985. Imagine, then, the excitement that Howard Carson, an amateur archaeologist at best, experienced when in crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site he felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber. Carson's incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one of then on a ceremonial bed facing an altar that appeared to be a means of communicating with the Gods and the other lying in a porcelain sarcophagus in the Inner Chamber, permitted him to piece together the whole fabric of that extraordinary civilization.

I think it's a brilliant concept and very creative.
...for example, THIS WEBSITE did a good job of summing it up and reads;

Each part of the "Toot'NC'mon" Motel is catalogued and fitted carefully into Carter's map of the site as a tomb and funeral repository. Even the Hot and Cold water initials on the "water trumpets" are taken by Carter as meaningful, namely, as his initials. The shrine, "carved out of a single piece of porcelain" is used to pray to their gods in song. The famous (because it appears on a paper ribbon sealing the shrine) chant is worked out phonetically by Carter to be "Sanitized Before Using" .

It shows me that we really don't know. We have to find reason and rhyme in everything and as much as think we have it figured out, we could be all wrong. ...and still think it's all right and be satisfied with a rational explanation that is not correct in the least.

The character is so confident that what's he finds - he can explain each and every thing and what it was used for.
...that's what we all want anyway, we want to explain things, right?

I am that fucked up that I thought of this today when I was frustrated with not knowing some thing. I don't know why someone did something.
It wasn't a relic , rather today it was a reason, that I questioned.
I remembered this book and thought of what I wanted to be the reason why someone did something crazy. "I know why he would do something like that. Of course."
Then I thought, "Brandon, you don't know all the circumstances about that person and what's going on in their life. You can think you know and have it figured out until you are blue in the face of reasons why and then think a little more and just when you think you have it figured out - it's totally wrong. ...not a bit of right."

Plus, it helps that it's a motel and I have that whole motel fetish thing going on. *wink*