BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Literally.

Why would I lie about something like that?

… And yes, I do realize that right now you are all sitting there chanting, “Murv’s gonna get it… Murv’s gonna get it…”

Normally, I would agree with you, but go back to the beginning and read again what I wrote… I’m fairly certain I typed in the word, literally. As in, E K is a literal pain in my ass. Not figurative. Not metaphorical. Nope. None of that dancing about and implied torture. No husbandly lamenting about a wife’s wifeliness. We are talking about the real deal here…

I mean to say, the woman literally caused pain and physical damage to my Gluteus Maximus.

Uh-huh… I know… Now all of you are sitting there saying, “So what? You’re talking about E K. Since you say she’s so evil then she probably just tied you up and spanked you or something like that. Big deal. Just roll with it you big baby.” (On that note – The cartoon on the right is just for you “perverted types,” BTW… )

Well, though it is apparently titillating for all of you to imagine such a scenario, otherwise you probably wouldn’t be imagining it… Hey…. Hey! Yeah, you. Stop staring at the cartoon and pay attention.

Okay… so where was I? Oh yeah… As I was saying, such graphic details might be a little too much info for a relatively PG rated blog like Brainpan Leakage… And, for the record, I am now firmly convinced that y’all have dirtier minds than I do… Especially you… Yeah, you in the back row. The one that keeps staring and drooling at the cartoon… It’s a friggin’  PG rated cartoon for Gods sake… Sheesh… For shame… For shame…

So, anyway, let’s set the record straight right here and now… E K did not spank me. Well… Not in this particular case anyway. (There, did that little bit of innuendo satisfy your prurient curiosity, or just pique it? Yeah… I thought as much, ya’ bunch of sickos… When you’re all done drooling over the silly cartoon, we can continue…)

(Jeopardy thinking music)

Okay, are we all done? Finally… Good…

So now that we’ve dispensed with the mental foreplay, we’ll move on already…

We’ve established that no spankings were had. The simple fact is that this is an entirely different kind of literal pain in the ass. And, it is also one that reaches far back into history. So, since the whole nostalgia approach of the “marriage blog” mini-series seemed to go over so well, I figured y’all might like to hear this story too. So, let’s all jump into the wayback machine and have a look at this particular, and annoyingly painful, slice of my past… (Yeah, you too… Yeah you… I don’t care… You can page back up and look at the cartoon again when we’ve finished the story… Sheesh… You don’t get out much, do you?)

Okay… On with the sordid tale…

The year was nineteen and eighty six…  E K and I had met by this point, and were more or less in the midst of doing that coy, flirty thing that accompanies the first three months of dating. You know what I mean…

For men it’s crap like: Getting a haircut. Making sure your shirt isn’t wrinkled. Actually tying your necktie in a Full Windsor instead of a Half, but only after making doubly sure it actually matches your shirt and slacks. Using aftershave and maybe even a bit of cologne… Holding your farts in until you are in the next county and downwind so that the object of your affection will never know…

For women it’s crap like: Shaving your legs regularly. Wearing a shorter skirt and higher heels than you normally would on your average workday.  A push up bra. Fancy jewelry… Holding your farts in until you are in the next county and downwind so that the object of your affection will never know…

Y’all know the drill… Typical, flirty – datey stuff.

On the particular day in question, E K arrived at our place of employment, all decked out in a nice blouse, blazer, shape hugging slacks, and the high heels that were a bit too high for your average work day… The pumps were a dead giveaway that she was being flirty, because:

1. She had service calls to take and was going to be on her feet, digging around behind printers, kneeling, bending over, and all of the other gyrations that come along with taking a service call. (For the record, it’s actually pretty good exercise.)
2. She had VERY RECENTLY uncovered my particular affinity for shapely female legs and high heels. (It bears mentioning that being the absolutely brilliant femme fatale she is, The Evil Redhead has used this information to her benefit on countless occasions, ever since making the discovery.)

The only thing missing from the overall package was the shorter than normal skirt, but see #1. She had to compromise somewhere along the line, and like I said, the slacks were definitely figure flattering…

Okay… I need some alone time now…

Just kidding. Well, not really, but I have too much to do and I need to finish this story…

In keeping with the flirty stuff, E K had some tasteful jewelry on to accentuate here and there. Of course, being incredibly practical as well, one of the jewelry items was a fancy little diskette lapel pin. I mean, after all, she’s a technician, so she needed to have herself some technician jewelry, right? And, yes, the picture here is of the actual pin in question. As amazing as it may seem, she still has it after all these years. Granted, it may look a bit odd to you youngsters who have never seen a 5 1/4 inch floppy diskette in real life, but that is exactly what it was patterned after. BTW, Sorcim / IUS was a software company. They were the “publisher” of a widely used, DOS Based program called SuperCalc. If I remember correctly, the lapel pin itself was a gimme type perk she received for attending a Sorcim seminar.

So, anyway, enough rambling on about ancient technology being transformed into jewelry. Let’s get back to this particular day in history…

E Kay’s truck… Yes, my dear and lovely used to drive a truck…  Anyway, her truck was going to be in the shop for some routine maintenance, which effectively left her without wheels, but she still needed to take service calls. Unfortunately, the outfit we were working for at the time, TC Service, didn’t have company vehicles for us to use. So, in order that my lovely be able to take her scheduled service calls, I loaned her my car. As it happened, said vehicle was the Mustang LX I was desperately trying to pay off… Yeah, that’s one of those, “another stories,” but if you read the “Mahwage” series of entries, you know what I mean.

So, after a bit of flirting and lustful stirrings brought about by E K in high heels purposely reaching for things behind her desk while standing in front of it, if you know what I’m saying, I sent her on the road with parts, tools, and my car. After that, the day continued in a relatively uneventful fashion. I configured a few Leading Edge PC’s, fixed a printer or two, answered some tech support calls… The usual crap… The Evil One completed her service calls and returned, both she and my car completely unscathed. Life was good.

As it happened, that evening was filled with “other obligations,” so E K and I were not going to be able to spend it together. Not exactly the best situation, given the fact that she had purposely lit my fuse, so to speak, but hey, stuff happens. Of course, we did the flirty-flirty thing through the afternoon, and retrieved her truck from the shop, then when quitting time rolled around, stole a few kisses before going our separate directions for the evening.

I hopped into my car, and at a point somewhere around halfway home, I felt a very sudden, very sharp, very intense pain in my right butt cheek. If I remember correctly, I even let out a yelp.  It was reminiscent of being nailed by a bee. Since it happened to be late summer, I assumed this was a real possibility.  Something else I considered was a cherry from a cigarette. At the time I was a smoker, so I had to wonder if I had inadvertently knocked the fire from the end of a smoke while shifting gears or some such.

Well, of course, I reached down and felt about in the seat while hiking myself up onto my left hip and dancing around in a circle, all while trying to keep the car in between the dashed lines dividing the lanes on I-170. However, no matter how much feeling about in the seat, or on my own ass I did, I found nothing.

Still, the pain continued.

Well… I have to admit, I have a fairly high pain tolerance. I’m not at all sure from whence it originates, but I can actually take a lot of abuse… Just ask E K… But, let’s not go there again… Seriously, though, I really do have a fairly high tolerance for pain, so since I couldn’t find the source I decided my best bet was to just ignore it. Besides, at this point, the initial shock of the pain was fading and it had settled down to a dull ache. The ache was making its way into the background as well, so I figured I’d be all good. Eventually, it would just go away.

And it did. For the most part, anyway. I mean, there remained a minor ache and soreness throughout the rest of the evening, but nothing anywhere near as intense as the initial stab of pain.

Life rocked on, I met my various obligations, and even had a quick chat or two with E K on the phone, just because I couldn’t stand to be away from her for more than an hour at a stretch unless I was unconscious. The evening grew late and eventually it was time to hit the sack. Following my regular routine, I emptied my pockets, then started getting undressed so I could go to bed. About the time I undid my pants and went to pull them off, I discovered that they seemed to be hung up somewhere around the right side of my ass. As in, they wouldn’t come off. At about the exact instant I started to tug on them a bit, the pain that had earlier ravaged my butt cheek exploded forth once more.

Now I was hopping about on one leg, cussing, and about to trip over my half-removed britches. Fearing that I was going to perform a flawless face plant on the floor, I twisted around and perched myself on the corner of my waterbed side rails, and rolled up onto my left hip. Reaching back and feeling around, through the fabric of the pants, my fingers now came into contact with a small lump on my rear, right about where my wallet had been residing earlier. Perplexed, I slipped my hand into my hip pocket and felt around some more. Within seconds I had hold of the offending object and pulled, much like the whole mouse yanking the thorn out of the lion’s paw scenario. Except, it was just me doing the yanking, and the paw in this case was my ass.

When I brought my hand up into the light, besides a bit of blood, I also found a gold, diskette shaped, lapel pin pinched between my fingers.

The next morning, when E K strolled into work, I waited for her to park herself at her desk, which was nearby and facing mine. After exchanging some flirty good mornings, I raised an eyebrow and asked, “So, were you trying to make sure I didn’t forget you last night?”

She furrowed her brow and cocked her head to the side. “What do you mean?”

I pushed back from my desk, stood, took the few steps in her direction, and then dropped the lapel pin on the desk blotter in front of her.

“Oh, I was wondering where I lost that!” she exclaimed. “Where did you find it?”

I shook my head. “You probably don’t want to know.”

I did eventually tell her, of course. A few minutes later, in fact. However, looking back on it now, that was probably a mistake in and of itself. You see,  it was at that point in our relationship that she became aware of my higher than normal tolerance for pain, and she has been trying to find my breaking point ever since…

But seriously… All joking and silliness aside, I think you can now see why I can truthfully say that, “E K is a real pain in my ass…”

More to come…

Murv

Part 3 of 12

Continued from: Mahwage: Love At First Sight…

When last we left our intrepid blogger, he had fallen hard for an evil femme fatale, and was perilously close to being…

Oh, sorry… I sometimes have a flair for the dramatic and all… Part of that whole writer thing…So anyway, where was I? Oh yes…

And there I was… Hopelessly – and secretly – in love with this woman everyone had told me would chew me up, spit me out, and then grind her heels into my corpse just for spite while cackling madly and spitting on me for good measure –  All for no other reason than she was just that kind of psychobitch. And, to add even more insult to injury,  she would also cut out my liver and kidneys with a rusty letter opener just so she could cook them up and feed them to her cats.

These folks really and truly did have a bizarre view of this woman.

To this day, I’m still not entirely sure what she did to make these people, especially the men, be so damned afraid of her. All I can say is that if  it was because she did in fact tap-dance on someone’s head around there, (figuratively or literally, either one), that person most assuredly deserved it. Believe me, I worked with them and I had my own daydream moments about some of these individuals falling off a cliff,  simply disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle, or some other such demise, and not all of them were as bloodless as those I listed…

Besides, look at that picture… How could anyone think such horrible things about this woman? Yeah, okay, well admittedly there is a bit of a “dominatrixish” gleam in her eyes… Well, more than a bit, actually…more like a whole bunch… But, that’s okay.  I’ll admit to being afflicted with Joss Whedon Syndrome (JWS), meaning I happen to love strong female archetypes. However, some folks – men and women alike – find strong women intimidating, so maybe that was their issue. (shrug). Or, they could have just been assholes like I said at the outset, which is probably the more likely explanation in my opinion…

But rather than go there, let’s move on. Actually, this is the point where we sort of hit the Fast Forward / Scan button on the story. All manner of things happened in the weeks that followed, but they are a bit of a drudgery in many respects and a bit too personal to blog about in others. So, in order to get from point A to point B, I’ll toss in an abbreviated sort of synopsis here.

Begin story compression:

Due to an oversight, it seemed that a tech position actually was open with the company, but had not been advertised, nor had the management of the store responsible for doing the hiring been told. This was rectified when the district manager came through town for a visit. Of course, I waved my flag and upon proving my claim was immediately transferred to the tech center (my heart went pitter-pat for more than one reason at this point, let me tell you)… Unfortunately, the district manager didn’t consult E K about this change to her staff and since she was the “tech management” she wasn’t terribly happy about that fact. Soooo, I was pretty much viewed as an enemy my first couple of weeks there. In fact, I was even interrogated by her with condescending questions like, “Do you know how to do x y z?” Invariably, x y z was always something ridiculously simple,to me, at least, and something I had been doing for 10 years longer than anyone else on staff: things like soldering components, swapping motherboards, aligning disk drives, etc… Rather than take true offense, I would simply answer in the affirmative then set about proving myself by completing the task perfectly and in record time. (No, I’m not bragging here… just telling it like it was. You see, while I had years of experience, Kathy, Erin, and Phil, all three, were recent graduates of the electronics program from the local community college. Although they had degrees not a one of them had even a full year under their belt in the real world of electronics repair.  The truth was they were  all green enough to stick in the ground and sprout roots. I was a veteran tech, and to a large degree found this whole scenario amusing beyond belief…)

Of course, Kathy’s condescension really didn’t matter at that point because I had no other choice but to worship her from afar anyway, because you see, it turned out she was married. My heart sank upon that discovery, however, I contented myself with spending 8 hours out of each workday in the same zip code with her and reveled in the opportunities I had to converse with her too. What I didn’t realize at the time was that her marriage was already dashed upon the rocky shores, and that for all intents and purposes it was really all over except the paperwork.

Eventually I endeared myself to my co-workers. They came to realize I had experience in the field and developed a true respect for my skills as a tech, so it wasn’t unusual for me to fix something, then find whatever one of the other techs had been working on positioned on my desk so that I could fix it too. I became the go to guy… Kathy, being the manager, would spend most of her time doing paperwork, but did check up on us regularly… That was always interesting, because trust me, this young lady made it very hard to concentrate when “inspection time” rolled around. You see, she would observe from a close vantage point… and I mean close. More than enough to be ah… um… shall we say… a distraction. This often left me parked at my bench for a bit after she returned to her office, whether I had completed the repair or not. (yeah, I know, that was just the lust talking… but hey, love and lust go hand in hand at times…)

Still, I continued to work there and secretly worship her. I didn’t have a shrine in my home or anything like that, nor did I stalk her. I’m not insane… Well, at least I wasn’t back then… But, I did think about her quite a bit, and I’m willing to admit I allowed my imagination to run wild on several occasions. But that is for me to know and you to, well… not know.

Speaking of imagination running wild, in one of those “what was happening on this day in history” sort of veins, Wildest Dreams by The Moody Blues was in the Top 20 on the airwaves at that time… Kathy despised it, primarily because it was overplayed. Me, I reveled in it, but for reasons not yet revealed to her. Every time it came on she would wonder aloud why I liked it so much. I just smiled and went about my business of daydreaming…

Then, a fateful day came… The VP of ComputerTrend showed up at the tech center. Kathy happened to be out of the office on a service call, and at this particular juncture Erin and Phil had both been laid off. It was just E K and me handling the repairs. Well, we had seen the writing on the wall when the layoffs happened, so I wasn’t surprised when the VP announced that the whole company had filed Chapter 13, was going under, see ya’ later, good luck, now get the f*ck out… Having read the earlier writing, I had already been trolling for another job and luck had been on my side for some odd reason. Within a week I was again gainfully employed, this time as the service manager for a new computer company opening up in the Brentwood area of the county. One of my first acts as the service manager was to hire a staff. I called Kathy immediately and offered her a job as a technician. She accepted and now the tables had turned. She was no longer my boss, I was hers… or so I thought.

End story compression…

Yeah, no kidding… believe it or not, that was abbreviated…

It was while working with T C Service (Total Computer Service, in it’s first incarnation as a side company to a T C B C computer store… I mention this only because I believe T C Service still exists, but I know for a fact it was sold shortly after I quit, and that was less than a year after I started… yeah, another story entirely)… Anyway, it was while working overtime one night for T C Service that Kathy finally announced to me that her marriage was all but done, and would be done soon enough if all went well with paperwork, lawyers and such, and that she had developed more than a passing interest in taking our friendship beyond the platonic stage. We were the only two souls in the place that evening, and all was quiet when she rolled her chair over to my desk and offered up this bit of news in a soft, mellifluous tone.

Yes… Once again my knees were like Jello and my feet like wet bags of cement, even though I was sitting down at the time. I’m surprised my heart didn’t explode straight out of my chest, especially when she leaned forward and proceeded to give me a thorough tonsil examination to validate her statement. But, before you get the wrong idea, no clothes flew off, and no one found a bra or a sock hanging from a monitor or workbench the next day.  It  literally didn’t go any farther than a few passionate kisses… well, not for a while anyway.

Since her marriage was in the process of dissolution, (a process that took longer than expected as you will discover in a later installment), we began to date. At this particular juncture she still didn’t know all that much about my financial situation. Probably because I wasn’t one to discuss this sort of thing. I suppose it was just how I was brought up. Your business is your business and other people’s business is their business, so keep it that way.  Suffice it to say, I was still deep in debt, behind in my payments, and my salary still wasn’t what it had once been: meaning, I was falling farther and farther behind money-wise.

However, I felt a deep need to impress this woman. In all honesty I saw this as a last chance. You see, I had been in love once before and that particular young woman had broken my heart. Yeah, that happens to guys too. In fact, to quote Steve Martin from Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, “All dames are alike: they reach down your throat and they can grab your heart, pull it out and they throw it on the floor, step on it with their high heels, spit on it, shove it in the oven and cook the shit out of it. Then they slice it into little pieces, slam it on a hunk of toast, and serve it to you and then expect you to say, ‘Thanks, honey, it was delicious.'”

That was pretty much what happened to me on the first go around, and it was exactly what I feared would happen with E K if I allowed her to know how I truly felt. But I forced myself to take the chance… And like I said, I was going to do whatever it took to impress her, wine her, dine her, and capture her heart so that there wouldn’t be a repeat of what I’d dealt with before. Well, I couldn’t really afford to wine and dine her. I couldn’t afford to do the things for her I felt she deserved. I simply didn’t have the money.

But, I did have plastic, and she didn’t know that I didn’t have the money to back it up…

So, one Saturday, bright and early I picked her up. We had already planned to spend the day together, but hadn’t really made any actual “concrete plans” about what we would be doing, other than simply hanging out with one another. At least, that is what she thought. You see, I had a plan and it was definitely being set into motion… I had heard her mention a few days before that she really wanted to get her hair trimmed and spiral permed, so I decided if that was what she wanted, then that was what she would have.  I  drove us to the mall and waltzed her into a local salon, arranged an appointment, then waited patiently as they pampered her and spent a couple of hours on her coif. Once finished, I walked her over to the nearby Dillard’s where we did our own version of a scene from Pretty Woman, (well in advance of the actual movie I might add), and eventually walked out with a gorgeous red dress. Of course, this also meant a trip to the hosiery store around the corner for stockings, a side trip to Frederick’s for pretty underthings, and was rounded out by a visit to a shoe store as well: because what good is a new dress without new shoes to match, correct? And then that evening we went to a very nice, very expensive dinner… (Yes,  the photo above of E K assuming a Marlene Dietrich-esque pose was taken that evening, and she is wearing the very ensemble I just described… as  she also is in the come hither-esque photo at the top…)

I think I ended up dropping better than 500  bucks that day. Money I didn’t have, and couldn’t afford to rack up on my credit cards. But, when all was said and done Kathy felt like a princess and that was what I wanted for her. Of course, it was a gamble that nearly backfired when she found out how far in debt I was, and that I was struggling to dig myself out, but that I had spent all that money anyway (she is a very frugal individual)… Fortunately, luck was somehow on my side and she didn’t immediately dump me… She did, however take a pair of scissors hold of the plastic in my wallet lest I be tempted to repeat my silly behavior…

On a musical note yet again, by now there was another song riding the airwaves in the top echelon of hits. This time, my future bride actually liked it, overplayed as it was. I did too. Pete Cetera, undisputed master of the make out song and former front man for Chicago, was crooning “Glory of Love“, the theme from Karate Kid II which was one of the hot movies that summer. As sappy and sentimental as it sounds, then and now, that tune became the proverbial “our song” that set a tone for our future.

(On a side note – since I often refer to E K as the evil redhead, I should point out that indoor pictures rarely showed the hidden auburn in her hair.  As you can see above it simply appears brown… These days, however, her deeper red comes from the  “Clairol Spell” which I cast upon her tresses, by her request, at 6 week intervals.  And, just so you know, I have her permission to reveal that fact.)

So, anyway…

After a few months things at T C Service were taking a turn for the not so good. Mainly, the owner wasn’t on the same page as the rest of us who were living in the real world. So, serendipitously, E K and I became aware of a computer cabling company that was looking to get into the computer repair business as well. They had the money to back it, they just needed someone with the know how to run it.  We had a meeting with them and within weeks we said our goodbye’s to the craziness at T C Service and launched, MicroFix, Inc…

About this time, Kathy and I had just rented one side of a duplex here in the burbs in the shadow of an old radar tower known to locals as, “the golf ball,” and finally moved in together.  Just us, her three cats, and some secondhand furniture. Yeah, cohabitation.  The whole living in sin thing… But, by the same token, the location of MicroFix happened to be very close by, which made for a quick trip to and from work. I know, lame excuse… especially since we shared a bed, not just an apartment…

So, back to the cohabitation thing… Well, there were the obvious fringe benefits. Things like being able to see one another without burning any gas, or driving home late at night and getting only a couple of hours of sleep before having to get up and go to work again… Life was good.

It was sometime within those first few months dwelling in that duplex that I took her hands in mine and asked a very serious question…

More to come…

Murv

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