BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

LOLcats seem to have all the answers. They can tell you if you are doing whatever it is you are doing, correctly, or as they like to say, “rite”.

Of course, they will also gladly inform you if you are doing it incorrectly, or also as they like to say, wrong… Amazingly enough, for being such atrocious spellers on the whole, they actually get that last one correct. Well, you know what they say about blind pigs and truffles… Maybe that applies to cats and “cheezburgers” too.

Anyway, since those little bastages apparently have the scoop on everything, I suppose that is why I am paying homage to them in the picture above. I mean, after all, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery… Hold on a second while I go barf up a hairball in my wife’s new shoes. That should flatter the hell out of the little “cheezburger nom nom nommers“… I just have to decide which pair I should toss the yak into…

Stunning visual there, eh?

Of course, as usual, I’m not here to talk to you about LOLcats, “cheezburgers” and who can “haz” them, or even my wife’s shoes, although I have to admit, E K has some really great shoes… And what with me being a leg guy and all… I’m just sayin‘…

Okay, fine… Y’all are really putting a crimp in my fun, you know… So anyway, what I am really here to prattle on about is blogging.

You see, ever since moving my blog from Myspace and setting it up over here on this self-hosted WordPress platform, I have been tracking little things like page views, subscriptions, and the like. Why? Because I can, I guess… But mainly, I just do it for fun… Really. I’m certainly not out to set any Google page rank records or anything… (Yeah, that whole page rank thing is going to show up in another blog… Trust me… I already wrote it and queued it up, so be on the lookout.) However, moving on with the current ramble, throughout this process I have been doing some studying… Or, as we like to call it back home in Kentucky, studyin’. And, because of all that studyin’ I’ve been uh-doin’, I have now added some new material to my reading list…

Unfortunately, it’s not the “reading for pleasure” kind of material…

Being an author, besides my research and such, I tend to read articles about marketing. Yeah, that’s why I sometimes refer to myself as a marketing whore… It’s all just part of being an author type person… Especially a fiction author… The publisher does quite a bit, but there’s still a whole stack of marketing that falls in the lap of the person who slung the words in the first place. In fact, the old adage is that an author’s job “begins the moment he or she types The End.” (Actually, we don’t type, The End... We type -30- or # # #, but that’s another story).

Be that as it may, I won’t go there, because we’ve already traveled this particular dark and rut-filled road in the past. I will, however, point out that the new material I added to my reading list had to do with, yes, marketing… Specifically, effectively using your blog for marketing.

And, as you can see in the picture up top, based on what I learned from everything I’ve read, I’m “doin it wrong.”

Apparently, I am supposed to be blogging solely about things such as writing, current events as they pertain to my writing, and more importantly, I am supposed to be handing out all kinds of helpful advice and crap about… Yeah, you guessed it, writing. But, I am supposed to do all of this without writing about myself, in any way, shape, or form, or reveal the fact that I am a writer by trade, other than to casually mention that I am in fact the author of said blog. But not of books… Just the blog… And only casually… That’s it. Nothing more.

However, if I really, really want to be impressive to the masses, what would make me an even more effective and popular blogger would be if I was some kind of Perez Hilton/TMZ clone, and I blogged about stupid things that celebrities do. Unfortunately, I generally don’t give a flying rat’s ass about “celebrities”… Megan Gallagher, well, she’d be the exception, but we won’t go there…

So… According to the “experts” it’s either that, or posting naked pictures in my blogs. That’d work too…

Well… I don’t wanna do any of that… Maybe the nekkid pictures… Yeah, okay, different blog… At any rate, one of my old bosses used to say, “An expert is a spurt that couldn’t cut it and had to quit.” There are all kinds of places we could go with that, but again, we won’t go there… Suffice it to say, being an expert really doesn’t mean all that much in the grand scheme of things.

But, seriously… There are all manner of do’s and don’ts to this blogging stuff. I’m actually starting to wish someone had supplied me with a manual up front, then I would have known I was breaking the rules right from the outset.

On that note, I have to say, I’m fairly amused by some of the lists I’ve read. You know, the “50 Tips For Better Blogging” type of lists. My favorites go something like this:

1. Don’t post blogs on weekends.
2. Don’t write about yourself.
3. Put links in your blog.
4. Post on weekdays.
5. Post on weekends because no one else posts on weekends.
6. Put pictures in your blog.
7. Write about yourself.
8. Write about your dog.
9. Don’t post on weekdays, no one will have time to read the post.
10. Don’t put links in your blog.
11. Don’t clutter up your blog with pictures. Text only.
12. Write an interconnected series.
13. Never write a series. Only short, 2 or 3 paragraph standalone blogs.
14. …

… And on from there. Telling you to do this, don’t do that, and contradicting themselves at every turn… Almost always within the same list. I honestly believe that some of these “helpful hints” have to have been posted as tongue in cheek silliness just to see if anyone would follow the “rules”. Either that, or the creator of the list has a debilitating hippocampus injury and cannot remember what she/he wrote two seconds ago.

But, no matter what, they all agree with the LOLcats. I am doing it wrong… I’m not suppose to be entertaining, I am supposed to be disseminating useful information devoid of any entertainment whatsoever. My blogs have to have a higher purpose… Higher purpose, not special purpose… Just how many times have you seen The Jerk, anyway? Yeah… Figures.

Well, as I’ve said in the past about my novels, sometimes the purpose is just to entertain, and in my estimation, that’s one damn fine purpose, and it ranks right up there with all the rest.

You know… I think I’ll just stop reading those articles and have myself a “cheezburger” instead…

More to come…

Murv

Part 8 of 12

Continued from: Mahwage: The Wedding Suit…

… Actually, in retrospect, the title of this entry, while close, isn’t entirely on the mark. Truth is, it was more along the line of, Swish! Clink! Ping! Clatter! Roll Roll Roll… “Oh Crap!” Clatter! *Plink!* Clatter! *Tink!*  “No No No!” Clank! Rattle… (eerie silence)… All followed by a quietly muttered, “Dammit…”

But let’s not get into a deep analysis of my attack of onomatopoeia just yet. Don’t worry, I promise we’ll get back to it… I mean, given the title of this entry, I really kinda don’t have any choice in the matter…

But first, a picture… Here on the left we have a photo of the happy couple.  Aren’t we cute? E K is gorgeous, just like I said… And me, well, I’m young, no grey to be seen, and  a whole lot thinner than I am today… (I’ve really gotta work on that)…  And check out those Clark Kent goggles… At this stage of the game our official and legal union is right around 4 minutes 27 seconds old. We have not yet had a fight, or even a minor disagreement. No spat of any kind. This is not to say we never have since, or that we hadn’t prior… That would just be untrue.  All couples have “disagree-uments” to one degree or another.  I’ve learned over the past 22+ years, however, that E K always wins… But, every now and then if the planets are aligned just the right way, or wrong way as the case may be, this important little fact slips my mind. And, when it does, I  make the mistake of disagreeing with her. In the grand scheme of things, however, there isn’t anything to worry about. The Evil One immediately points out the error of my ways, puts me back in my place on the end of the leash, and life is once again good…

But, back to the picture above… At 4 minutes 27 seconds into this odyssey, all was bliss. Given that the “not having a suit thing” could have been an even  bigger debacle than it turned out to be, this was reassuring. However, what you cannot see here is that yet another issue had cropped up shortly before this photo was taken, and it was a bit of a speed bump in and of itself. I shall endeavor to explain…

Zero hour was approaching fast. In fact, we were literally at T-Minus 60, or thereabouts. Family and a few friends had arrived a bit earlier to help with the last minute preparations. My sister had pitched in and taken over the final cooking so that I could grab a shower and get dressed. Erin, (remember Erin?) was there setting up the chafing dishes… My dad was assuming his role as unofficial photographer while helping with chairs, tables, and setting up the luminaries E K had made for decorations. Things seemed to be right on track.

My sister, Missy, had finished up with the cooking and was now off in the bedroom helping E K with her hair, since one of Sis’s learned talents happened to be hairdressing. These days she handles video conferencing and support for families of deployed soldiers, and is damn good at it, but that’s one of those “nother blogs”…

I, myself, was being the somewhat typical nervous groom. Not that I had suddenly decided to bolt or anything. Quite to the contrary, I was still coming to terms with the fact that E K had finally said yes, and my jangly nerves were a product of the fact that I figured I would be waking up at any moment and hearing, “No, not right now,” rolling off  of my betrothed’s tongue.

In all honesty, to this day there are still times when I think that is going to happen, but there we go with my personal insecurities again…

So, does anyone remember Service Merchandise? Yeah, I know, that was a rough transition there, but I still haven’t had my coffee quota just yet today, so please bear with me… If you are unfamiliar with them, they are a semi-defunct chain of catalog showrooms. I say semi-defunct because they disappeared around 2002, but from what I just looked up it appears they returned as an online store sometime in 2008. In any event, there used to be a Service Merchandise out at Northwest Plaza (or, N W P). One of their charms was the fact that they sold okay quality jewelry on the cheap. Well, if you haven’t picked up on it throughout this blog series so far, I will remind you here… E K and I were pretty much too broke to pay attention, just like most young couples when they are first starting out. We knew we could have a “ringless” ceremony, but we didn’t want to do that. We were foregoing much of the pomp, circumstance, and religious frou-frou already, what with us both being secular humanists, me with a rich and diverse background in earth/eco-centric religions and Paganism, of course. In fact, we had even written our own secular vows, which her father embellished of his own accord, but I don’t hold that against him. He’s a Baptist minister and he wasn’t about to preform the ceremony without sticking God in there somewhere… I get that. Didn’t care for it, but I get it. So, all was good.

Anyway, back to this ring situation. We were going secular and eschewing much of the “ceremony” associated with a wedding already, but we wanted to retain at least some bit of symbolism, that being the rings. So, since we were  “poor,” so to speak, we had gone to Service Merchandise out at N W P, and purchased a matching set of plain, 10K white gold bands. Not very fancy, but it didn’t matter to us. They were symbolic enough…

(On a side note… Even though I have since presented my bride with a much fuller set of precious gold, replete with a sparkly, ancient rock collection mounted upon it, she still wears that simple band on a regular basis. I still have mine too, but it lives on my key chain. You see, it doesn’t fit over my arthritic knuckles anymore, and while I have a newer, fancier ring that I wear when I get “duded up”, that simple band goes with me everywhere… Yeah, okay, I’ll turn off the sappy faucet before there’s a flood…)

Now, let’s get back around to that hairdo… Why hairdo? Well, you see, while E K was in the bedroom getting even prettier than she already was, (and still is, of course), I was also doing something about my own appearance. In particular, my hair… Y’all who have seen me these days know that I pretty much have a wash and wear, stick it in a ponytail and go, kind of “do”… But, back then, as you can see in the picture, I had 80’s hair. Not “hair band” hair, but just regular old 80’s hair. For you youngsters who don’t remember the 80’s, what that means is, feathered bangs, a love affair with a blow dryer, and a lot of hair product, namely mousse.

So, there I was, standing in the bathroom in front of the mirror. I was already dressed, sans jacket just yet, and was putting the finishing touches on my “do”. Like I said earlier, we were at about T-minus 60 and counting, so things were starting to roll and I wanted to be prepared so that I didn’t screw up any more than I already had… (remember the hangover, not having a suit, etc… Need I say more?) Well, Scott, the 6 foot 6 inch tall cop, best man, yadda yadda, and his wife had not yet arrived, therefore I had not been able to hand over Kat’s ring to him for safekeeping. So, in my desire to not forget to do something as important as that, I was keeping her ring on my own finger… Now, obviously she has petite little hands, so I had it jammed onto my right pinky finger. It was on there pretty good too. In fact, my biggest worry was actually how much skin I was going to lose when I peeled it off to give to Scott prior to the ceremony proper.

Now… Have you ever had anything happen to you in slow motion? You know, some event befalls you and it is as if time has dilated for you, and only for you… You feel disembodied, like you are watching everything from above as no more than an observer. It drags on before your eyes, flowing languidly along, unfolding like a horror that you can do nothing about, until it reaches its final, sometimes near devastating conclusion, and then suddenly life speeds up once again? Yeah, just like Hollywood special effects, but it’s for real…

Well, that’s exactly what happened to me.

I pulled the brush through my hair, then flipped it back forward to make sure the volume of my “do” was just so, and suddenly I was out of body… Watching as…

Swish! Clink! Ping! Clatter! Roll Roll Roll…

In a muffled, slow motion drone I heard myself say, “Oh Crap!”

Clatter! *Plink!* Clatter! *Tink!*  “No No No!” Clank! Rattle Rattle… (eerie silence)…

Time sped back into its normal flow and I returned to my body with an unceremonious plop, only to find that I was now kneeling on the bathroom floor and staring in abject horror at the air conditioning vent. This is right about the time the “Dammit” rolled off my tongue.

The tiny little band that had been wedged so tightly upon my digit had for some unknown reason elected to go on a trip. As I was concentrating on my coif, oblivious to its escape plans, the damn thing had seized the opportunity to eject itself from my finger. Once free it had flown through the air, bounced from the mirror, fallen into the sink, jumped out of the sink, clattered across the top of the vanity, rolled off the edge, plonked off the toilet seat, rolled across the floor, bounced against the wall, jumped up, done a double back flip, followed by a triple Salchow, then executed some other kind of fancy spin, and then did a straight in dive between the slats in the grate that covered the AC vent in the corner, before finally sliding down the duct work and falling silent… All while I groped, grabbed, and stumbled after it. I’m pretty sure I heard the silly round thing laughing at me the entire time too…

On that note, the judges gave the ring a 9.5… I think I got a 2.

This was going to be a problem.

Now remember, I was already nervous, and quite honestly I was still hung over too. So, I have to say I am fairly proud of myself for what I accomplished next. You see, even in my muddled mind angles were now being plotted on imaginary graphs that only I could see, trajectories were being simultaneously calculated, and flight dynamics of gold bands reverse engineered at lightning speed. My brain was ker-chunking like Univac on a mission to save the world. Advanced calculus equations I had labored over when in school suddenly became old hat as I plotted the path of the ring, right down to the millimeter, and within seconds, determined the exact location where it had to have come to rest in the duct work.

With no time to lose I bolted from the bathroom and out to my car… You see, back then I worked as a computer technician, so I was kind of like Paladin. Have tool bag, will travel…

I was keeping this horrible incident to myself, so as yet I had said nothing about what had happened. Fortunately, no one seemed to have heard me cursing  earlier, so everything was good… Or, so I thought. Screwdriver in hand, I raced back into the house, my sights locked on the basement door. However, as with any covert mission, just when you think everything will go without a hitch, the proverbial wrench gets thrown into the works by an insane howler monkey… Well, maybe not an insane howler monkey, but I just really wanted to say that, because I think monkeys are funny. Especially howler monkeys… And rhesus monkeys… And spider monkeys… And… Well, you get the idea…

At any rate, I was three steps from the basement door when I came face to face with my soon-to-be-mother-in-law. My mad dash, combined with my inability to keep the wild-eyed “what the f*ck have I done?!” look off my face had apparently attracted her attention.

“Murv, what’s wrong?” she asked.

I hemmed and hawed for a second. It seems that the clarity I had found during the period of doing advanced mathematical calculations moments before had now fled, leaving me conversationally brain dead. I simply could not think of anything to say other than the horrible truth.

“I dropped Kathy’s ring down the air-conditioning vent,” I mumbled.

At this point, almost-mom-in-law looked at me like I was a complete idiot, and then she said with an unmistakeably admonishing screech in her voice, “Oh, Murv!”

And, yes… For the record, that was when I discovered exactly where E K learned, “the look.” You know, the one that makes you feel about 3 inches tall…

I also believe, with all my heart, that this was probably a defining moment which set the tone for my relationship with my mother-in-law all these years. I say that because I’ve heard “Oh, Murv!” several times since that day… But I digress… (Oh, and another for the record note… I really do love my mother-in-law. She’s a wonderful lady. How could she not be? She’s E Kay’s mom.)

Back to the crisis…

Kat, still in the process of getting hairdoed, make-upped, perfumed, and dressed to the nines, hears her mother with the keen acoustic acuity only an offspring, grown or otherwise, can possibly have, and instantly pokes her head out of the bedroom door and asks with alarm, “What’s wrong?”

At this point, whichever vacuum tube in my head hadn’t yet warmed up, suddenly came on line. Flashes of the “one eyed E K stare at the front door,” the “Okay, come with me,” huff, and each and every of my bride’s reactions to all of the other stupid acts I had committed in the past year now flashed through my brain. I knew I couldn’t stop my mother-in-law from selling me out, but I could make it a moot point if I lied through my teeth and turned a screwdriver really, really fast…  So I did the only thing I could do…

I looked at her and said, “Nothing honey. Don’t worry…” Then made a bee-line for the basement like my life depended on it…

Knowing E K, it probably did…

And, just so you know, I had another worry rattling around inside my skull. You see, I didn’t exactly ace my math courses when I was in school…

More to come…

Murv

… NEXT: Mahwage: Fool For Your Stockings…