BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Allow me to quell your fears. This blog entry isn’t about what your dirty little minds think it’s about.  So there.

 Now, on with the story…

It was a weekend just like any other weekend, with the exception perhaps that it was Fourth of July weekend. However, since July 4th has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on this tale, we’ll stick with, “It was a weekend just like any other weekend.” All good? Terrific…

On this particular weekend like any other weekend I had been doing elebenty-gazillion loads of laundry just like any other weekend. However, I was finished with laundry, so I don’t guess it has any real bearing either, other than the fact that I had “specially washed” one of the O-springs garments sans fabric softener because she was on a mission to dye it a different color. Of course, what with the spring being a little to the young side for handling stuff like dye and hot water without dying the whole room, adult supervision was needed.

For the record, E K has me doing the laundry, but I don’t dye. Allowing me to dye something would be tantamount to allowing the o-spring to dye something without supervision.

Anywho… On this particular weekend we had also purchased a new computer for E K. Super fast, loaded with memory, storage, and all housed in a black case to match her shoes and leather wear. E K likes to coordinate, you see. Therefore, we were in the office. I was busily doing whatever it is that writers do when they are working on 57 projects at once. E K was playing Speed Sudoku… Or HALO 17: The Leather-Clad Bitch Edition… Or  hacking NORAD… Or maybe it was paying bills and checking her Facebook profile. I never can keep any of that straight. Either way, we were engaged in office type computer activities, and the spring was watching the toob — that is, right up until her program ended and she had a sudden, powerful desire to dye the aforementioned garment.

No… She didn’t try to do it herself. That would be way too predictable… Come on… You know me better than that…

Acquiescing to the Tween Urgency of the project, E K sent the child on a mission. That being to go into the basement and retrieve the large bucket we use for whatever sorts of things one might require a large bucket. And so, off the o-spring went to “haz a bukkit.”

Two minutes, seventeen seconds elapsed when we suddenly heard a door fly open, followed by a running child – the herd of elephants noise was then followed up by a herd of wildebeests bounding up the stairs toward the office. The louvered doors split, swinging inward with enough force to cause a sonic boom. The silence in the wake of the sound barrier being broken was quickly filled with a panting child.

Gasping for breath she yipped, “OhMyGoshIt’sHUGE!!”

I remained silent. I knew better than to get involved.

“The bucket?” E K asked.

“Nothuhbuuug!” Child-o-mine replied.

E K puzzled aloud, “The what?”

Our tween panted some more, then gulped in some air and yelped, “There’sAGiantBugDownThere!”

E K found this to be funny. So did I. But that’s not the funny part I’m here to tell you about.

So… E K says to the spring, “How big is this bug?”

“OMGIT’SHUGE!” the kid replies.

“Really?” E K says.

“YES!” the wild-eyed child tells her.

“It’s been raining,” the redhead explained. “It’s probably just a water bug.”

You see, our basement is an unfinished, leaky, storage/laundry hole in the ground. Whenever it rains, we get water, and maybe even some water bugs.

Now, as we know, for E K this isn’t a really huge issue. If it’s a bug she likes, she picks it up and moves it to a safe, out-of-the way, natural habitat sort of location, and then threatens anyone in the general vicinity with death if they even look like they might be intent on harming the insect. However, if it is a bug she doesn’t like it still really isn’t a problem – and she does, in fact, have a list of bugs she doesn’t like. It’s a short one, but it’s a list nonetheless.  Either way, in the event of the bug being on her hit list, she just puts on her patent leather cockroach killers and goes to work with a wicked gleam in her eyes and a smile on her lips. It’s pretty much the same as how she deals with men, except that as a rule, when it comes to men instead of insects, I’ve never seen her set one free, move him to safety, nor protect him from harm. Quite the opposite, actually… But I digress. This is about actual insects, not figurative ones.

The o-spring, however, hates ALL bugs. She fears ALL bugs. She would be perfectly happy for ALL bugs to be eradicated from the face of the planet. Hence the fact that she was now standing in the office hyperventilating.

But back to the dialogue…

“IT’SHuuuuuuuuuggggggeeeee!” the child repeated, not really placated by EKay’s explanation for its presence in the basement.

“Did you see it on the floor or on the stairs?” EKay asked.

“Onthefloor!” the short person replied.

The redhead shrugged and said, “Okay, well the bucket is on the shelf right at the bottom of the stairs.”

O-spring returned, “IknowIWasDownThere!”

“Well… Did you get the bucket?” E K asked.

The child thought for a second, then with the first inkling of calm she had shown since hurtling up the stairs, she delivered the punch line: “Wellllll… I SAW the bucket…”

Fifteen minutes later we held a funeral for the water bug. After we scraped him off the sole of EKay’s pump, of course. What with him being a water bug and all we flushed him. Seemed fitting.

After all that you have to wonder if he “Saw The Bucket” too… I’m thinking he probably did. Right before he kicked it.

More to come…

Murv

Something people like to ask me is whether or not I have ever killed someone off  in a story. Well, since I write suspense thrillers about serial killers one would think that I could just look at them and say, “Duh.”

Well, sometimes I do, actually.

Then they go on to explain that what they really mean is, “Have you ever put a real person into a story and killed them off in the story because you were mad at them or something?”

Then I look at them and say, “What? Are you some kind of sicko or something?”

After I spend a few minutes watching them get all flustered I let them off the hook and give them a real answer.

That being, “Yes. Of course.”

I have made real live annoyances in my life into characters, then had them meet an ugly demise. This is something that every fiction author on the planet who writes a murder mystery, suspense thriller, or the like has done at one time or another. If such an author tells you otherwise, s/he is lying. Guaranteed. They can tell you I am full of it if they want, but they are still lying. I take a dump every morning.

Hell, just look at the facts – they even have coffee cups and t-shirts that say, “Be careful or I’ll kill you in my next book.”

Those didn’t happen by themselves, let me tell you.

So, yes, over the years I – like most all of my word slinging colleagues (some of them write non-fic) – have named fictional victims in my novels after old girlfriends… I have named them after the idiot behind the counter at the local shop ‘n stop… I have named them after someone who did me wrong… And then I have offed them in some horribly gruesome and terribly painful fashion – all on the pages of a novel.

It’s one of those cathartic writing exercises. It makes you feel good and just a little evil at the same time.

However, one particular “story killin'” stands out in my mind above all others. It actually didn’t happen in a novel. It was in a short vignette I wrote while in High School. You see, I was in a film study class – mostly because it was an English Credit, and I had already taken all of the truly academic English/Lit courses. This is not to say it wasn’t a good class, because it was. I actually learned quite a bit and enjoyed it immensely. But I digress…

During that semester there was this girl seated in the desk next to mine. We’ll call her Janice, mostly because that was her name. Now, Janice wasn’t a horrible person by any stretch. At least, not that I am (or was) aware. She was, however, insanely annoying. You see, she had no desire whatsoever to think for herself, so even in a class so subjective as Film Study, she wanted everyone else to provide her with the answers. Since I was sitting a mere three feet to her left, and was “gettin’ good grades” as Timbuk 3 would say, she figured I was a good candidate for providing them.

In keeping with the song reference theme, she had another issue – Just like Joe Walsh has crooned, “she just would not shut up…”

Yeah, Janice was a talker, and that just made her even more annoying.

So moving right along… One day Janice happened to notice that I didn’t just write for the school newspaper. This happened because I dropped some papers and she got to them before me. My guess is she was probably looking to see if there were answers she could steal. What the papers were, however, were some of my short stories.  For whatever reason, this intrigued her, and she embarked upon a mission to talk me into writing a story that featured, who else, her.

She kept on me, and on me, and on me for more than a week. Every time I saw her in a class. Now, it bears mentioning here that Janice and I weren’t exactly friends, nor were we dating or anything like that. She was just one of those bizarre folk who would glom onto someone and drive them crazy just because… well… she could.

Anyway, after finally becoming fed up with the harassment, I gave in. That evening, I went home and rolled a sheet of paper into my trusty Smith-Corona manual typewriter (yes, I’m old) and proceeded to tap out a 2 or 3 page vignette featuring none other than Janice herself. It was a sci-fi sort of setting, with her being a high level operative of some government organization who had been captured by very bad people – but in a stroke of blonde genius (yes, Janice was blonde and a poster child for the negative stereotype) she had managed to subdue her immediate captors and was making her escape from the maximum security facility where she was being held for interrogation. (wow… that was a long sentence)…

Anyhow, as I am sure you have guessed, she didn’t make it. It was a sad and horrible death. Not overly gruesome. Just the right amount of gore, mixed with pain, and a healthy dose of “holy shit, I should have turned left instead of right.”

The next day, in Film Study class, as we were taking our seats and she was bugging me, I handed over the pages. Ten minutes later, as we were all sitting quietly, working on our assignments, she blurted out while waving the papers wildly, “WHAT? YOU KILLED ME?!”

Now, there is something else I should mention here – Our teacher, whose desk was nearby, had been hearing Janice annoy me about this story for the entire week prior. In fact, the teacher had even told her to lay off on several occasions, not that it really did any good, obviously.

So, as Janice belted out her umbrage over my having dared to do her in on the page, drawing quiet attention from every corner of the room, the teacher looked up from her desk and without missing a beat said, “Can you blame him? You’ve been annoying the poor guy all semester.”

Hmm… I think maybe I should name a victim Janice in a future novel. After all, that’s one of the great things about being a fiction author – you can always dig  up your enemies and kill ’em again…

More to come…

Murv