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

Back in 1993 there was this movie starring Michael Douglas. Some of you may remember it. The title was, Falling Down. Now, when you read the plot synosis it repeatedly refers to Douglas’ character as ‘disturbed.’ I will agree with that, wholeheartedly. The problem is, while the synopsis outlines key events in the movie that trigger the character, they paint him as disturbed (i.e. mentally unstable at the outset) and triggered as opposed to being a normal guy who is beaten into disturbia by society and events and then triggered.

When you watch the movie itself they make this latter point clear, but the synopsis really doesn’t. The main reason I even bother to go into that fact is that some of you may not have actually seen the movie and would base your view on that synopsis. Just want to make sure that is cleared up… So, now that it is, on with the rest of this ranting blog thing…

‘I just want to go home,’ is something Douglas’ character said quite a bit throughout the movie. It is also something I say very often… You see, D-FENS (the character – no, don’t get the wrong idea, it’s not some stupid name… You see, for most of the movie you are only able to apply an identity to him based on his vanity license plate D-FENS – he was a defense industry worker if that helps explain it… You don’t find out his real name until later)…

Anyway, my point here is that I can readily identify with D-FENS. I have sympathy for him. Sometimes I feel like I AM him…

In case you haven’t seen the movie and don’t intend to follow the above link to the synopsis, basically you have a guy who is laid off, divorced, beaten down, and just plain sick and tired of the BS out there in the world. By BS I mean getting mugged by a gang, a store owner who won’t make change for a buck so you can use his pay phone then gouges you on a candy bar so that you still don’t end up with any change (yeah, I know, a bit outdated what with cell phones and all, but you get the idea), traffic jams caused for no reason other than the fact the people with entitlement issues are being assholes… Well, finally this guy cracks and fights back. Granted, it gets pretty bad in the end, (what he does, not the movie itself – I think the movie was great) but, in any case, I’ll let you watch the movie to find out those details…

So… Here I am, on the raggedy edge… No, wait, that was from Serenity… Wrong movie… good movie.. no, actually it was a GREAT movie… but not the one I am referencing right now…

So, here I am… Pretty much feeling like D-FENS… No, I haven’t been laid off (actually, I have a contract to fulfill with my publisher, so that means I still have a job – even though book sales are way down in the current economy, but that’s a different blog)… And, I’m not divorced nor am I in any danger of being so (unless, of course, EK has plans I don’t know about…) But, I have been dealing with the whole entitled asshole thing…

You see, I just got back from grocery shopping for the Yule bash this weekend. I wasn’t even able to finish the shopping because I simply couldn’t take any more… In fact, I was on the verge of re-enacting a few scenes from Falling Down right there in the Shop ‘n Save. Fortunately, since I DO still have a wife and a kid and a job, I have too much to lose, therefore I had the good sense to just head for the checkout stand, pay for my cartload and leave…

But, to give you an idea… As I was politely making my way down the aisles, moving to the side and allowing people to pass whenever I needed to stop, or waiting for folks to finish before trying to get past them myself, I was faced with assholes. People who would ram my cart as I politely waited for the old lady in front of me to finish putting something into her own cart…

They would ram MY cart, push past me, then ram the old lady’s cart in order to rush past her. Then guess what? They’d stop 15 feet up the aisle – in the MIDDLE of the friggin’ aisle – and would they get something off the shelf and move on? No… They’d stand there blocking the aisle while carrying on a LOUD conversation with someone via cell phone. ‘Giiiiirrlrllllllll, I be tellin’ you he be yadda yadda…etc… etc…yadda…’

However, I DID figure something out during all of this – These assholes don’t use the words ‘excuse me’ because they don’t know what they mean. I tested the theory several times by politely saying excuse me while trying to get around them, and was merely stared at like I had grown an extra head. Obviously, ‘excuse me’ is spoken in a foreign language where they are concerned.

If that was all that occurred it wouldn’t be so bad – even though said incident happened MULTIPLE times within the span of 1 hour with different assholes involved each time – but, it doesn’t stop there. I had an idiot bean me with an eight pound ham because he tossed it into the bin without bothering to look first. When I looked up  he stared at me like it was my fault for being there.

There were several other incidents, but I don’t want to bore you with a neverending rant… Suffice it to say, I was pushed to the point where I was imagining myself in D-FENS’s position, and thinking I would do pretty much the same thing he did (see movie – or at the very least the synopsis – for details)

Of course, to add insult to injury, even though I decided to check out and ‘go home’ rather than lay waste to everyone in my path, someone still found it necessary to push in front of me while I was standing in the checkout line.

While I refrained from picking up the nearest blunt object and beating her to death with it, I let her know in no uncertain terms what she’d done… Then, just to be an asshole myself, I told her with as much sarcasm as I could muster (and them some), “But you just go ahead…don’t mind me.”

I guess I had a pretty wild D-FENS kind of look in my eye, because she said, ‘ummm, oh, ummm, no…’ then pulled out of the line and went to the checkout stand at the far end of the store which happened to be much closer to the front door.

It could have been the look in my eyes… It could have been the tone of my voice… It might even have been my posture… But, somewhere in the back of my head I have to wonder if it was all because she had once seen the movie in question combined with the fact that I simply stood there muttering, ‘I just want to go home…’

Yeah, something tells me that might have been it… And, I think she wanted to put some distance between us and be within reach of an exit in the event that I might Fall Down…

More to come…

Murv