BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Continued from: Enhanced Husband Torture Techniques…

Part 2 of 2…

Return with us now to the thrilling days of a Christmas past – When last we left our intrepid blogger, he had asked his wife – the evilest of all evil redheads, Queen Eebil Kat – what manner of offering she demanded be left beneath the sacred scratching post tree on Eebil Katsmas Eve. Her  demand was, of course, for nothing less than “Cool Socks”. Unbeknown to our lovable curmudgeon, Queen Eebil Kat was hatching a sinister plan which would place him in serious peril – a peril she would use for her personal amusement while she laughed and filed her nails…

Okay… Everyone all caught up? Good. Let’s get on with this, because it’s painful for me to even think about.

So, I was feeling pretty good with this. “Cool Socks”. Definitely couldn’t be that hard. I’d been in the sock room before, so I knew what generally constituted cool in her eyes. I also knew her shoe size, so if the socks were for some reason classified by actual sizes, I could cross reference it somewhere.

I was all good. I’d already ordered up another gift she had made noises about throughout the year, so the socks were going to be the perfect distraction. Truth is, I was more than good. I was flat out golden.

Then, as they say, the hangin’ day came round… (Who is they? Mason Proffit, of course…)

At any rate, I cleared a bit of my schedule one day so that I could run to the store. Now, I didn’t imagine it would take long for me to obtain the sacred socks, but just to be on the safe side, since it WAS the Christmas (aka Katsmas) season after all, I scheduled myself the whole late morning and early afternoon to accomplish said task.

Now, something you need to understand about me is this: I absolutely hate shopping. Despise it. Seriously. I am one of those folks who knows exactly what he is after, goes to get it at the least busy time of day he can find, then zips in and right back out of the store, avoiding all unnecessary contact with insane shoppers that he can. The only – and I mean ONLY time I enjoy shopping is when I take E K to a nice store and do the whole “Pretty Woman” thing with her.

1. Because she is, in point of fact, pretty. EXTREMELY pretty. (Wayyyyyy prettier than Julia Roberts if you ask me.)
2. Because I get to sit in one place and watch. Not much crowd dodging involved. Life is good. E K gets new pretty clothes, I get to relax and watch a hottie trying on said clothes. The only thing that would make it better is a cooler full of beer.

Unfortunately this particular spree did not fall into the “E K / Pretty Woman” category. It did, however, fall into the “must obtain offering for the Eebil Queen” category. And, I’m all about making sure The Evil One is placated, lest I end up whimpering in the back of a closet with a variety of size 7 woman’s shoe prints all up and down my torso.

So, with my schedule cleared, off to the mall I went.

Not being a regular shopper for women’s wear, I wandered aimlessly through a couple of the stores at Northwest Plaza. Up the escalator I went. Down the escalator I went. Wander, wander, wander… Dodge, dodge, dodge… Up, down… Down, up… Wander some more.

Then I frowned really hard. Why? Because I found no cool socks. In fact, the only socks I managed to find were mens tube socks, six in a bag, your choice, black or white.

Definitely not cool.

So, with my shoulders starting to slump, I started again through the mall and decided to bite the bullet. I would go into one of the high dollar department stores. I don’t want to name it here, but let’s just say the first half of the name is a kind of pickle and the second half rhymes with “cards”.

We had played pretty woman here before, so surely they, of all stores, would have “cool socks” befitting of Queen Eebil Kat.

I did the up, down, wander around thing a bit more. Then, like the point of a shovel striking a buried chest, I rounded a corner and found, yes, you guessed it, socks. But, that wasn’t all. As I made a beeline toward this treasure trove of offerings for my Evil Queen, I met what you might call resistance. You see, just as pirates buried dead dudes with their treasure chests, apparently big, fancy stores bury dead, angry salesladies with their socks. Before I had made it two steps into the department, the departed souls of one of them popped right up in my face. With the path to my prize blocked, I immediately took evasive action and tried to sidestep her. Well, apparently the angry spirits of dead old salesladies are pretty nimble, because I didn’t make it an inch before she was right there barring my way. I tried feinting to one side and then shifting to the other, but it was like she could read my mind. I simply wasn’t getting in.

I stopped and stood there for a moment, while the sales zombie looked me over, then she opened her mouth. I started to back up, fearing that she was going to try to eat my brain, but instead she simply barked with unmistakable disdain, “Can I help you?!”

You could just tell by the way she said it that she had to have been a redhead before all the color drained out of her.

“Socks,” I said. “I need to by some socks.”

“Mens apparel is downstairs,” she growled.

“They aren’t for me,” I replied.

She eyed me with suspicion then demanded, “Who are they for?”

“My wife.”

“Your wife?” She didn’t sound as though she believed me.

I couldn’t help myself. I was starting to get a bit impatient so I blurted, “Did I stutter?”

“Don’t be a smartass or I’ll eat your face!” she hissed in return.

“Yes ma’am.”

Continuing with her interrogation she spat, “Why are you buying socks for your wife?”

“A Katsma… I mean Christmas present.”

“Present? Socks?” There was absolutely no mistaking the fact that she didn’t believe me at all this time.

“Yeah, she said she wanted some cool socks.”

“Cool socks? What do you mean, cool socks?”

“You know. Socks with interesting patterns. Argyle. That sort of thing.”

“Yeah, right,” she mumbled, standing there working her jaw and smacking her lips. I imagine she was trying to get an errant bit of brains from the last poor schmuck dislodged from her false teeth. She looked me over in silence twice more, then stepped aside. “These are all the socks we have.”

“Thank you,” I said, slipping past her to inspect the rows of polka dotted, striped, argyled, fuzzy, and otherwise “cool” feminine foot coverings.

Now, not having an absolute inventory of the sock room floating around in my head, it took me a bit to make a decision on a few pairs of the sacred socks. Obviously I wanted my offering to the Evil Queen to be perfect, especially with it being Katsmas and all. My task, however, was not made any easier by the fact that the Zombie Sales Lady Jackal didn’t stray from my side. She just kept following me up and down the aisles, never less than a half dozen inches away as she shuffled along, grunting and wheezing. I have to admit, not only was it psychologically disconcerting, but I almost succumbed to the Ben Gay and Polygrip fumes that were wafting around me in thick clouds.

Finally, I chose some especially cool socks for my dear and lovely. Before I could even start toward the register, Zombie lady snatched them out of my hands and demanded, “Cash or charge?”

“Visa…” I mumbled, extracting the plastic money from my wallet.

“You want these gift wrapped?” she spat, wobbling off to the register stand.

“No. I can handle that,” I replied.

“Uh-huh,” she grunted. “I thought so, you pervert.”

By the time I arrived at my truck, mall security, the local police, and a SWAT team had surrounded it. I was taken into to custody and spent several grueling hours trying to answer questions about sock fetishism.

But, that wasn’t the scary part. When they finally turned on the overhead lights in the interview room, who do you think I saw? Yeah… E K sitting in the corner, giggling to herself in a very satisfied way, all the while painting her nails.

I’m no longer allowed within 100 feet of the women’s sock aisle in any department store in the United States. I can hang out in the lingerie all I want, but if I go near the socks I end up getting tackled by security. These days I have to shop for my offerings to Queen Eebil Kat online. Even so, my guess is all those sites are tracking my IP address just to be sure I don’t do anything perverted.

More to come…

Murv

I don’t know if any of you caught the recent news report about this. It was one of the feature stories on The Early Show, and since I like to sit and ogle Julie Chen and Maggie Rodriguez every now and then it’s a program I catch on a regular basis. (Just kidding, I don’t really ogle them. They are both very easy on the eyes, though, I can’t deny that.)

Anyway, as it happens, just the other day they had a feature about Marriage, Relationships, and Intimacy in the wake of starting a family. Basically, some University did a study – probably with our tax dollars if I had to guess – and came up with the conclusion that better than 90% of the time,  once a couple has a kid, intimacy and moreover sex within the adult relationship declines dramatically. They even pointed out that this happens most especially within the first couple of years.

No shit… You know, I never would have figured that out without their help. I mean, it’s not like you suddenly aren’t getting any sleep, or that your whole life doesn’t hinge solely on the well being of this screaming poop machine.  Or that your wife is now in the land of unbalanced hormones and will be for a while. Had they never done this study I’m afraid I might have wandered aimlessly through the rest of my life, always wondering why such things happen.

Okay… That’s enough sarcasm from me for the time being.

So anyway, they talked to some guy with a pile of letters behind his name who is billed as a relationship expert. He was the co-author of the book to the left there… Hmmm… I think the cover artist must have been looking in E Kay’s closet for inspiration or something… But, I digress… I’ll admit, I haven’t actually read this particular book, but I did read one of his other self-help missives – She Comes First. It’s a tome geared toward helping men please their mates in the… you know… bedroom. I read it because I’m all about doing whatever I can to please the E K. It tends to reduce the number of beatings I have to endure, and stuff like that.

However, with regard to She Comes First, let’s just say some of the things in it frightened me. Quite a bit. Not all of them by any means, but there were a few… And, I’m married to Satan in High Heels, so I’m not easily frightened. Okay, I’ll be honest; they didn’t really “frighten” me per se. They did, however, make me go “ewwwww!” At any rate, I won’t go into details, but… ummm… well… ’nuff said… shudder… ewwwwww!… Okay, now ’nuff said.

Anywho, they were talking to him about the Love In The Time Of Colic book – (that I am inadvertently advertising for him… aww hell, maybe he and/or HarperCollins will return the favor) – but, back to the story, one of the things he went on to outline is that couples have to make time for one another, do the date night thing, give each other 20 second long hugs – (Where 20 seconds came from I dunno… Probably all that research is my guess. E K and I usually go for a 2 or 3-minute hug, but then we love each other and all that silliness so we can actually endure physical contact that lasts longer than 20 seconds.)

And, of course, there was also the whole thing about the S word… Yeah, S E X.

Okay… I’ll fess up… We had ourselves another “no shit, Sherlock” moment right then and there. But, to be fair, maybe we are just a bit more well adjusted and free thinking than some other folks and some of this stuff simply hasn’t dawned on them. Therefore, I’m not going to put the guy or his work down. If it helps someone out there, rock on. It’s just that the concepts seemed like no brainers to the Evil One and me.

Still, E K was in a semi-jocular mood… So, as this interview and feature aired, and she was preparing to leave for work, she came over to hug me and started counting aloud – One… Two… Three… Four…

Okay… I guess you had to be there. Trust me, it was funny at the time. Really… It was…

But, moving right along… We had both been chit chatting about this report, pretty much making comments at the TV much like the comments I made above. I did, however, mention to The Evil Redhead that I thought we had handled things fairly well, both throughout the munchkin’s infancy and now with her being an almost tween who demands a lot of attention. I also pointed out that a few good hugs shared between the two of us definitely did make my day complete.

She agreed… Well, I suppose I should say I think she agreed. Her reply was kind of one of those E K grumbling, “Yeah, okay, whatever, now fetch my things out to the car then kiss my feet, lackey,” sort of comments.

Still, even with the grumbling, since she seemed to be in a good mood I then mentioned the more intimately physical aspect of things. Of course, since our offspring happened to be sitting right there staring at the TV, I tried to do it on the sly – How would I do that, you ask? Simple – I said, “And besides the hugs, there’s the whole S-E-X thing.”

Yeah… I spelled out the word… Yeah… Yeah… I know. Our kid is nine, gifted, reads at a level way beyond her years, and has a vocabulary that outshines some high school students I’ve met.  Just bear with me for a second… There really was a method to my madness.

Of course, E K looked at me like I was a blithering idiot, looked at the kid, then back at me – once again like I was an idiot – and then shook her head and said, “Why did you spell it?”

“The kid,” I replied.

“She can spell, you know that.”

“Yeah, but I’m counting on the fact that she’s half asleep and drooling at the TV,” I replied. (For the record, it was Good Friday so the kid was off school.)

E K snickered and said, “Yeah, right.”

“What did you just spell, daddy?” the kid asked out of the clear blue, not breaking her zombie-like stare from the television screen.

“Excess,” I replied without missing a beat.

She mumbled, “Oh… Okay…”

I knew my ploy had been a bit of a gamble, but luck was on my side and it had worked. I looked back at E K in triumph, but she just scowled and cocked her eyebrow. My momentary elation instantly came crashing back to the ground in a crumpled heap.

You see, Her Majesty, The Queen Bitch Of The Whole Fucking Universe, Missouri Chapter, doesn’t like losing, especially if it involves her being wrong and me being…well…not wrong. Even if my “not wrongness” is purely out of luck or even a fortuitous accident. Moreover, not only had I seen that evil look before, unfortunately I knew exactly what it meant.

Seems I’ll be doing without any excess for a while…

More to come…

Murv