BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

I talked to my child’s principal today… But, we’ll get to that in a minute… Right now, the wayback machine is calling…

The last time I was called to the principal’s office, I was in high school. Yeah… Way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and all that jazz…

Now, please don’t misunderstand. I wasn’t a troublemaker by any stretch of the imagination. As it happened, my infraction had more to do with freedom of the press, and the administration wanting me, as well as a few other student journalists, to roll over on each other regarding a source from a news story. Fortunately, we had a hell of a staff advisor and the inquisition came to a swift end, minus the use of thumbscrews, detention slips, or suspensions.

Yeah… We were a regular bunch of Woodwards and Bernsteins back then.  I don’t even remember the exact story to be honest, but it probably had something to do with seriously hard hitting news, like some football player’s grades being fudged to keep him on the team, (because, of course, that so rarely happens). Or, maybe it was about a particular inferior brand of floorwax was being used by the janitorial staff.

Truth is, the story probably wasn’t even that “sexy”… We probably managed to get our hands on the lunch menu for the following week a few days early and broadcast it on the student radio station, KRSH, or something stupid like that… I really and truly don’t remember…

Suffice it to say, as you can see, the incident was so traumatic that I’ve simply blocked it out after all these years…

Yeah… Well… Saying it was traumatic  sounds much better than saying it was just so unimportant that I didn’t bother to remember… But, I digress…

Anyway, like I was saying, we took our Journalistic integrity very seriously back then… Last I heard, some of my cohorts even went on to become actual paycheck earning, byline having, Journalists, while I went the direction of writing Fiction instead… Of course, judging from the news I read in the papers and see on the tube these days, it would seem they went in the direction of Fiction too…

But, I suppose I should keep my opinion to myself where the integrity of today’s Journalism is concerned… Besides, this is really supposed to be about getting called to the principal’s office… So, let’s get back to that.

As I said at the beginning, I had occasion to chat with my child’s principal  on the phone today. Don’t worry, it wasn’t anything too serious. The reality is I had recently voiced a concern over the school district’s Internet policies. As it happened, the principal was kind enough to call me to discuss it.

Very cool… I was impressed by the attention to the matter, the timeliness, and the overall concern expressed… By the principal, that is.

The district’s policies, well, that’s a different story… But, we won’t go there right now.

The thing is, because of the subject we were discussing, I happened to mention that my feelings about the policies were partially driven by the somewhat ugly things I have learned doing research for my novels. I mean, given the subject matter about which I write, I’m bound to learn some pretty disturbing things about human nature and sociopaths, correct?

So, no big deal, right?

Well, if you remember one of my previous blog entries, (They’re Creepy And They’re Kooky… – March 2008), I don’t exactly run around broadcasting my profession to folks at my child’s school. In fact, other than Internet marketing and when I am actually “working,” (i.e. at a book signing,) I don’t say all that much about it at all, unless asked, of course. It’s not that I’m ashamed of it, but hey, it’s just my job. I mean, after all, it’s not like I would walk in to a parent-teacher conference and say, “Hi, I’m Murv, the plumber,” or “Nice to meet you, I’m Murv, the aircraft mechanic.”  Therefore, why would I go around announcing that I am an author? Again, unless asked of course.

My point here being, apparently the principal did not know what I do for a living. Or, at the very least, he didn’t know what the subject matter of my novels happened to be…

…And, by the same token, he probably didn’t, and still doesn’t, know what I used to do for a living… That being the fact that I was a Senior Level Electronics Tech and Internet Systems Administrator for 25 years…

“So, what does that have to do with anything, much less being called to the principal’s office?” you ask.

Well, you can take the Tech out of Geek land, but you can’t take the Geek out of the Tech… What I mean is, I still have my finger in the whole electronics and Internet thing… Including, analytics and IP tracking…

So, imagine my amusement when within an hour or so of hanging up with the principal I do a quick scan of my website logging and see, plain as day, that my legal name has been Googled, along with the tag “books,” all originating from an IP address registered to the school.

And, of course, Google dumped him right into my blog…

Given the sometimes racy jokes, unsavory words, and often tongue-in-cheek innuendo  my posts generally contain, I have to wonder how long it will be before I get called to the principal’s office…

Oh, do you think they’ll let me bring my notebook computer with me to detention? I have a lot of work to do and I could use the quiet time…

More to come…

Murv

Part 8 of 12

Continued from: Mahwage: The Wedding Suit…

… Actually, in retrospect, the title of this entry, while close, isn’t entirely on the mark. Truth is, it was more along the line of, Swish! Clink! Ping! Clatter! Roll Roll Roll… “Oh Crap!” Clatter! *Plink!* Clatter! *Tink!*  “No No No!” Clank! Rattle… (eerie silence)… All followed by a quietly muttered, “Dammit…”

But let’s not get into a deep analysis of my attack of onomatopoeia just yet. Don’t worry, I promise we’ll get back to it… I mean, given the title of this entry, I really kinda don’t have any choice in the matter…

But first, a picture… Here on the left we have a photo of the happy couple.  Aren’t we cute? E K is gorgeous, just like I said… And me, well, I’m young, no grey to be seen, and  a whole lot thinner than I am today… (I’ve really gotta work on that)…  And check out those Clark Kent goggles… At this stage of the game our official and legal union is right around 4 minutes 27 seconds old. We have not yet had a fight, or even a minor disagreement. No spat of any kind. This is not to say we never have since, or that we hadn’t prior… That would just be untrue.  All couples have “disagree-uments” to one degree or another.  I’ve learned over the past 22+ years, however, that E K always wins… But, every now and then if the planets are aligned just the right way, or wrong way as the case may be, this important little fact slips my mind. And, when it does, I  make the mistake of disagreeing with her. In the grand scheme of things, however, there isn’t anything to worry about. The Evil One immediately points out the error of my ways, puts me back in my place on the end of the leash, and life is once again good…

But, back to the picture above… At 4 minutes 27 seconds into this odyssey, all was bliss. Given that the “not having a suit thing” could have been an even  bigger debacle than it turned out to be, this was reassuring. However, what you cannot see here is that yet another issue had cropped up shortly before this photo was taken, and it was a bit of a speed bump in and of itself. I shall endeavor to explain…

Zero hour was approaching fast. In fact, we were literally at T-Minus 60, or thereabouts. Family and a few friends had arrived a bit earlier to help with the last minute preparations. My sister had pitched in and taken over the final cooking so that I could grab a shower and get dressed. Erin, (remember Erin?) was there setting up the chafing dishes… My dad was assuming his role as unofficial photographer while helping with chairs, tables, and setting up the luminaries E K had made for decorations. Things seemed to be right on track.

My sister, Missy, had finished up with the cooking and was now off in the bedroom helping E K with her hair, since one of Sis’s learned talents happened to be hairdressing. These days she handles video conferencing and support for families of deployed soldiers, and is damn good at it, but that’s one of those “nother blogs”…

I, myself, was being the somewhat typical nervous groom. Not that I had suddenly decided to bolt or anything. Quite to the contrary, I was still coming to terms with the fact that E K had finally said yes, and my jangly nerves were a product of the fact that I figured I would be waking up at any moment and hearing, “No, not right now,” rolling off  of my betrothed’s tongue.

In all honesty, to this day there are still times when I think that is going to happen, but there we go with my personal insecurities again…

So, does anyone remember Service Merchandise? Yeah, I know, that was a rough transition there, but I still haven’t had my coffee quota just yet today, so please bear with me… If you are unfamiliar with them, they are a semi-defunct chain of catalog showrooms. I say semi-defunct because they disappeared around 2002, but from what I just looked up it appears they returned as an online store sometime in 2008. In any event, there used to be a Service Merchandise out at Northwest Plaza (or, N W P). One of their charms was the fact that they sold okay quality jewelry on the cheap. Well, if you haven’t picked up on it throughout this blog series so far, I will remind you here… E K and I were pretty much too broke to pay attention, just like most young couples when they are first starting out. We knew we could have a “ringless” ceremony, but we didn’t want to do that. We were foregoing much of the pomp, circumstance, and religious frou-frou already, what with us both being secular humanists, me with a rich and diverse background in earth/eco-centric religions and Paganism, of course. In fact, we had even written our own secular vows, which her father embellished of his own accord, but I don’t hold that against him. He’s a Baptist minister and he wasn’t about to preform the ceremony without sticking God in there somewhere… I get that. Didn’t care for it, but I get it. So, all was good.

Anyway, back to this ring situation. We were going secular and eschewing much of the “ceremony” associated with a wedding already, but we wanted to retain at least some bit of symbolism, that being the rings. So, since we were  “poor,” so to speak, we had gone to Service Merchandise out at N W P, and purchased a matching set of plain, 10K white gold bands. Not very fancy, but it didn’t matter to us. They were symbolic enough…

(On a side note… Even though I have since presented my bride with a much fuller set of precious gold, replete with a sparkly, ancient rock collection mounted upon it, she still wears that simple band on a regular basis. I still have mine too, but it lives on my key chain. You see, it doesn’t fit over my arthritic knuckles anymore, and while I have a newer, fancier ring that I wear when I get “duded up”, that simple band goes with me everywhere… Yeah, okay, I’ll turn off the sappy faucet before there’s a flood…)

Now, let’s get back around to that hairdo… Why hairdo? Well, you see, while E K was in the bedroom getting even prettier than she already was, (and still is, of course), I was also doing something about my own appearance. In particular, my hair… Y’all who have seen me these days know that I pretty much have a wash and wear, stick it in a ponytail and go, kind of “do”… But, back then, as you can see in the picture, I had 80’s hair. Not “hair band” hair, but just regular old 80’s hair. For you youngsters who don’t remember the 80’s, what that means is, feathered bangs, a love affair with a blow dryer, and a lot of hair product, namely mousse.

So, there I was, standing in the bathroom in front of the mirror. I was already dressed, sans jacket just yet, and was putting the finishing touches on my “do”. Like I said earlier, we were at about T-minus 60 and counting, so things were starting to roll and I wanted to be prepared so that I didn’t screw up any more than I already had… (remember the hangover, not having a suit, etc… Need I say more?) Well, Scott, the 6 foot 6 inch tall cop, best man, yadda yadda, and his wife had not yet arrived, therefore I had not been able to hand over Kat’s ring to him for safekeeping. So, in my desire to not forget to do something as important as that, I was keeping her ring on my own finger… Now, obviously she has petite little hands, so I had it jammed onto my right pinky finger. It was on there pretty good too. In fact, my biggest worry was actually how much skin I was going to lose when I peeled it off to give to Scott prior to the ceremony proper.

Now… Have you ever had anything happen to you in slow motion? You know, some event befalls you and it is as if time has dilated for you, and only for you… You feel disembodied, like you are watching everything from above as no more than an observer. It drags on before your eyes, flowing languidly along, unfolding like a horror that you can do nothing about, until it reaches its final, sometimes near devastating conclusion, and then suddenly life speeds up once again? Yeah, just like Hollywood special effects, but it’s for real…

Well, that’s exactly what happened to me.

I pulled the brush through my hair, then flipped it back forward to make sure the volume of my “do” was just so, and suddenly I was out of body… Watching as…

Swish! Clink! Ping! Clatter! Roll Roll Roll…

In a muffled, slow motion drone I heard myself say, “Oh Crap!”

Clatter! *Plink!* Clatter! *Tink!*  “No No No!” Clank! Rattle Rattle… (eerie silence)…

Time sped back into its normal flow and I returned to my body with an unceremonious plop, only to find that I was now kneeling on the bathroom floor and staring in abject horror at the air conditioning vent. This is right about the time the “Dammit” rolled off my tongue.

The tiny little band that had been wedged so tightly upon my digit had for some unknown reason elected to go on a trip. As I was concentrating on my coif, oblivious to its escape plans, the damn thing had seized the opportunity to eject itself from my finger. Once free it had flown through the air, bounced from the mirror, fallen into the sink, jumped out of the sink, clattered across the top of the vanity, rolled off the edge, plonked off the toilet seat, rolled across the floor, bounced against the wall, jumped up, done a double back flip, followed by a triple Salchow, then executed some other kind of fancy spin, and then did a straight in dive between the slats in the grate that covered the AC vent in the corner, before finally sliding down the duct work and falling silent… All while I groped, grabbed, and stumbled after it. I’m pretty sure I heard the silly round thing laughing at me the entire time too…

On that note, the judges gave the ring a 9.5… I think I got a 2.

This was going to be a problem.

Now remember, I was already nervous, and quite honestly I was still hung over too. So, I have to say I am fairly proud of myself for what I accomplished next. You see, even in my muddled mind angles were now being plotted on imaginary graphs that only I could see, trajectories were being simultaneously calculated, and flight dynamics of gold bands reverse engineered at lightning speed. My brain was ker-chunking like Univac on a mission to save the world. Advanced calculus equations I had labored over when in school suddenly became old hat as I plotted the path of the ring, right down to the millimeter, and within seconds, determined the exact location where it had to have come to rest in the duct work.

With no time to lose I bolted from the bathroom and out to my car… You see, back then I worked as a computer technician, so I was kind of like Paladin. Have tool bag, will travel…

I was keeping this horrible incident to myself, so as yet I had said nothing about what had happened. Fortunately, no one seemed to have heard me cursing  earlier, so everything was good… Or, so I thought. Screwdriver in hand, I raced back into the house, my sights locked on the basement door. However, as with any covert mission, just when you think everything will go without a hitch, the proverbial wrench gets thrown into the works by an insane howler monkey… Well, maybe not an insane howler monkey, but I just really wanted to say that, because I think monkeys are funny. Especially howler monkeys… And rhesus monkeys… And spider monkeys… And… Well, you get the idea…

At any rate, I was three steps from the basement door when I came face to face with my soon-to-be-mother-in-law. My mad dash, combined with my inability to keep the wild-eyed “what the f*ck have I done?!” look off my face had apparently attracted her attention.

“Murv, what’s wrong?” she asked.

I hemmed and hawed for a second. It seems that the clarity I had found during the period of doing advanced mathematical calculations moments before had now fled, leaving me conversationally brain dead. I simply could not think of anything to say other than the horrible truth.

“I dropped Kathy’s ring down the air-conditioning vent,” I mumbled.

At this point, almost-mom-in-law looked at me like I was a complete idiot, and then she said with an unmistakeably admonishing screech in her voice, “Oh, Murv!”

And, yes… For the record, that was when I discovered exactly where E K learned, “the look.” You know, the one that makes you feel about 3 inches tall…

I also believe, with all my heart, that this was probably a defining moment which set the tone for my relationship with my mother-in-law all these years. I say that because I’ve heard “Oh, Murv!” several times since that day… But I digress… (Oh, and another for the record note… I really do love my mother-in-law. She’s a wonderful lady. How could she not be? She’s E Kay’s mom.)

Back to the crisis…

Kat, still in the process of getting hairdoed, make-upped, perfumed, and dressed to the nines, hears her mother with the keen acoustic acuity only an offspring, grown or otherwise, can possibly have, and instantly pokes her head out of the bedroom door and asks with alarm, “What’s wrong?”

At this point, whichever vacuum tube in my head hadn’t yet warmed up, suddenly came on line. Flashes of the “one eyed E K stare at the front door,” the “Okay, come with me,” huff, and each and every of my bride’s reactions to all of the other stupid acts I had committed in the past year now flashed through my brain. I knew I couldn’t stop my mother-in-law from selling me out, but I could make it a moot point if I lied through my teeth and turned a screwdriver really, really fast…  So I did the only thing I could do…

I looked at her and said, “Nothing honey. Don’t worry…” Then made a bee-line for the basement like my life depended on it…

Knowing E K, it probably did…

And, just so you know, I had another worry rattling around inside my skull. You see, I didn’t exactly ace my math courses when I was in school…

More to come…

Murv

… NEXT: Mahwage: Fool For Your Stockings…