BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

If you have been following me on Facebook in recent months, I’m sure you’ve noticed that I posted a whole slew of pictures from my high school years. This was brought about by the fact that I happened to stumble across a Facebook Group devoted to KRSH FM 90.1, (Now KRHS FM) the school radio station where I cut my teeth on broadcast media and moreover real, hardcore Journalism, at the direction of a fantastic teacher and faculty advisor, Martha Ackmann. But, I’ll babble on about that in a different blog. (Yeah, just gotta love chasing those chickens, eh?)… You see, the only reason I even brought that up is that it ties in with the fact that I was an avid photographer as well and I worked for the school newspaper and yearbook in that capacity… But, now we are running after a rooster… The deal is, I actually made myself a side business out of photography in the early to mid 90’s.

E K and I were partners with some other folks in a Saint Louis based sound recording studio… Yeah, yeah, I know… What does sound recording have to do with photography? Well, actually that’s an easy question to answer. Recording studios draw in bands; bands need publicity photos and CD artwork. See where I’m going? Yeah, it just sort of made sense… Therefore, we came up with the idea that having it all under one roof just might work. So, I dusted off and reassembled my darkroom, invested in a bit of updated equipment… Well, it was updated back then. Now, not so much. But, I digress… Anyway, back to the story, toss in setting up a couple of wholesale accounts for supplies, and there you go. We had ourselves a part-time photography business.

Well, the story behind the studio and how it eventually fell into financial ruin is a blog unto itself, which in order to protect the innocent will probably never see paper, electronic or otherwise. Suffice it to say, we had ourselves a good run while it lasted, and we actually did quite a few unique, fun, and even at times profitable, photo sessions in conjunction with recording sessions, bands, and even their groupies.

But, here’s the thing… I had pretty much pushed a lot of that completely to the back of my mind. I honestly hadn’t remembered how many shoots we had done until the other day when I was searching out pictures to scan for the whole KRSH thing I mentioned earlier. The whole mess came flooding back to the forefront when I found myself sifting through a 4-drawer file cabinet full of contact sheets, stripped proofs for publicity photos, and tons of negatives.

Yeah, a lot of pictures, both printed and unprinted… Fortunately, they were organized and labeled, which is obviously something I did back before I returned to my natural state of “messy desk habitat”…

Now, just to be annoying, I’m going to switch gears on you. Chase a different feathered fowl so to speak… Trust me, the rooster and the chicken eventually meet up and make cute little yellow chicks. Just give the egg a minute or two so it can hatch… I promise, it really will…

Some of you may remember from the “Mahwage” series of blog entries that I had mentioned E K being on the drill team when she was in high school. Well, because of that I have a tendency to refer to her as having been a cheerleader, to which she always replies, “I wasn’t a cheerleader, I was on the drill team.” It’s not that she has anything against cheerleaders… She just likes to clarify things.  She’s very direct like that… And, she’s evil… Anyway, it would seem that at her school at least, there was a hierarchy. Cheerleaders first, followed several rungs down the ladder by the Drill Team. Kind of a “cool kid caste system”… Okay, I’ll give you that… We had our own “caste system” when I was in high school, and I was right near the bottom of it… Actually, I don’t think I even qualified to even be on it… I think I was on the waiting list to get on the last line of the caste list, or something like that… So, what I am saying is that I get it. Cheerleaders were apparently “cooler” than the girls on the drill team.

Still, when you get right down to it, E K was way up on the ladder in relation to where I was. If I can use my high school experiences as a benchmark, she was in the top 5% of coolness, whereas I was overheated in hell. And, by the same token, the young ladies on the drill team wore uniforms… And, what were those uniforms? Fuzzy sweaters, really short skirts, and saddle oxfords… Or, those little mini-dress looking things in the summer… Anyway,  I rest my case.  The simple fact is, to a zit-faced outcast nerd like myself, if it looked like a cheerleader, wore clothes like a cheerleader, and bounced around like a cheerleader, then it was a cheerleader… And, of course, was therefore the object of many an adolescent fantasy.

Believe me, I’m not trying to be pornographic here… I’m just telling it like it is. But, since pornography has been mentioned, anyone with two brain cells in their head can look at popular media references and see that the whole cheerleader fantasy extends to the adult male as well. Therefore, I really and truly am making an objective observation here…

So, my initial point being this… I may have been a zit-faced nerd in high school, but I married myself a smokin’ hot cheerleader, so bite me! Neener, neener…

Just kidding… Well… A little bit, but kinda serious too… In any case, that right there would be the subjective observation…

Okay, now let’s see if we can get that chicken married off to that rooster…

As I was going through the stacks of negatives in search of nostalgic shots of 16-18 year old journalism students collecting MIPA awards, prattling nonsensically into microphones, or just generally being teenagers who happened to have to good fortune of working at a high school radio station, I ran across a manila folder labeled “B&W Proofs – Kat in Advertisement“.

You see, during the old recording studio/photo studio days, one of our partners actually worked in the darkroom at a local advertising agency. Whenever they would have a local job we had the opportunity to bid on it. And so, one Saturday morning, I received a phone call from my friend, telling me the agency needed an “emergency product shoot with a model” for a big client. They needed proofs and slides by that evening and on top of that they had not yet hired a model. As it turned out, models and photographers were apparently hard for them to come by at the last minute, so they wanted to know if we could handle it. The specs were fairly simple… They wanted us to shoot a roll of Black and White Negatives and a roll of Color Transparencies, (AKA – slides), of a pretty woman, clad in business clothing, filling a tire on a nice looking car, using the client’s product. That product was, of course, a fix-a-flat in a can sort of thing.

So, we loaded up the equipment, ran my relatively new Cutlass Supreme through the car wash… The Cutlass was a company car provided by the computer repair outfit for which I worked full time back then… and then set up a shoot on the parking lot of the studio with our model….

And, as you can see from the pictures, our model was none other than E K herself. Yes… E K… In a matter of a 60-minute shoot and about 2 hours in a darkroom, the Evil One became the hands, face, and legs of “The Pump,” Pyroil’s fix-a-flat in a can. Yep, she was the “Tire Babe” in advertisements and promotional materials around the country. I often wonder if they did up one of those life-sized cardboard cutouts to use as a display in auto parts stores. If they did, something tells me some grease monkey somewhere has one tacked up on the wall in his garage…

At least, let’s hope it’s just the garage…

So, why am I telling you all this? Simple… Besides being one of those little bits of nostalgia that just happened to slap me in the back of the head, there’s an even more important point… An extremely important point, in fact, even if it is purely selfish and a tad bit juvenile… But hey, I’m a guy and it’s my job to be juvenile every now and then…

At any rate, the point would be the following… Not only did this zit-faced, klutzy, outcast nerd marry a cheerleader, he married a model… Yeah… Bite me again.

So, can I get a big ol’ “neener neener” from the crowd?

Yeah, life is good… And, I’m one hell of a lucky bastard… I know that.  But, it really is too bad E K doesn’t have that drill team uniform anymore…

More to come…

Murv

In general, whenever I mention Satan, I am referring to one particular petite, redheaded woman in stiletto heels, who is packing an evil attitude and looking for someone to abuse. Yes, you guessed it, E K. (Yeah… I know… It’s not like it was hard to figure out.)

In point of fact, I would venture to say that 90% of the time the word Satan even comes out of my mouth, or off the end of my fingers for that matter,  it is because I am talking about The Evil One to whom I belong. Why? That’s easy. Because she is also sometimes affectionately, and jokingly, (or, depending on your perspective, fearfully,) known as, “Satan In High Heels.”

Believe me, there’s a damn good reason for that insidious sounding title to be bestowed upon her. To put it simply, she really can sprout horns. And, when she does, there’s no saving the poor bastard who was stupid enough to metaphorically pour water on her head and make them grow.

I know it sounds far-fetched, but it’s true. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Hell, (pun fully intended,) I’ve even been gored by those horns when I wasn’t even the idiot who set her off. Yeah… I’ve been the collateral damage.

Don’t you feel sorry for me?

But, it isn’t just me who has seen it. There are others who have witnessed her true and inherent evilness, but since they are usually her victims, there really isn’t much left of most of them, which is probably fortunate… For them…

As to the survivors… Well, there are only a scant few of them, and even those who aren’t totally catatonic and drooling on themselves are locked away in a mental ward somewhere. The even fewer who still have some semblance of their faculties remaining, simply refuse to talk about it. It’s too traumatizing to relive, even in mere words. At least, that is the excuse they and their shrinks usually spout. I only know of one poor soul, besides me that is, who ever dares to say anything about it. Unfortunately, you cannot make much  sense of what he says. He merely sits in a corner, rocking endlessly, and keeps muttering, “But, but, I said unicorn.”

I have no clue what that means.

If you ask me, I think they’re all just “piss in their pants” afraid of her… Of course, I can’t say as that I blame them. I mean, she looks so innocent one minute, and then the next there are those horns poking out of her skull and she’s slipping into a pair of those pitchfork heeled stilettos, just like the one on the cover of The Devil Wears Prada… And the thing is, if you see the horns… Well… Let’s just say you should have left sooner because it’s all over but the funeral.

But, we really should move on, because E K isn’t actually the subject of this post… Well, actually she kinda is. Sort of. Eventually.  But we have to talk about something else first.

So, back to the whole other Satan thing. While we’ve established that Evil Kat takes up 90% of my “Evil Fallen Angel Quotient,” the other 10% of the time usually involves me rebuffing an accusation about spiritual beliefs by offering a clear explanation of alternative religious paths. Up to and including Satanism itself. Or, in other instances, I am engaged in a rousing conversation about Biblical Prophecy… That last bit always makes for a good time around the dinner table…

Obviously, since I stopped chasing that earlier random chicken, this particular missive about Satan falls into that 10% category. Although, it really has nothing to do with either explanations or prophecy…

You see, like it says in the title, somehow, Satan got behind me…

Well… That’s not quite accurate. The truth is, Satan did NOT actually get behind me.

Satan did, however, somehow manage to obtain my email address.

Yeah… No kidding.

Imagine my surprise when I checked my email, only to find a note from The Dark Prince himself. The Devil. Beelzebub. The Evil One (The other “The Evil One“, not E K). Lucifer. Old Nick. The guy in the suit from “Reaper“… John Glover from “Brimstone“…

Well, I have to say that I don’t think I am the only one who would feel compelled to open such an email. I mean, after all, that’s what Satan is all about, right? Tempting the weak… The strong… The faithless… The faithful… Rhesus monkeys…

Okay, so maybe not rhesus monkeys, but you get my point. The thing is, not only was a I tempted, but I gave in to the temptation. Yes. I opened the email. I mean, after all, I’m running some seriously high-end anti-virus software here, so if it had a Trojan or something, bells, whistles, and other flashy things would have already been going. I was safe from that sort of mischief from hell. All I really needed to worry about was an Apple, especially what with me being a PC guy and all.

Well, no Trojan or virus was to be had. And, I was even safe from Apples. Much to my surprise, however, this is what I saw:

A message for an online singles dating type social network from the bowels of Hell. (Please note that I purposely blotted out the URL in the screen capture. I mean, after all, I’m not about to give Lucifer any free advertising. If he wants me to spread the word about his singles club, he’s going to have to cough up some cash.)

But, here’s the thing that gets me. Apparently Beelzebub just isn’t satisfied with anything these days. Why in the world would he send me, of all people,  an invite to his dating service? Unless, of course, he’s getting soft in his old age and is feeling sorry for me.

I mean, after all, I’ve been married to his sister for better than 22 years, and she’s a damn sight more evil than he could ever be… (See, I told you we’d get back to the evil redhead…)

… Now, however, if you’ll excuse me, I think I need to go hide. E K was reading over my shoulder as I was typing this, but she disappeared a few minutes ago. Now,  suddenly I’m smelling sulfur, and I’m pretty sure I just heard  the distinct sound of a pair of pitchforky high-heels gouging the floor.

And they sound like they’re coming closer with each step…

More to come…

(Maybe…)

Murv

* “Devil Woman Image” courtesy On The Edge Graphics © 2009. Used with permission.