BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Over the past few days folks have probably taken note that I’ve been somewhat busy with cleaning, shopping, cleaning, cooking, cleaning, sho… Well, you get the idea.

I’ve been, to say the least, busy. And, as I have noted on my various social networks, this “bizzy” came about not only from the writing I’ve been doing, but also from my preparations for the Festival of Luetsencurbenpuken.

As you may have guessed – because you may be one of the folks I am about to mention – folks (that’d be the folks I’m mentioning) have been leaving comments and dropping me emails, most often with the question: “

“Hay! Merv. Cellers. Whot thee f*ck is Loosencrippenfahrvegnugget?”

Okay… Well maybe the spelling and grammar weren’t quite THAT bad. But anyway, suffice it to say I’ve received many a, “What the hell is that?” email. So, with today being the final day of Luetsencurbenpuken, I thought perhaps I’d give everyone an explanation.

Luetsencurbenpuken (Loots – en – curb – en – puke- en) n. – A three day holiday celebrated by a small group of  Saint Louis residents, taking place in relative proximity to the Winter Solstice (December 21-22) each year. Marked by colorful signage, abundant alcohol, food, raucous singing and the obsequious worship of a petite redhead wearing black patent leather. A traditional bonfire is required for proper celebration, and the first day of the festival is started with “The Chopping Of The Wood” followed by “The Drinking Of The Dry Dirty Martini.” Margaritas – frozen, of course – can be substituted for the Martini, however the two tasks must be done outdoors in sub-freezing temperatures, while wearing shorts and a hoodie. Overt and constant adulation of the redhead is a must. On the second night of the festival, the real fun begins.

Now, I could certainly leave it at that. After all, now you know what Luetsencurbenpuken is. However, I’m sure you wonder just exactly how this particular holiday came to be in the first place. Well… Let me tell you a story.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF LUETSENCURBENPUKEN

Believe it or not, Luetsencurbenpuken is not a new holiday. It has been around almost since the dawn of time. But, it wasn’t always called Luetsencurbenpuken. To understand its roots we have to go back a bit in history. We won’t go all the way back to the dawn of time though. We’ll just flip the calendar pages a few hundred years into the past.

Ritual Mock Beheading Of The "Pie Man" - Traditional Luetsencurbenpuken Party Game

During the time of the Roman Empire when a bunch of toga wearing, $5 pizza making, nutjobs were fornicating, stabbing each other, and farting in public bathtubs, they also celebrated a holiday around the Winter Solstice that they called Saturnalia. Historians have speculated that this was due to a script that was found for a popular serial play of the age called, “Lost in Carpathia,” in which a family, along with a guide and a demented former Senator went forth in a huge chariot dubbed Saturn II, ostensibly to visit with the Carpathians. However, due to a scroll malfunction – caused by the former Senator – they became hopelessly lost and wandered about in a futile attempt to return to the aqueducts. The plot of this serial play may seem familiar to those of you who recall the hit 60’s television show, Lost in Space. In order to get around the Aristotle Plagiarism act of 723, they renamed the spaceship Jupiter II but pretty much used the same scripts, although slightly updated. But… This really isn’t  about the Romans and a date that I pulled out of my arse.  In reality, this is about the Mumbling Drelts.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Mumbling Drelts, they are an ancient people who came into existences after some wayward Mummers interbred with some wayward Druids. These “Mummids,” as they were known, traveled a short distance to sack a village of Celts, whereupon they had their way with the women. The women, being smarter, poisoned them, beheaded their carcasses, and put their heads on poles, whereupon they danced around them into the night, attempting to yodel. This is where the legend of the Banned She, (later to become Banshee) is thought to have originated.

Afterward, with not much of a village left and no visible means of support, they lived their lives out as a band of wandering burlesque performers, picking up jobs as paid assassins on the side. However, as there was no reliable birth control back then, several of them had become pregnant via the unfortunate “way having.” These women gave birth to a whole new raft of folks. They, in turn, interbred and became the Mumbling Drelts.

The reason you don’t hear much about them is that they died out over a period of 200 or so years due to the fact that they would repeatedly beat themselves over the head with rocks for no apparent reason. (Of NOTE – as you will discover later – renowned sexual anthropologist Dokter Brunhilda has published a paper which may support the theory that the self-flagellation with rocks was a misguided form of masturbation, as there is already solid evidence that such activities did, in fact, occur as a foreplay-esque prelude to copulation. See article – International Journal of Anthropological Kinkiness, Issue 69, May, 2007.)

But on with the story.

You see, while the Romans were fornicating at Saturnalia, the Mumbling Drelts were celebrating the Solstice holiday in their own fashion. Throughout the year they would gather berries and grains, which they would then turn into a mash, ferment, and then bottle. They would also distill a portion. The resultant highly alcoholic concoctions were then imbibed at the Winter Solstice  Office Party, which usually happened on the weekend nearest the Solstice proper, since everyone needed to be off work for a couple of days in order to enjoy the festivities.

And this is how the holiday of Luetsencurbenpuken was first known by the name, DRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLL!

You see, DRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLL! was the drunken cry they would make at the moment the first of them became so inebriated that he, or she as the case may be, began to, well, drool. Why? Because they were drunk and drooling. And, since the Mumbling Drelts had no written language, this tradition was handed down orally. But, this is a family blog so we won’t get into that.

At any rate, once they died out, it seemed that the holiday of DRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLL! was gone forever…

Except (saw that coming, right?)…

A Rare Snapshot Of The Luetsencurbenpuken Queen - AKA She Of Red Hair And Patent Leather

Except that a nomadic camel dealer by the name of Mortimer “Mort” Farhquar had come upon one of these celebrations in his travels and been invited to join the Mumbling Drelts for some boozin’ and droolin’. Mort liked the tradition so much that he passed it along to his kin, except that because of the verbal language barrier and a slight hearing problem he had picked up during a freak camel spitting incident, he interpreted DROOOOOLLLLL! as “Yoooollllll!”

Hence, the holiday of Yoooollllll was created. As years wore on and language evolved, this was shortened to Yule, and became the preferred winter holiday of folks around the world.

Now, you’d think the story would end there, but if it did it wouldn’t make much sense, would it?

Fast forward back to the here and now. Well, the here and then, actually. I met the redhead (see blog entries about courtship, marriage, etc for background) and one of the things we would do each year is have ourselves a “Christmas Open House” sort of party. Well, as things would go, we ended up competing with other friends who were having the same, and didn’t want to end up REALLY competing, if you get my drift. Therefore, we moved our Christmas Open House back a bit, and turned it into a Yule celebration for close friends who were able to embrace the idea of dredging up the holiday of the Ancient Mumbling Drelts.

Of course, being modern folk and all, we live in a suburban area. Therefore we endeavored to keep things on an even keel so that no police would be called on us for yelling DRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLL! at all hours of the night and early morning.

That is, until we met Missus Loota-Chack… AKA Anastasia Luettes.

As it turns out, a DNA test revealed that Anastasia is actually descended from the Ancient Mumbling Drelts themselves. It seems that they did not all die out. In fact, one couple, Frodis and ShaNayNay Bushplucker, experienced an epiphany during intercourse and ceased to beat one another over the head with large rocks as a form of foreplay. And, it is from this “Adam and Eve” pair, if you will, of Mumbling Drelts that the lineage continued.

However, Missus Loota-Chack married up to a wonderful German guy, who likes food, and worships the Patent Leather Redhead with reckless abandon, doing any and all chores she demands, even before she demands them. So much so, in fact, that he tends to make me look bad at times. Fortunately, I am busy with other tasks prescribed by her evilness, and therefore I don’t get kicked to the curb.

And speaking of the curb…

Traditional Luetsencurbenpuken Signage

Several years back, Missus Anastasia and Mike “Yes Mistress Kat, May I Please Have Another” Loota-Chack were at our annual Yule celebration, just as they had been in the past. However, this particular year, Anastasia had been spending an enormous amount of time researching her rediscovered roots. That, and having odd, lurid fantasies about redheads, jumper cables, and low amperage battery chargers, but that’s another part of the story we won’t get into here. She claims that because of this research – although our theory is that it had more to do with the fantasies – she neglected to eat during the morning of the first day of the holiday. Fact is, she neglected to eat at all that day. Not just the morning.

However, in order to continue fueling the redhead and jumper cable thing going on in her head, she began drinking at around 3AM. The day before. Heavily. Therefore, by the time she arrived at Casa de la pelirroja, she was schnockered. I mean gone. She didn’t have three sheets to the wind, she had one sheet and she was tangled in it.

Then she ate.

Then she drank some more.

Then she stripped naked and danced on the dining room table while singing in a blend of French, Irish Gaelic, Swahili, and some dead Slavic dialect nobody else knows. All we were really able to understand was the chorus which went something on the order of, “Spank me, Oh Spank Me, You Fool, You Fool…”

Of course, none of us spanked her. Dollar bills were tossed on the table, however, while our friend Johnny “The Bologna Man” Seitz continued to eat his dinner while occasionally shouting, “GoDdAmM Luettes!”

Several minutes into the naked can-can, Anastasia suddenly stopped. Looked at all of us with her eyes bugging out of her head, then screamed at the top of her lungs, DRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLL! Achtung! Cac capaill! FEK FEK FEK!

Which, of course, is the holiday cheer of the ancient Mumbling Drelts, followed by something in German, Irish Gaelic, and Colloquial Irish Slang that loosely translates to: Attention! Horse Sh*t! F#CK, F#CK, F#CK!

Upon bellowing she ran naked out the front door and into the streets – icy, snowy, cold streets, mind you – and screamed DRROOOOOOOOLLLLLLL! repeatedly as she zipped around the neighborhood, with an embarrassed Mike following after her. The rest of us were highly amused by the sight once we got over our initial shock.

On her eleventyish pass down our street, she came to a sudden halt, much like the roadrunner in those cartoons. She was across the street, next to our neighbor’s house, and she suddenly pitched over and ralphed the contents of the pre-dinner appetizers and 36 hours of drinking onto the curb – as well as a portion of his yard. Of note, grass will still not grow there to this day.

After that it was all over but the crying.

Much like grandma being “runned over” by a reindeer (or molested at the airport by the TSA, as the case may be) we’ve never been able to forget the events of that night. Therefore in honor of it, we renamed the annual Yule celebration to Luetsencurbenpuken (kinda makes a little sense now, doesn’t it?) and decorate accordingly.

And there you have it. From my fingers to your brainpan. Thing is, I was here and had to witness it firsthand, so don’t complain. I had it way worse than you.

Hopefully, I’ll have some pics from Luetsencurbenpuken 2010 to post in the next blog. Provided Anastasia leaves her clothes on this year…

Also of note, Luetsencurbenpuken is immediately followed by, and sometimes will literally encompass on one of the three days, the high holiday of Luetsengottenolderen.

But that’s another story…

More to come…

Murv

With thanks (and apologies) to Baz Lurhmann for the original. Wear Sunscreen re-imagined by yours truly for writers everywhere…

This originally appeared in a comment thread on my Facebook wall, 12/12/2010… About 30 minutes ago, as a matter of fact. All because I was bored and felt like entertaining myself.

USE FLASH DRIVES

Writers and wordslingers of the class of 2010…

Use Flash Drives.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, Flash Drives would be it. The non-volatile redundancy benefits of Flash Drives have been proved by cataclysmic hard drive crashes, whereas the rest of my writing advice is really just a bunch of meandering, tongue-in-cheek humor…

I will dispense that advice, now:

Enjoy the power and beauty of the adverb. Oh, never mind, you will not understand the power and beauty of the adverb until you grasp adjectives.

But trust me, in 120,000 words you’ll look back at adjectives you didn’t use and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much descriptiveness lay before you and how great the verb really could have looked… Adding LY is easier than you imagine.

Don’t worry about the optional comma; or em-dash, but know that an ellipsis is as effective for indicating a pause as a semicolon. The real punctuation in your work is apt to be removed and then restored by an editor; the kind that blindsides you with revisions at 4pm on some Saturday when you planned a family outing.

Write one thing every day that makes absolutely no sense.

Spellcheck.

Don’t be reckless with apostrophes, and don’t put up with people who are reckless with colons.

Revise.

Don’t waste your time on head popping POVs. Sometimes you’re in one characters head, sometimes you’re in another… the story is what’s important, and in the end you’ll only confuse your readers.

Remember the good reviews you receive, forget the bad; if you succeed in doing this, tell me how. Keep your old notes, throw away your old rejection slips.

Edit.

Don’t feel guilty if you surf porn for a few hours when you have writer’s block… Some of the most interesting writers I know were kinky at 22. Some of the most interesting 40+ year old writers I know are still kinky.

Do plenty of research. Be kind to your editors, you’ll need them when you’re late on a deadline.

Maybe you’ll get a multi-book deal, maybe you won’t. Maybe your book will get optioned for a movie, maybe it won’t. Maybe you’ll be a mid-lister, maybe you’ll hit the NYT best seller list… whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either – it’s all a matter of luck, for you and everybody else as well.

Enjoy your first novel, and admire it every way you can… Be proud of it, and ignore what other people think of it, it’s the only first novel you’ll ever write.

Read. Even if you have no time to do it but on your lunch break in the bathroom.

Learn the rules of grammar, even if you don’t follow them. Do NOT read “How To Write” books, they will only make you feel inadequate.

Get to know bookstore owners. You never know when you’ll need to book a signing venue. Be nice to other writers; they are your best shot for a cover blurb and the people most likely to chat you up to acquisitions editors.

Understand that readers come and go, but there are those who will stay loyal no matter what the critics say. Work hard to fix your plot holes and make suspension of disbelief as seamless as possible, because the deeper you get into a story, the more you need your readers to follow along.

Write a chase scene once, but don’t let it overwhelm the story.

Write a sex scene once, but don’t let it become the entire focus of the plot.

Double space.

Accept certain inalienable truths: commas generally go before conjunctions, periods end sentences, and interjections don’t always denote excitement, but when they do you should follow them with an exclamation point, not a period or a comma, unless followed by another interjection.

Use interjections.

Don’t quit your day job. Maybe you’ll get an advance, maybe you’ll retain your electronic rights, but you never know when or if a book will earn out and pay royalties.

Don’t mess too much with your arc, or by the time it develops people will be bored. Be careful with your characters, but, be patient with their back stories. Character development is a form of mental masturbation, and nurturing it is a way of creating a personality, giving it legs, breathing life into it, and making readers believe the fictional construct is real.

But trust me on the Flash Drives…

More to come…

Murv