BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Such is the life of an author.  Sitting by the pool, sipping hurricanes and having a gorgeous assistant apply tanning lotion. We lounge and read high-brow literary endeavors penned by our colleagues, wax prophetic, say witty things for no apparent reason, then break for a leisurely dinner of lobster salad on a bed of mixed greens, all washed down with some manner of imported and unpronounceable blend of teas. We get cleaned up, put on our smoking jackets with the elbow patches, then head off (in a limo, of course) to yet another party being held for a charity no one has ever heard of, but that part really doesn’t matter because instead of investing the donations in the charity itself all of the money is being spent on caviar, crab puffs, Dom Perignon, and an open bar. I mean, after all, it’s a party, right? If you don’t give good party then no one will show up to donate money to finance the next party. But, I digress yet again… We laugh, we say more witty things in order to make other people laugh, and then we slip out to head home (in the limo, of course) and grab a few hours sleep before starting the whole process over again, plus maybe an interview with an editor from People magazine and a quick, on camera tour of our digs with someone from Entertainment Tonight. (Hopefully it would be Mary Hart… That gal has got some serious gams… but, we won’t go there…)

Ahhhh… The life of an author… It just can’t be beat…

Whoa! Did you hear that? Yeah, it was loud…What was it, you ask? Could it be the sound of the above fantasy shattering like a plate glass window?

Or, might it have been the sound of a distant yell followed by something whistling past your head then going “plooooop!” (gotta love onomatopoeia) into the pristine waters of the pool… But, we’ll get to that eventually. (I promise)

No, no, no… I’m not about to lecture you on how the majority of us authors are generally poor folks who work just as hard as everyone else (even though that’s true). Nope, I really and truly am going to go on about sitting by the pool. Well, maybe not sitting so much as standing…and walking around it…and, well, pushing the vacuum head around on the bottom of said pool with one of those extendable aluminum poles. But, like I said above, we’ll get to that.

Now, before you ask, the answer is no. I wasn’t a pool boy… Although, when the kid is having a sleepover at a friend’s house and we are all alone, EK and I sometimes play “wealthy lady and the pool boy“… JUST KIDDING. We don’t even have an inflatable kiddie pool so that one definitely is NOT in the repertoire…

Okay… so is everyone settled down? No more impure thoughts and all that? Wait…You in the back… yeah, YOU. Did you have something you wanted to share with the rest of us? Excuse me? Say that again… (sigh) No, we don’t play “wealthy lady and the gardener” either. Sheesh… Can we just get back to the topic at hand now? Thank you…

Now, before we can get to the pool – and more importantly, the loud noise – As usual I have to prattle on endlessly about some of the background. You might already have a head start on the background if you are one of those folks who reads the acknowledgments at the beginning of a book – obviously in this particular case, my books. If so, you have probably run across the honorific and name, “Sergeant Scott Ruddle, SLPD” in my litany of couldn’t have done this withouts. (Yes, in the earlier books in the series it was Officer, not Sergeant… Believe me, he points that out to me every chance he gets…)

So, in case you haven’t figured it out, this is another one of those dominos. I’m not quite sure what knocked this one over. Maybe it is just brain cells dying off and emptying memories into the ether as a final cry of defiance. Suffice it to say a line of the figurative, dotted, oblong hexahedrons went clickity-clack and we ended up here… go figure.

I also need to point out here that I really and truly do come from humble beginnings. I’ve rambled on about that fact several times before. Summers on the farm, work, values, etc.  (See the PB&J blog for instance…) However, I will admit that in my late teens things were looking up for our family, primarily because my father was frugal, had a Midas touch when it came to investing, and worked his ass off. At any rate, by the time I hit the tender age of 16 my parents had managed to purchase a very nice 5 bedroom ranch on an extra large lot, and it happened to be right around the block from the small cracker box of a home where we had been residing. The great thing is that they did this all without overextending themselves. And, as an added bonus, they sprang for a pool to be installed. (Not right away… that came a year or so later.) In any case, they managed to fit into the budget a 16X32, in-ground pool with a 3 foot shallow end, an 8.5 foot deep end, diving board, and a nice patio. It had a vermiculite-based bottom with a liner, as opposed to being poured concrete. This saved money, and it was still durable and looked just like any other pool.

I’m not flaunting this fact. Really, I’m not. But, I have to say that it was really nice. I mean, not every high school kid gets to say,  “Hey, wanna come over and take a swim?” to his friends. But, that’s another story/blog. At this point we fast forward…(yes, we’ve made it to the pool, but we have to go somewhere else for a moment…I promise, we’ll come back…)

I met Sergeant Ruddle of the SLPD a few years before he ever pinned a badge onto a uniform. Well, a real one. I have no idea if he ever played cowboys as a kid and happened to take on the role of the sheriff or some such. As to what he and his wife do in the privacy of their own home… Well, I’m not even going to speculate on that because if I did and blogged about it he’d probably have me arrested and lose me in the system for a few days. Besides, it would be like thinking about your parents…well…you know… Wayyyy too much, “eeewwwwwww!” factor there.

Anyway, I met Scott and his lovely wife when I was working as a salesperson at a mall store called VideoConcepts^TM. Yeah, I was one of those annoying guys in a sport coat who talked your arm off until you gave me your credit card and I sent you out the door with a VCR/Big Screen TV/Stereo. To give you an idea of the time frame this was happening, Beta was a big deal and VHS was a relatively new format. High-end turntables for LP’s were the thing, MP3 was two letters and a number strung together in random order, and if you wanted to carry music with you the Sony Walkman radio/cassette player (or generic equivalent) was your only choice. I even have vivid memories of us all standing around and doing the “ooohh – aaaahhh” thing when the first CD player showed up in our store (which BTW had the following functions – play, pause, stop, & skip and it cost a “reasonable” $1299.95 <– No, that is NOT a typo.)

Moving on… Scott and his bride came into the store one random day in order to look at stereos. They lived nearby and were pretty much just window shopping at the old Northwest Plaza outdoor mall. I happened to draw a bead on them first and like any jacked up salesperson I went in for the kill. I have to admit, they did NOT leave with a stereo that day. They did, however, leave with an impression, some spec sheets on amps, and a giant load of information about the VideoConcepts^TM Movie Rental Club. Fortunately, the impression they took with them was a good one (How I managed that, I will never know…)

So, anyway, when my shift came to an end, like any average, single guy in his early 20’s I beat feet out of my place of employment and went in search of beer and women. If I remember correctly, I found beer (that was easy) but I think I struck out in the women department that evening.

Scott, however, returned to the store and purchased a membership to the movie club well after I had gone. SOP at the store was to ask a customer if they had talked to a particular salesperson so the commissions could be properly assigned. For whatever reason, Scott didn’t have my business card and at that point couldn’t remember my name, so he just said yeah, “some sandy-haired hyper guy.” (yeah, my hair darkened considerably as I aged – plus, I don’t have a pool anymore…yeah, we’re getting back to the pool…) So, the long and short of it is that I got my two bucks commission (or whatever it was) and when Scott returned his initial “hey, you just joined so have a free rental on us” movie, I happened to be working so we spent some time chatting and eventually became friends.

The process by which our actual friendship proper came about is a bizarre and psyche damaging history… And, there is plenty of blog fodder in there. Believe me. Maybe we’ll get into that at another time. Depends on the dominos…

Now, about that pool… (see, I told you we’d get there…well, almost)

At this stage in my life my parents had divorced, my sister was living with my mother, and I was renting half of that 5-bedroom ranch from my father. The way it was laid out, there were basically two wings each with its own bathroom, and the kitchen & living room nestled in between. There was even a door separating the wings that could be shut. So, it was kind of a bachelor’s paradise in a way. My dad traveled quite a bit when he wasn’t working, so I pretty much had the place to myself, and the rent was reasonable. It beat the hell out of a tiny little apartment with a huge price tag, even if it did still carry the stigma of “What?! You still live with your dad?” attached. The stigma, however, quickly faded whenever friends – or girlfriends – would see the place and realize that even when my dad WAS home, he was off in his own end of the house and you rarely, if ever, saw him.

Now, as a part of my rent, I had certain duties. In retrospect, it was much like owning a home. Mow the lawn, do this, do that, and other stuff. Among those duties were the care and maintenance, as well as the opening and closing, of the swimming pool. If you have ever “opened” a pool in the spring or “closed” one in the fall, you know how much work this can be. (I will spare you a complete rundown of the details…)

The year was… Well… I dunno what the year was… suffice it to say it was a long time ago. I took a weeks vacation during the late spring/early summer in order to open the pool. Scott, having become one of my best friends – he was even my best man when EK and I married, but that came years later – took a week of his own vacation to come over and help me. Okay, so here’s the thing. Scott and I are the same age. He’s like 2 months older than me, so not much difference there…

Think about this… You have two guys in their early twenties, on vacation, and opening a swimming pool. Things are going to happen… Yes, there was much BBQ’ing involved while working. I mean, why not? We had to eat, right? But, we still worked our tails off. No kidding. We just found a way to make the work fun… But, think harder about the situation… A couple of twenty-something guys, a swimming pool, warm early summer day, and no worries… Yeah, exactly… Even more insidious than the BBQ’ing was the proliferation of fermented and hopped malt beverages served cold from a convenient twelve-ounce aluminum container with a small hole in the top.

Beer. That sparkling elixir… The potion that makes all things…well, blurry and uneven, but I digress…

Now, with all this work to do, we managed to go through quite a bit of beer. And, as will happen, we would, on occasion, run out. One day, right about the end of the week, we did. Run out, that is. We had run out before, but this particular day we had a nice London broil cooking on the grill, the pool truly was pristine and ready for swimming, and Scott’s wife was going to be over as soon as she got off work. We were going to kick back and enjoy the fruits of our labors for a change… But, we were going to need more beer. Scott, in his infinite wisdom, went to buy some more.

Now, before you get all excited, he wasn’t drunk. We were both sober at the time, which is what makes what happened next even more bizarre…

Yeah… Now we are back to the noise (see, told ya’…)

I was putting the finishing touches on the pool and Scott had been gone maybe 10 minutes at the most (there was a liquor store three blocks up the street). I hear this distant voice calling…

“Mmmmmeeeeeerrrrrrrppppppp!” (that’s what Scott and his wife called me…Seems I “looked like a Merp” to them. Whatever the hell a Merp looks like.)

I cocked my head to the side and listened. Silence.

Then again, “Mmmmmmmmmmmeeeeeeeerrrrrrrppppppp! INCOMING!”

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this until the noise met my ears…It was kind of a Doppler distorted whistling whoosh-pfffffffffbbbbbbbttttttt type sound, followed very closely by a loud KER-PLOOOOOOOMMMMMMPPPPFFF! This racket which brought up the rear of the whole cacophony was joined by the physical action of water splashing up out of the pool and all over me. This, of course, was followed by my reaction, which took the form of extreme surprise and me nearly falling into the pool as I attempted to jump out of my skin, run around the yard, then climb back into the aforementioned shed epidermis.

Before I could even begin to speculate as to the planetary origin of the meteorite that had just crashed to earth before my eyes, another came whistling past my head and repeated the loud KER-PLOOOOOOOMMMMMMPPPPFFF! and splash. This time, while not entirely prepared, I was a bit less surprised. Instead of trying to climb out of my skin, I simply turned around three times while inside it, then spent a minute or two adjusting my bellybutton back where it belonged due to the twisting. (I never have managed to get that thing centered correctly since)…

The Whistle filled my ears one more time, but instead of being followed by KER-PLOOOOOOOMMMMMMPPPPFFF! it was punctuated by a horrendous sounding KRUNCH-CLATTER-CRASH-GRONKKKKKK-Hisssssssssssssss. This was combined with an object cartwheeling backwards (relative to its earlier trajectory) through the air as it expelled some manner of liquid propellant in a violent spray. A split second later it plummeted into the water and continued to spew and bubble.

A couple of short minutes passed by with nothing else falling from the sky.  As I stood watching a pair of 12 ounce cans bobbing up and down in the pool, while another slowly worked its way toward the bottom, I heard a deep chuckle coming from the sliding doors leading out to the patio.

You see – and I’m sure you figured this out already – it seems Scott had been standing in the middle of the street in front of my house, lobbing full beers over it to test his “marksmanship”.

“So, did I hit the pool, white man?” Scott finally called from the doorway. (yeah, just like Ben Storm.)

At that point all I could think of to say is, “I think we’d better add some more chlorine or something.”

Yeah, and now he’s a cop.  Welcome to my world.

More to come…

Murv

Well, to some extent they go hand in hand. Love, lust, and all points in between. You start out in lust and as you get to know one another the lust becomes love, and if you are lucky, they blend together to become this Love/Lust amalgam that carries on throughout your relationship and/or marriage.

But, before you get all excited or start calling me Doctor Phil, I should point out that I’m actually here to talk to you about dominos again. And, no, still not the pizza.

You see, I’ve been married to EK now for Twen-koff-koff yea-koff…Okay…for real, 21+ years, and we “co-habitated” for a year prior to that. So, we’ve been ’round the block in the ol’ Radio Flyer a couple of times – always with me pulling as she beats me with a buggy whip and screams “faster, faster…watch out for that crack in the sidewalk…slow down…careful around that turn…faster, faster!” But, as usual, that’s one of those “other” blogs (actually, they probably wouldn’t even let me post it here…but I digress…)

My point being, I’m no stranger to the relationship game, marriage game, whatever… Now, let’s be clear. I am in no way claiming to have all the answers. Hell, I don’t have ANY of the answers. I just pull the wagon and do what I’m told. I’m merely pointing out that I do have at least a passing familiarity with interpersonal relationships between two folks who make up a couple.

Since the EK and I have been together for better than two decades, just like any other couple we have settled into some behavioral patterns. This is not to say that love and lust are gone. The love is there stronger than it was in the beginning, and growing daily. Lust…well…can’t really get into that here (LOL)… But, like I said, as with any couple, patterns will emerge. Ways of interacting. It’s just all part of life. Therefore, a half hour or so ago when I nonchalantly and jokingly said to my wife, “what are you making for dinner tonight?” her response came as no surprise, and the dominos began to teeter…

I suppose you might need a bit of background first…You see, my wife almost never makes dinner. In fact, whenever I go on tour for a week or two at a time, I spend the week prior to my departure working in the kitchen – cooking, packaging, and freezing meals in reusable “freezer to microwave” containers so that I know she and my daughter will eat something other than crackers and yogurt. It’s not that she’s lazy. She’s about as far from lazy as you can get… Hell, I wish I had her energy… It is just that she really dislikes cooking. With a passion it seems. Me, on the other hand, having grown up in a family with diners and restaurants, I absolutely love to cook. So, this makes at least part of the division of labor in our home a no brainer. Put simply, the kitchen is my domain.

But, like I said at the outset, there are dominos involved here, and again, I’m not talking about pizza…even though we are on the subject of food.

To inspect this particular dot-covered game piece we have to turn back the clock to a time EARLY in our marriage. Back when, even though we had dated for some time, then cohabitated for an entire year, and then even been legally married in the eyes of the law for a couple more years, we were still in that state of semi-honeymoon. Not the face-sucking-sex-in-every-room-with-reckless-abandon phase, mind you. Just the hyperactive love-lust combination where you want to impress your partner because you love them so much – and again, I want to be clear on this impressing thing – I’m not talking about dressing up in a negligee and posing next to the bedroom door while batting eyelashes (come to think of it, that’s a pretty good domino too, but I probably wouldn’t fit in that negligee anymore…just kidding… I mean just kidding about the negilgee, not the fitting into it part… you know what I mean…dammit, I’ve never owned a negligee, so just stop it!)

Back to the story… sheesh…ya’ bunch of weirdos…

So, in this particular instance we are talking about dinner. You see, way back when, during the days of hyperlovelustwhatever, the evil redhead decided to make dinner. (They “make” dinner here in the north, as opposed to fixing dinner, like it’s supposed to be done) Now, not being a big fan of the kitchen she wasn’t about to get herself into a major project (I’d like to take a moment to point out that it isn’t that she can’t cook, because she can. It’s simply that she hates cooking.) But still, she intended to “make” dinner. And, so she did. Cheesy tuna and noodles Tuna Helper^TM. Now, before you think I am about to complain, guess again. I happen to like tuna casserole, and mac n’ cheese, and yes, cheesy tuna and noodles. It was all good.

So, my lovely bride served up a big, steaming dish of Tuna Helper^TM, happy with herself and confident in the fact that she had done something nice for me that I would appreciate. And, I did. Harboring the same hyperlovelustwhatever as she, I sat at the table and shoveled in the Tuna Helper^TM while smiling and telling her how wonderful it was, as well as how much I appreciated her fixing dinner. In fact, I was so overwhelmed with hyperlovelustwhatever that I didn’t even hint at the fact that there was something terribly, and fundamentally wrong with the meal. Not something that would make you ill, mind you, but something fundamentally wrong, nonetheless, given what it was supposed to be. The meal went on, the dishes were washed, and well, I can’t really remember what else happened that night, but I suspect that since we were working on remodeling the house at the time we were probably both exhaused and just went to bed then straight to sleep – none of the “not so blog safe” material to worry about this time.

So, everything was good. I had done my duty and nothing need ever be said about the problem with the meal. The EK was happy, I was happy, and even the cats were as happy as cats can be.

The next day, however, it became apparent that my plan to protect the evil redhead from personal embarrassment had gone terribly awry. At this point I cannot remember exactly what I was doing at the moment of realization. I do, however, have vivid recollection of EK walking into the room with an unopened can of tuna in her hand, which she had found sitting on the kitchen counter right where she had left it the night before. With a look of realization flooding her face, she stared at me and stated, as much as asked, complete with a matter-of-fact incredulity, “I forgot to put the tuna in the Tuna Helper last night, didn’t I?”

I could not tell a lie, but I also didn’t want to add insult to injury. I simply replied, “No worries. It was really good macaroni and cheese.”

The domino in this case? Well, it didn’t have to knock much over. You see, this afternoon when I jokingly asked my wife what she would be “making” for dinner, without missing a beat she replied, “Hamburger Helper without the hamburger.”

We’re older now, and while we still have that hyperlovelustwhatever thing going on, I’ve learned I don’t really have to suffer (unless I want to, that is, but again, different blog…)

I think I’ll just go ahead and “make” dinner tonight.

More to come…

Murv