BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

This is likely to be my final blog post. The end of an era, the sad and pitiful end to Brainpan Leakage and anything that has passed for humor in it over the last several years. I’m sure my loyal readers are now asking, “Why would you stop blogging, especially after going through all of the trouble of moving B L over here to WordPress and all that jazz?”

Well, it’s simple. Within a 24 hour period following the “deployment” of this particular post, I will probably be dead. Corpsified. X’s on the eyes. Pushin’ up daisies. Stiff as a board. Croaked. No longer among the living… Well, you get the picture. Just insert your preferred euphemism and sally forth… In lieu of flowers, send booze and cigars…

Now, I am sure you are wondering why it is that I figure I will be dead. Again, there’s a simple answer to that one. E K will be killing me. How she’ll do it is anyone’s guess. Gun, knife, running over me with her car, who knows… It’s probably a safe bet that it won’t be poison, since she doesn’t cook, but I suspect the rest of the methods are up for grabs. Of course, if she suddenly offers me a sammich, then I suppose it could be death by arsenic. But, I think that would be some long odds, because it would still involve use of the kitchen and once I’m croaked she won’t have anyone to do the dishes.  Still, take it from me… Knowing her like I do, I am certain my demise will be slow and painful, for me at least. I’m sure she’ll enjoy every minute of it. In any event, if you happen to be starting a pool on this, think outside the box. Remember, she’s evil, and extremely creative. Very convincing too. I’m sure she’ll have a perfectly reasonable explanation for the investigating authorities.

Yep… I can already hear the gears meshing and smell the wood burning as you all try to figure out why E K would want to kill me… Well, I keep telling you she’s evil, but y’all just don’t listen. And besides, you don’t live with me, so obviously you aren’t privy to a good portion of what could serve as her impetus… However, in this case all of that is really a moot point. The simple truth is, she will be committing blatant spousicide, (as I said earlier, probably only after gleefully subjecting me to some extreme and prolonged spousal torture), and it will be all because of the story I am about to tell.

You see, some time back when I was bouncing blog ideas off my dear and lovely, (figuratively, folks… I didn’t actually hit her with stuff… If I’d done that I’d already be dead)… But anyway, during one such conversation E K told me she liked my blogs when they made her look good. Anything where she came out on top and I was revealed as the bumbling klutz, worshiping her from my station at her feet was all right by her. As to the rest of it, her reaction was something along the line of, “Meh.”

Not surprising. Remember, she’s heard most of these stories before, and was even present for many of them…

Of course, I immediately pointed out that any time she appeared in my blogs, she was always portrayed as the beautiful, intelligent, crafty, and yes, overly evil,  heroine. That last part, of course, is merely truth in advertising. Furthermore, I reminded her that I was always painted as the complete doofus.

She cocked her head to the side, raised an eyebrow, frowned, tapped her foot in that evil “let me explain this again you moron” sort of fashion, then said, “Kmart?“

Yeah… In case the rest of you don’t recall this grandiose f*ckup on my part, during the “Mahwage” blog series I outed The Evil One as having purchased her wedding dress from Kmart. I paid for that… Or, I thought I had…  I even have the lash marks to prove it… But, apparently there’s some interest, or hidden principal, that I missed when I made out the check…

So… The long and short of it is this… If the Kmart thing was enough to get me long term punishment, the story I am about to tell is enough to get me tortured and killed. Count on it. Truth is, I may even qualify for the full William Wallace treatment, so don’t be surprised if I am drawn, quartered, and have my individual parts buried in landfills at the four corners of the earth.

So, again I am sure you are wondering why I am going to tell this tale if I already know doing so is equivalent to signing that proverbial death warrant? Man, y’all are just full of easy questions today… Are you taking pity on me or something?

Thanks… I guess…

Well, at any rate, the answer is once again, as I said, simple… Because it’s funny. Well, it’s funny to me. And to the few folks to whom I’ve told it to in secret, (but only after having them sign off on a non-disclosure agreement). Hopefully it will be funny enough for y’all that it will make up for my untimely corpsification. I guess we’ll find out.

On that note, the story you are about to hear is true. The names have not been changed because there is no innocence to be protected. Again, in lieu of flowers, send really good scotch, bourbon, and cigars to wherever E K buries me. I don’t know if they have liquor stores and smoke shops on the other side of the veil, so I want to be prepared…

Now, on with the crime…

Umpty-jillion years back… Okay, seriously, it was more like about a decade ago… E K and I had ourselves a wedding to attend. Not ours, someone else’s. It was for some good friends we had known for quite a while and were a part of our particular circle. Therefore, while we didn’t know everyone at the reception…you never do…our core group was there to help celebrate.

Now, going to a fancy wedding and reception at a fancy hotel pretty much means you shouldn’t show up in shorts and a t-shirt. Especially since this happened in January and there was snow on the ground. But, of course, those of you who know me are well aware that I do the whole shorts and a t-shirt thing year round. But, as usual, that’s not my point. What I’m trying to say is that we got ourselves all prettied up. I did the whole button down shirt, tie, slacks, nice blazer thing. E K, naturally, did the whole eye-popping killer dress thing with heels. And, I need to point out that since this was a fancy party deal and all, she wasn’t wearing everyday go-to-work shoes. She was prancing around on a shiny pair of CFMP’s… (For those of you who may be unfamiliar with that particular acronym, it stands for “Come F*ck Me Pumps“… Yeah… Bedroom shoes.) Now, before you shake your heads and mutter, “tisk-tisk,” I am not bringing this up just because I like seeing my wife in heels. We’ve already established that I do… However, this is actually a very important part of the story… After all, this post is titled “Gimme Mai Shooz…”

So… There we are at this party. I’m looking kinda okay… You know, about as silk purse as a sow’s ear can get once it’s cleaned up… E K is, of course, looking amazing, as always. The party is raging around us. Food is served, booze is flowing, and dancing is happening.

Now, at this point I have to give you a tiny bit of background… At this juncture, E K and I had been trying to start a family. There had been miscarriages involved, along with a whole lot of stress and urgency… I mean, we weren’t getting any younger, and the bell on The Evil One’s biological alarm clock had already been hammering out a deafening cacophony for a couple of years. But, at this point in time, after repeatedly trying and failing, we had finally taken our own advice and decided it was time to simply relax. If it was going to happen, it was going to happen. Enough said. Because of this, we didn’t even have to flip a coin that evening with regard to a designated driver. I told E K that since she had been putting herself under all this stress, and had been living in her own private, self-imposed “dry county” for several months, that I would take it easy on the drink and let her do the table dancing and lampshade wearing at this particular shindig.

She was all good with that…

One more important piece of background… In our youth, E K used to drink me under the table. Once I was there she would kick me repeatedly and use me as a footrest, but that’s a different story… But seriously, this tiny little, 100 pound when soaking wet, waifish doll, could pull a Marion Ravenwood and go shot for shot of hard liquor, then still be perfectly coherent and drinking when everyone else was passed out, or laid up in the hospital being detoxified (See: Raiders of the Lost Ark, bar scene in Nepal). It was truly a sight to see. But, as I said, that was in our youth… And, we weren’t exactly youthful anymore… We weren’t as un-youthful as we are now, but you get the point. On top of that, she was out of practice… See where I’m going?

So… Yeah. The Evil One came down with a severe case of the drunks. Now, for those of you who don’t know E K, there is only one way you can tell she has even been drinking, and that is the fact that she starts talking. You see, The Evil One is generally very reserved and quiet. Probably because inside the pretty head of hers she’s hatching evil plans against the world. But seriously, she really is a quiet and reserved type of person, especially in crowds. So, when you see her out on the dance floor, giggling and bouncing off the walls, it’s a good bet she’s had a drink or two… or three… or four.

But, as I have tried to illustrate above, an attack of gregariousness is pretty much it. She doesn’t get sloppy, falling down, toilet bowl hugging drunk. I’ve never seen her go that far… Well, until that night.

However, we aren’t there yet. You see, as the evening wore on and all was good. E K was flitting about, dancing, laughing, bouncing around, and just generally having a great time. It was wonderful to see her de-stressed for a change. But, as usual, all good things must come to an end. As expected, at umpteen-thirty in the morning the party reached its inevitable conclusion and everyone parted ways to head to their respective homes, us included.

I should have known right away that the booze bottles E K had tied to her tail were drained dry the minute we started out across the parking lot. Remember, I mentioned this was during the winter and it was cold outside. My dear and lovely, who freezes to death when the temperature drops below 70, pranced right out through the cold night in her slinky dress, coat over her arm, and completely unfazed. Obviously, her anti-freeze was working just fine.

Fortunately, it was a relatively short drive home, however, this was when things started going south. Anyone who has ever done any drinking to excess knows that there are two scenarios that come into play here. One is, if you’ve been sitting at a table tossing them back, once you stand up, it’s all over but the funeral. The other is, if you’ve been moving about like a crazy person while downing the booze, once you stop moving, it’s all over but yadda yadda.

Well, obviously, E K fell into category two. Now, fortunately there was no hurlage or any such grossness, but by the time we arrived home she was doing a lot of moaning and whenever she spoke it sounded like the language our daughter used to speak when she was around 18 months old, punctuated by an occasional, and perfectly understandable, “Oh sh*t.”

Now, I’m sure you are all wondering what’s so funny about this… Well… Nothing. That’s because this isn’t the funny part. This is just the set-up. You know how it works by now…

So, anyway, we get into the house, and while the walk from driveway to living room wasn’t exactly long, E K was ready to sit down. She plopped onto the couch and moaned some more. Being the good guy I am, I pulled her shoes off and propped her up so that the sofa would only spin at something near half speed. I figured I’d be sitting up with her for a bit so I took off my tie and started to get comfortable when she mumbled, “Ahm gomma gro banoom.”

Naturally, since it sounded like she had just told me she was going to explode, I said, “What?”

“Erm gon manna berf noom,” she replied.

Unfortunately, I had left my drunken E K to English dictionary in the car, so I simply stood there and puzzled over what she was trying to tell me. For a moment I thought maybe she was saying, “I’m gonna barf soon,” but she didn’t look particularly green around the gills, so I chalked that one down as a possibility, and continued to ponder.

With an exasperated sigh that was somewhat dangerous due to the fact that it could have been ignited by even a small spark, my rag doll wife mumbled once again, “Annem gimma froom.”

With that she rocked forward and pushed herself up off the sofa. With a quick twist she started forward and her eyes suddenly expanded to the size of salad plates. Right before my eyes, she collapsed downward as if she had just tripped over a curb. I jumped forward, caught her before she hit the floor, and settled her back on the couch.

Less than a minute later, and this time with no warning, she tried getting up again. She came to her feet, teetered, stepped forward, stepped back, then fell straight down onto the couch.

I laughed. Probably not the best idea, but hey, it was funny… But, things were about to get funnier…

She stood again, teetered back to front, then pitched forward a second time. And, once again I stepped in and caught her before she did a face plant on the hardwood.

“Ammen gimma badda froom..” she insisted, pointing past me and down the hallway. Or, at least that’s where I thought she was pointing.

Putting 2 and 2 together I surmised that she wanted to go to the bathroom, so I asked her, “Do you mean you want to go to the bathroom?”

Yeah, I know, obvious question, but I was tired.

She nodded, then her eyes got big again as she mumbled something a little more decipherable. “Ohm sit!”

I was still holding her up, so I hooked my arm tighter around her waist and tried to guide her around the coffee table. We made it exactly 1 and 1/2 steps before she teetered backwards and toppled onto the couch, nearly taking me with her.

She giggled. Then she giggled harder. Then she mumbled, “Ohm sit…” again.

I said, “Okay, let’s try this again.”

As I started to pull her up she raised her eyebrows and began to babble. “Gamma sous.”

“What?” I asked.

“Ganmanna souses.”

Again, like an idiot, I asked, “What?”

“Ginnama soons,” she replied a bit more adamantly.

I shook my head. “Honey, I don’t understand what you want.”

She let out an exasperated sigh, drew in a deep breath and tried to focus on me. With what was obviously a huge amount of effort  in order to form semi coherent speech, she demanded, “Gimme Mai Shooz!”

Well, having been drunk before I know how it is. You get attached to something, important or not, and you want to make sure you know where it is at all times. Be it a bottle cap, a swizzle stick, or even your shoes.

So, I turned around and plucked the pair of stiletto heeled pumps off the coffee table and handed them to her. She rocked a bit then pitched herself forward and tried desperately to fit the left shoe onto her right foot. In this case, however, it wasn’t so much that she was trying to put a shoe on the wrong foot, she wasn’t even able to match the shoe with real foot. It seems she was seeing several, so her aim was way off.

After watching this for a half minute or so, I knelt down and took the shoes from her hands and slipped them onto her feet. After all, it seemed important to her that her feet no longer be naked.

Once I had done this she mumbled something then gave me a nudge, which I interpreted to mean, “get out of my way you idiot.”

Apparently, my translation skills were getting better. As soon as I had stood and backed away, she pushed herself up and stood perfectly without even teetering. Then, without another word she pranced off to the bathroom in a perfectly straight line, no bob nor weave save for the sexy sway that afflicts a woman in high-heeled footwear.

I suppose it’s kind of like the Sid Caesar sight gag joke about the staggering drunk guy who can suddenly walk a straight line during an earthquake. In this case, however, instead of a natural disaster, apparently some form of female fashion physics is involved. I don’t have the necessary plugin to show the equation, suffice it to say, the answer to the variable seemed to be, if you get drunk while wearing high-heels, don’t take them off until you are  either sober or passed out.

And now, I need to go finish writing my Last Will and Testament…

More to come? (I guess that really depends on how merciful The Evil One decides to be…)

Murv

PS. For readers of the Rowan Gant saga… Did you ever wonder where I got the “drunken Felicity” scene in Never Burn A Witch? Well, now you know…

Please Note: Some of the images contained in this post were found via LOLcats and/or displayed on multiple non-commercial or advertisement sites throughout the web. It is not the intention of M. R. Sellars or Brainpan Leakage to infringe upon copyrights. If valid copyright holders of any image above consider  the use in this blog  entry to be in violation, please contact mrsellars@sbcglobal.net and the photo will be removed immediately. Proof of copyright or trademark authority required.

It was pretty much a typical Friday morning as Friday mornings go.

I rolled out of bed at 5:39 AM. A bit later than usual, yes, but only by around 9 minutes, which is the span of time allowed by a slap of the snooze button on our alarm clock. Not really a big deal. I just wouldn’t have quite as much “quiet time” alone in the office as I normally did prior to the hustle and bustle of getting E K off to work and the child off to school. I could easily live with that.

I hit the ground running… Or, these days, shuffling just a bit. I fixed breakfast for E K and the offspring, packed E Kay’s lunch while the coffee maker sputtered and steamed, downed a cup or two of the java once it was finished, answered some email, checked my Facebook and Myspace pages, and even took a quick look at the local news on the idiot box. (I prefer K M O V channel 4 here in Saint Louis, just in case you are wondering. They seem to have fun, and Matt Chambers is one of those honest weather guys who prefaces his forecasts with, “This is what we think is going to happen”.)

But, lest I digress…

In keeping with the regular Friday routine,  (as Friday has a few more steps than say, Wednesday, for instance), I had already run about the house  on a mission – gathering trash and replacing the bags in various refuse receptacles, then cleaning the cats’ litter boxes, (not one of my favorite tasks, but hey, it has to be done), and finally delivering the bountiful haul of garbage out to the street corner to await removal by the big, blue, noisy truck that arrives every Tuesday and Friday (except holidays, of course).

All was good… In fact, even with getting a bit of a late start, I was now actually ahead of schedule by just shy of 10 minutes. Not only had I made up the 9, I’d added 9 and some change to it. I was feeling a bit proud of myself.

I figured I could take advantage of that extra time on the back end of the morning, so rather than stop in front of the “toob” to admire Julie Chen and Maggie Rodriguez on The Early Show,  I just kept plugging away. As the clock continued ticking forward my routine progressed with little deviation from how it has gone for countless Friday mornings past.

My initial chores of the day were finished, (though there were many more on the docket for later), the offspring was in her room obsessing over exactly what to wear – as female offspring often tend to do, and E K was finally out of the shower. Since I was next up in the scrub-a-dub-dub queue, I slipped into the bathroom with my lovely wife and proceeded forward with step one of  “Murv’s Morning Routine Phase 2”.

Advancing mechanically through my usual order of tasks I had already run my toothbrush over my teeth, dragged a comb through my hair, and had even made it so far as to whip up a passable lather with my shaving brush,  (trying to be eco-friendly, I’ve used old school shaving soap and a brush – when not on the road – for several years now, as opposed to cans which just end up in landfills). At this juncture, my face was full of rapidly dissipating foam and I had just dragged a trio of  insanely sharp, cold metal blades resting on the end of a short, crooked stick, across my cheek when the demand hit my ears.

“Move over,” came my wife’s voice. “I need to wash my face.”

I gave the end of the screaming metal skin scraping stick a quick rinse and shuffled to my left. I was an inch away from dragging it along my jawline when I stopped, cocked my eyebrow, then turned to look at my bride. Her hair was wet and I knew she had just climbed out of the shower moments before. Still, not being one for taking things at face value, with a vague questioning tone I said, “I thought you just took a shower?”

“I did,” she replied. E K didn’t seemed surprised at all by my query. Of course, after 22 years together she has grown used to my random verbalizations of various thought processes and simply accepts them as old hat. I’m certain this will serve her well later in life when we are both sitting in rocking chairs, side-by-side, and I am talking to myself for no apparent reason.

I pondered her answer for a moment, then gave her excessively damp, red tresses a one-eyed stare as I added, “And, you washed your hair.”

“Yeah,” she answered. “I did.” She still didn’t seem at all fazed by the fact that I was currently channeling Obvious Man.

At this point, had I bothered to look in the mirror, I’m sure my eyebrows would have been see-sawing back and forth like a puppy trying to figure out whether to pee on the carpet in the living room, or on the tile in the hallway.

“So…” I started, then paused.

“So, what?” E K asked, amusement now welling in her voice.

“So, if you took a shower and washed your hair, how did the water manage to miss your face?”

“It didn’t. My face got wet,” she chuckled.

“Okay…” I paused again. “But, you’re saying it didn’t get washed while it was wet?”

“Of course not,” my wife replied. Her tone had made a drastic and sudden change. It was now one of sympathy for someone who is obviously a bit slow in the brainpan, so by way of explanation she added, “I have different soap for my face.”

“Different soap,” I said.

“Yes,” she replied. “Different soap.”

She reached past me and rummaged around in the medicine chest,  so I watched on in silence, now taking notice of the countless weird shaped and various sized bottles, tubes, and jars lining the shelves. I’d never really paid any attention to them before. After all, they are on her side of the medicine chest, not mine. Of course, I have to admit that I had always wondered why her side of the three-paneled chest consisted of both the left and the middle as well as a portion of the right, whereas mine was just a small sliver of said right.

Now,  my curiosity was piqued, so I focused my attentions on her task.

Oddly enough, upon initial and even secondary inspection, I didn’t see any containers with “soap” written on them. I  did, however, see things like “anti-wrinkle cow placenta apricot avocado P H-balanced age defying micro-bead moisture-rich scrub“… With “scrub” coming in at the end of the title, I suppose that stuff would qualify as soap, but it seemed to me “face soap” would have saved some ink when the bottle was being labeled. But, that’s just me, I guess.

There were other products as well, each with equally descriptive and endlessly confusing names like, “glycolic facial peeling solution masque,” and  “collagen infusing pore cleansing makeup removing pre-wash.” I figured that last one probably had pig in it instead of cow, what with collagen being first in the title.

One of the bottles that did make perfect sense had adopted the simplicity in labeling scheme I suggested earlier. It was titled, “nail polish remover.” I pretty much got what they were saying with that, so it seemed like a pretty good marketing move to me. I mean, if E K were to say, “Honey, could you hand me the nail polish remover,” I was all good. But if she were to ask me to retrieve her “face soap”, I’d probably be back to deciding whether to pee on the carpet or the tile. By the time anyone found me I would most likely be doing the “potty dance”.

There were other bottles, jars and tubes – more than I could count really – but I can’t even begin to pronounce their dozen word, semi-foreign, hyphenated and fancy-script-fonted names, (nor would I want to, unless of course, I was considering a career in Dermatology).

“I see,” I finally muttered, even though I really didn’t.

After a couple more swipes across my face with the stubble scraper, I gathered enough courage to ask, “So, do you have different soap for other parts of your body too?”

By now, E K had dried her freshly washed face and was lining up various bottles of differently named products along the edge of the vanity – each of which thankfully ended in the easily definable word, lotion. This helped reduce my confusion, but only just a bit given that there were so many containers that ostensibly all contained the same thing.  Once the linear arrangement was complete, she began working her way down the line, applying different amounts of each to various different areas of her person. Had I not been somewhat preoccupied with my confusion at this point, it probably would have been fun to watch, in an adult amusement park sort of way, if you get my meaning.

“Don’t be silly,” she chuckled in response as she adopted a Marlene Dietrich-esque leg-hiked pose, using the toilet lid to rest her foot, then proceeded to slather, smooth, and rub various lotions into the shapely appendage.

I was actually taking some amount of solace in that answer until she snorted, “Of course I do.”

I didn’t pursue the conversation. A quick glance at the clock told me I had used up my almost 10 minute surplus of time and was instead operating at a deficit, now being a little over 3 minutes behind schedule. I figured I’d better pick up the pace, because since E K had been in the shower first, I knew I was going to be spending several more minutes just looking for the shampoo amidst all of those different bottles she had lined up along the ledge around the tub.

At least now, after 22+ years, I knew they weren’t just decorations…

More to come…

Murv