BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Part 11 of 12

Continued from: Mahwage: Trick Or Treat!

Okay… So you got me to admit that E K did not actually stomp on the little groom guy from the cake topper… I suppose y’all are real proud of yourselves now, eh? Well, here’s the thing: I’m willing to bet you she thought about it,  really, really hard. As a matter of fact, I’m sure she did.

How can I say that, you ask? Easy, she’s evil. (E K … Evil Kat… Get it? Of course you do…)

So, there you go, case closed, she’s just plain inherently evil. However, if that isn’t enough  to convince you there is also the fact that I happen to know she  really likes to stomp on things… I mean, you should see this woman with an aluminum can that’s destined for the recycle bin… she gets all giggly and stuff… Then all of a sudden it’s just flat out metal carnage, I tell you! (Get it, flat out… Yeah… Okay… Well, I thought it was funny…)

Yeah, yeah, I know… I’ve said all manner of wonderful things in this blog series to purposely dispel any myths and/or rumors about the evil redhead, but I have to do that. It’s all in the script she wrote for me and if I don’t say all these nice things about her then she’ll beat me and lock me in a closet. Really… Seriously…  She will…

I’ve just lost all credibility with you folks, haven’t I?

Well… Maybe I can get some of it back.

How, you ask? (You know, y’all ask a lot of questions)… Well, I’ll tell you. It  just so happens that I have photographic evidence of E Kay’s evilness, complete with full color depictions of cruelty, betrayal, calculated deception, and no inkling whatsoever of remorse for her actions. Yes, for real. Undoctored, unfettered, pure photographic evidence that E K is as evil as they come…

Allow me to set the stage for you…

Among those time honored traditions that go hand in hand with weddings and wedding receptions, is the bride and groom feeding the cake to one another, all cutesy woodja-woodja and the like. In that same vein there is also the “smear the cake all over your new spouse’s face” collateral tradition. I have no idea who started that particular subset of the cake thing, but he or she needs to be shot. Just my opinion, but hey…my blog, my opinion. Kinda works…

Anyway, E K and I had ourselves a talk about this. In fact, E K is the very one who brought it up. (I should have known right then and there that something was amiss)… At any rate, one day as we were working on the wedding plans she looked at me imploringly with those big blue eyes and said, “Look, Murv, let’s make a deal with one another right here and now — When it comes time to cut the cake and all that, I promise I won’t smear you in the face with it, if you promise you won’t smear me in the face. Deal?”

Well, how could I resist? She was just so damned cute and convincing and all that jazz. Besides, I really and truly wasn’t all that skippy about the prospect of having cake plastered throughout my beard for several hours, so this seemed like  the perfect solution to me. Therefore, I did the only thing I could possibly do under the circumstances. I responded in earnest, “Yeah, honey.  No problem at all. I’d say you’ve got yourself a deal. I promise to not smear any cake on your face.”

Now, being from the south I knew better. And, I knew I knew better.  In keeping with the theme of things I knew, I also knew in my heart, and in my head, that I should have spit in my palm, made her spit in hers, and had a handshake on the deal right then and there, but I didn’t. Instead, I trusted my soon-to-be-wife without hesitation. Of course, even the handshake probably wouldn’t have mattered, what with her being a Yankee and all… It stands to reason with all that northern blood she wouldn’t have honored a spit promise anyway, so that would have only made the situation worse. I mean, if  she had broken a spit promise of all things, then she just would have gone from being a Yankee to being a Damn Yankee… Obviously this would have presented a major problem, because while it’s a forgivable offense to be married to a Yankee, (after all, they can’t help it they were born in a foreign country,) marrying a Damn Yankee… Well, that’ll just get you hanged.

However, I promised you evidence and so here it is. I give you Exhibit A. (left)… Notice how I am placing the cake carefully into her mouth. However, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to be able to see that her aim is way off. My mouth has never been on the side of my face and she knows that.  No… she was purposely assaulting me with the “cake smear”. If you look closely at my expression, posture, and the position of my other hand, you can also plainly see that the photo caught me right in the middle of a serious, “WTF?! You promised!” moment.

Now, had it merely been a case of poor aim on her part, she wouldn’t have continued to grind the icing into my beard, as evidenced in the next photo, which we shall label Exhibit B.

Unfortunately, what you are unable to see from this particular photo, is her satisfied grin. There were witnesses… But, I think she might have paid them off… Now I ask you… Evil or no?

What? Sheesh… I really don’t see why everyone is taking her side in all of this… I mean, yeah, I do get that she was merely establishing dominance in the relationship so that I would know who was really in control,  but hey, she promised… (One of these days I’m going to find out exactly what it was she had crossed when she made that promise, because I’m pretty sure her hands were in plain sight at the time…)

So, back to the title of this entry. “Where’s everybody going?” refers back to what I mentioned in the Fool For Your Stockings chapter of this series,  (Feb 22, 2009), when I spoke briefly about us hitting the sack in the evening as opposed to the very late night, or wee hours of the morning. I told you we’d get to it, and now here we are.

You see, soon after the smearing of the cake, someone must have mistaken the purely evil gesture as playfulness and then passed the word that E K was feeling frisky or something. I surmised this because it wasn’t long before a mass exodus began. People started patting us on the back, congratulating us just one more time, hugging and kissing us, then winking as they said their goodbyes. A couple of them even flat out mentioned to us that they were clearing out so E K and I could have… Ahem… “Alone time”…

WTF? E K and I had already been living together “in sin” for a year. Yeah, we’d been sinning left and right. So, it’s not like we had gone through this whole process in order to get a “free bedroom pass” or something. Truth is we already had ourselves a “big ol’ bag o’ tokens” for adult activities and we’d been spending them whenever we had a chance. Now, please understand, it’s not that we weren’t interested in visiting the “grown up amusement park” on a regular basis, or even having a go at some of the “rides” we hadn’t yet enjoyed, but on that particular night we wanted to have a party. We had spent every bit of money we could scrape together on food, a keg of beer, and fixing the place up enough to be able to have a shindig. We had worked hard to make this happen. We wanted to share and enjoy it with our friends. We could jump on the “tilt-a-whirl” tomorrow… Hell, two or three times if we felt like it.

However, no matter what we said, folks would just give us the “wink wink nudge nudge” and be on their way. By 10:30 PM, my hot and sexy bride and I were standing in the middle of our living room, just us, the cats, and no one else, surrounded by empty chairs and a whole mountain of food. Now, I know 10:30 PM sounds like night and not evening as I had said… These days, at my somewhat more advanced age, yeah, I’d call it night too. But, back then at the wet behind the ears twenty-something stage, when we were immortal and could drink a hell of a lot more, 10:30 PM was merely evening… Night was still on its way and wouldn’t be arriving for at least another half hour or so…

But, yeah, I know, that’s all just a matter of semantics… You say tomato, I say roundish red thing that goes on my sammich… Still, 10:30 PM? That’s just too damn early to pack it in when you have the youth combined with the level of party fixin’s available that we did…

So… We took one last look around and proceeded to do the only thing we could do. We put everything away, filling the refrigerator to the gills in the process, locked the doors, closed the windows, slipped out of our Sunday go to meetin’ clothes, went into the bedroom and… Passed out from sheer exhaustion.

Yeah. Sleep. That was it. No roller coaster, log flume, bumper cars, scrambler, or even a quick spin on the merry-go-round… Nothing… But, it was all good… If were weren’t going to have anyone staying to party with us, then what the hell… We’d just catch up on those 287 1/2 hours of sleep we’d managed to miss getting ready for this whole affair.

E K could tie me up and beat me later when we’d both be awake enough to enjo… Er… Uhm… Never mind.

But, honestly, in retrospect we both desperately needed the rest. Besides, if you recall, E K had lost the feeling in her legs and we needed to get her out of those rubber bands…

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the serendipitous, (depending on your perspective,) benefits of everyone bugging out so early… And, I’m not just talking about the sleep.

We ended up with almost an entire keg of beer to ourselves… Not a quarter barrel, mind you, we had ordered a half-barrel. And it was the good stuff… Well, as good as commercial big-brewery beer can be and this was in the days before Microbreweries became truly popular. Still, before everything was said and done, I was filling gallon jugs 3/4 full and putting them in the chest freezer downstairs so I could use the flat brew to cook with at a later date, while at the same time I was staying tanked the whole day. We washed our hair with it. We gave it to the neighbors. We invited folks in off the street to have a beer. All I knew was that we’d paid for it, so that metal barrel wasn’t going back until it was floating…

I was never so glad to return a keg in all my life… Really.

On top of the beer-en-dipity there was also food-en-dipity… I didn’t have to cook for a week and a half. We just took stuff out of the freezer and ran it through the microwave. Ham sandwiches, apple-rice curry, veal parmigiana… Good thing too, because with all that extra beer I was sucking down, I was just too damn drunk to cook.

And so we had a relatively anti-climactic end to one of the truly climactic points in our lives… We spent our honeymoon here in town, shopping for furniture with the money we’d earned for getting married, (what a racket… I’d be willing to do it once or twice a year if I thought folks would keep forking over the cash), and just generally hanging out.

But, before I can formally end this proverbial stroll along memory lane, we still have one more little pothole to investigate… And, to do that, we have to get back to the subject of food…

More to come…

Murv

… NEXT: Mahwage: Whores Duh-Voars…

Part 9 of 12

Continued from: Mahwage: Clink! Clank! Oh, Murv!

Apparently, I perform well under pressure, even when it comes to mathematics…

Yes… The ring was exactly, and I do mean exactly, where my advanced calculations had said it would be. I didn’t even have to get dirty looking for it. I simply stood on an upturned 5 gallon bucket, removed two screws from a vent cover on the duct work, and there it was, winking at me in the dim light as if to say, “Whee! That was fun, let’s do it again!“

Needless to say, I ignored the ring’s request, replaced the vent cover, and returned upstairs. I also made it a point to show my mother-in-law the ring so that she would know the crisis had been averted, and more importantly, that I was not nearly as big an idiot as she imagined me to be. To this day I’m not really sure she was convinced…

Oh, and before I go any further I need to address a couple of things…

First, my apologies to Z Z Top for snagging one of their song titles for this blog entry. But, I think you’ll see why I did it if you keep reading…

Second, if you look closely at the picture above and on the right, you will notice that E K appears to have a grin on her face… In fact, it is something almost resembling a laugh. Well, that’s because it is. A laugh, I mean. Although you can’t see my face in this photo, rest assured, I was desperately trying to stifle a guffaw myself. It seems our rings were in a mood that evening. Not only had E Kay’s wedding band taken an unscheduled excursion through the HVAC duct work, we  even had ourselves another “ring mishap” right smack in the middle of the ceremony. Scott, (visible on the right), had handed me E Kay’s ring. Erin (remember Erin?) had handed E K my ring. Both of us, at his behest, had handed the respective rings to E Kay’s father, (the guy in front of us performing the ceremony), so that he could bless them… When he handed them back to us,  each at separate times as the ceremony called for, somehow I ended up with my own ring to slide onto Kat’s finger. Well, my ring being larger, obviously, this wasn’t that much of an issue. However, as the logical progression continued, moments later E K ended up with her own ring to place  on my finger and we tried desperately to make a surreptitious swap without letting on, but ended up getting tickled…

But, let’s step a few minutes back in time… (Yeah, don’t you wish you could do that for real? Me too.)

So, here we are, instantly back in the recent past… Well, it was recent past then… Now it is… Well, you know what I mean…

At this point I have recovered the fugitive wedding ring and I am feeling fairly proud of myself over such a grand accomplishment. However, since the clock didn’t stop during the mini crisis, we are at T minus 15 at this point… E K is still in the bedroom making herself too gorgeous for words, or as has been my personal contention for years, desperately trying to pry open the window that had been painted shut by the previous owners in order to make her escape. She maintains that my theory simply is not true, but when we went to replace that window during our continued  remodel several months later, I found claw-like fingernail gouges in the woodwork that looked suspiciously like they had been made by a human being with petite little feminine hands. From all appearances they seemed to have been made while she was attempting to dig her way through the wall.

With evidence like that, you tell me… What would you think?

But yeah, I digress…

We were coming up on zero-hour and fast. People had been arriving for several minutes, and our tiny house was now full, and even overflowing onto the front porch. In fact, it became obvious that there was a bit of an exodus occurring right before my eyes. It was at this particular point when I realized that I had started to sweat more than just a little. At first I thought it was simply because I was the groom and it was my job to sweat profusely immediately prior to the ceremony, however it was soon brought to my attention that everyone else was sweating too. Given that they weren’t standing in my shoes, there had to be something else going on…

You see, as I outlined in the earlier installment, “Mahwage: The Wedding Suit,” not only had the 2008 startup of the Large Hadron Collider screwed with the fabric of time and space, effectively f*cking up clocks on 10/31/87, apparently it had also temporarily shifted the entire planet on its axis, returning us from the beautiful fall weather we had been experiencing, (since, after all, it was autumn), to something more closely resembling mid-summer.

Yes, what I am saying is that  it was unseasonably warm… Way, way unseasonably warm. And when combined with all those bodies milling about in an enclosed area, as well as a half dozen medium-sized cans of Sterno flaming away beneath chafing dishes, along with a couple of crock pots set on high… well, it was just plain sweltering in the house. Not a problem.  Easy to fix. I would just turn on the A C…

… Uh-huh… Yeah… Problem…

And said problem is yet another reason why we paid way too much for our “fixer upper”. I slid the switch on the thermostat, and the A C clicked on. It then proceeded to make a groaning noise, followed by a clank, punctuated by a sputter, underlined by a screech, and then  when it was fully satisfied with itself, the damn thing settled in to a loud, not quite right sounding whirr. All well and fine, except that whirring was pretty much all it was good for at that point. Uh-huh… The compressor was all but shot, and the coil was hot on its heels… And, while that pun wasn’t intended, it is entirely accurate… The A C was blowing hot air…

But, even though the air flowing from the vents felt more like the product of the furnace than the A C, at least now it was moving…  Sorta… Well, a little bit…

So, in a last ditch effort to adjust the comfort level, we ran around the house and pried open every window we could so as to assist in the circulation. There were still more people coming for the reception following the ceremony proper, so heat exchanging was definitely going to be an issue. This process took a little elbow grease, because remember, the previous owners had been very good about painting the windows shut for us. While that thought was awfully kind of them, I was less than excited about it right then…

But, let’s move on to those stockings…

I make absolutely no secret of the fact that I am not a “boob man”. This is probably one of the reasons Erin, (remember Erin? By the way, is anyone sensing an “Erin” theme here yet?) Anyway, this is probably why Erin and her most bodacious and prominent chest didn’t enrapture me as it had done for the other red-blooded males back at ComputerTrend. I mean, nothing against breasts… They’re nice… Even fun to play with now and again… (No, I never played with Erin’s… Sheesh, you people…) But, to put it very simply they aren’t the physical feature that first attracts my attention when it comes to the appreciation of the female form… (As you can see, I am desperately trying to apply some political correctness to this part of my rambling, and failing miserably in the process, so I’m afraid I’ll just have to abandon the attempt…) The long and short of it is this… I’m a leg man. Nothing titillates, (yeah, odd word choice, considering), me more than a woman’s legs. I’m all about the whole stocking-encased, silky thigh, back of the knee, shapely calf, well-turned ankle appendage ending in a stiletto heeled pump…

Uhm… Excuse me just a moment…

…Okay, I’m back now…

What? I was getting more coffee… Jeez… First Erin, now this… Y’all are worse than me… Give me a break.

Okay, so let’s get back to the story… So, yeah, everyone has their turn-on’s, and shapely female legs are mine. So, my lovely bride, both knowing this fact and being in possession of a fantastic pair of legs, (yes, hers, not someone else’s), had picked out a pair of sexy, white, back-seamed stockings to go with her dress and high heels. Trust me… I was not complaining about this fact at all…

Now… I have to divert from the storyline once more in order to pass along a bit of pertinent information. E K was, at that time in her life, habitually late for everything. She still is, but to nowhere near the degree she was back then… Remember the part in an earlier installment about us annoying one another? Well, there’s one for you… As it happens, I’m habitually early. See the rub? I am pointing this out because much time has passed with all that A C mucking about and window opening handjive.

Therefore, much to my chagrin, we have now arrived at T plus 20 or so… Yeah, the mission profile has been altered and I didn’t get the memo.

And so, the tableau is set up thusly… E K is still in the bedroom. I am standing in the middle of the living room with all of our friends and family, doing the only thing I can think to do, which is shrugging my shoulders and shaking my head. My sister has already made a trip or two back to the bedroom to check on E K and has assured me that she is neither sick, nor has she escaped.

We continue to stand and/or sit, as the case may be, around the living room and stare at one another. Every now and then I would shrug once more and smile nervously. By now my best man, Scott, has punched me in the arm enough times that I am convinced I will be needing to head to the emergency room for an X-ray and cast once the ceremony is over… Got all that? Good, because here goes…

Finally, we heard the bedroom door click and swing open. A hush fell, almost like it would in an actual chapel. It must be something to do with “Bride Radar” or some such, you got me, all I know is it got real quiet, real fast… Anyway, from my vantage point I can see down the hallway and slowly, but surely, an absolute vision comes into view. E K was beyond stunning and my breath literally caught in my chest. However, since I realize full well that during this series I have gone on and on and on about how gorgeous  my wife is, in my eyes at the very least, I’ll try to refrain from doing so for a minute or two.

E K smiled and began walking toward me. I smiled back at her, and as she stepped into the living room her heels clacked across the hardwood floor, sharp and obvious in the hush that still gripped those in attendance. She glanced around at everyone and said in a shy voice, “Sorry… I guess we’re ready now.” I stepped quickly to the “altar,” (as seen in the first picture up top, the “altar” was the yet unfinished window at the South end of the living room.)

My plan, of course, was to wait for my lovely bride to make her complete entrance and allow her to be the center of attention for a moment, just like it is supposed to happen at a wedding. She picked up on the cue and ventured farther into the room as she walked slowly toward me.

I continued smiling at her, but noticed that her own smile was quickly fading. In fact, her eyes had grown wide and her face had begun to twist into a look of surprise, fear, consternation, concern, calculating thought, and about twelve other similar expressions… And, these bizarre looks were being displayed all at once. Without missing a single, dainty step, as if perfectly choreographed, she turned smoothly on her heel and continued her march in the complete opposite direction, making a sharp right turn into the hallway from whence she had come, as she called over her shoulder, “I’ll be right back.”

A pair of seconds later we heard the bedroom door open, and then quickly shut. We all looked around the room at one another, totally dumbfounded. This was the last thing anyone had expected, and it once again had me wondering if E K was trying to claw her way out the back window in a bid to seek freedom. Of course, customarily the groom is the one to get cold feet, but since we had already been setting a precedent throughout our entire relationship for re-enacting scenes from movies that hadn’t even been made yet, there was always the chance that this incident was going to be plucked from our lives and inserted into Runaway Bride.

For a moment, I considered sending my sister back to the bedroom with a bottle of scotch  and a tumbler. My hope was that a shot or two would bolster my maybe-soon-to-be-wife’s courage, but before I could set that plan into motion, Kathy reappeared, her smile now beaming as she once again muttered a quick “sorry about that,” and made her way through the assemblage to stand by my side.

It wasn’t until we were preparing for bed later that evening… Yes, later that evening… Not night, not the next morning, that evening… Trust me, we’ll get to the “why” in relation to that in just a bit. Anyway, it wasn’t until then that I found out what that whole little back and forth dance was all about. And, I only found out because my bride suddenly announced to me that she had lost all feeling in her legs…

You see, it’s like this… While me not having a suit was a major screw up…  I readily admit that… It seems I wasn’t the only one who was misfiring in the grey matter department. E K… Yes, E K, had screwed up too. When she purchased the stockings to go with her dress, she had thought she picked up a pair of thigh-highs, when in fact she had picked up stockings. As in stockings that require a garter belt. A garter belt which was still packed away in a box in the basement, because we had only just moved in and were woefully behind in unpacking due to the remodeling activities. So, even if she had asked me to retrieve the lacy accoutrement for her, I probably wouldn’t have been able to actually locate it amidst the boxes until sometime during the spring of 1994, which obviously would have been just a tad bit late. She knew this… Remember, like I said before, she’s a smart cookie…

So, in a MacGyverish gambit, she had attempted to make the sheer fabric stay in place with a bit of  cellophane tape… Unfortunately, by the time she made it less than a half dozen steps into the living room, the stockings began to fall, hence the sudden horrified look upon her face.

But, why had she lost the feeling in her legs? Well, here’s the thing… Her own personal lightning fast calculations in the face of an impending crisis had led her to the only solution available within the confines of the bedroom, and time allotted upon her hasty retreat… For the entire evening she had been holding up her stockings with heavy duty rubber bands wrapped around her thighs… Now, that’s what I call commitment to a cause, for you see, I happen to know my bride had other actual thigh high stockings in the bedroom. I know this because she used to buy Leggs stockings mail-order by the dozen. Now, I doubt if she had any that were white, although she may have. I don’t actually make a habit of inventorying my wife’s undergarments.  That would just be… Well… Weird… Harmless, but weird… Anyway,  my point here is that I’m willing to bet there were some in “nude,” or some other hosiery shade that would have worked just fine with her dress.

But of course, that’s my E K for you… Once she sets her mind to something you best stay out of her way, because she is going to see it through come hell, high water… Or even sagging stockings…

But, as I said, this little tidbit of information came to my attention much later in the evening… I’m afraid this story isn’t over quite yet…

More to come…

Murv

… NEXT: Mahwage: Trick Or Treat!