BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

I talked to my child’s principal today… But, we’ll get to that in a minute… Right now, the wayback machine is calling…

The last time I was called to the principal’s office, I was in high school. Yeah… Way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and all that jazz…

Now, please don’t misunderstand. I wasn’t a troublemaker by any stretch of the imagination. As it happened, my infraction had more to do with freedom of the press, and the administration wanting me, as well as a few other student journalists, to roll over on each other regarding a source from a news story. Fortunately, we had a hell of a staff advisor and the inquisition came to a swift end, minus the use of thumbscrews, detention slips, or suspensions.

Yeah… We were a regular bunch of Woodwards and Bernsteins back then.  I don’t even remember the exact story to be honest, but it probably had something to do with seriously hard hitting news, like some football player’s grades being fudged to keep him on the team, (because, of course, that so rarely happens). Or, maybe it was about a particular inferior brand of floorwax was being used by the janitorial staff.

Truth is, the story probably wasn’t even that “sexy”… We probably managed to get our hands on the lunch menu for the following week a few days early and broadcast it on the student radio station, KRSH, or something stupid like that… I really and truly don’t remember…

Suffice it to say, as you can see, the incident was so traumatic that I’ve simply blocked it out after all these years…

Yeah… Well… Saying it was traumatic  sounds much better than saying it was just so unimportant that I didn’t bother to remember… But, I digress…

Anyway, like I was saying, we took our Journalistic integrity very seriously back then… Last I heard, some of my cohorts even went on to become actual paycheck earning, byline having, Journalists, while I went the direction of writing Fiction instead… Of course, judging from the news I read in the papers and see on the tube these days, it would seem they went in the direction of Fiction too…

But, I suppose I should keep my opinion to myself where the integrity of today’s Journalism is concerned… Besides, this is really supposed to be about getting called to the principal’s office… So, let’s get back to that.

As I said at the beginning, I had occasion to chat with my child’s principal  on the phone today. Don’t worry, it wasn’t anything too serious. The reality is I had recently voiced a concern over the school district’s Internet policies. As it happened, the principal was kind enough to call me to discuss it.

Very cool… I was impressed by the attention to the matter, the timeliness, and the overall concern expressed… By the principal, that is.

The district’s policies, well, that’s a different story… But, we won’t go there right now.

The thing is, because of the subject we were discussing, I happened to mention that my feelings about the policies were partially driven by the somewhat ugly things I have learned doing research for my novels. I mean, given the subject matter about which I write, I’m bound to learn some pretty disturbing things about human nature and sociopaths, correct?

So, no big deal, right?

Well, if you remember one of my previous blog entries, (They’re Creepy And They’re Kooky… – March 2008), I don’t exactly run around broadcasting my profession to folks at my child’s school. In fact, other than Internet marketing and when I am actually “working,” (i.e. at a book signing,) I don’t say all that much about it at all, unless asked, of course. It’s not that I’m ashamed of it, but hey, it’s just my job. I mean, after all, it’s not like I would walk in to a parent-teacher conference and say, “Hi, I’m Murv, the plumber,” or “Nice to meet you, I’m Murv, the aircraft mechanic.”  Therefore, why would I go around announcing that I am an author? Again, unless asked of course.

My point here being, apparently the principal did not know what I do for a living. Or, at the very least, he didn’t know what the subject matter of my novels happened to be…

…And, by the same token, he probably didn’t, and still doesn’t, know what I used to do for a living… That being the fact that I was a Senior Level Electronics Tech and Internet Systems Administrator for 25 years…

“So, what does that have to do with anything, much less being called to the principal’s office?” you ask.

Well, you can take the Tech out of Geek land, but you can’t take the Geek out of the Tech… What I mean is, I still have my finger in the whole electronics and Internet thing… Including, analytics and IP tracking…

So, imagine my amusement when within an hour or so of hanging up with the principal I do a quick scan of my website logging and see, plain as day, that my legal name has been Googled, along with the tag “books,” all originating from an IP address registered to the school.

And, of course, Google dumped him right into my blog…

Given the sometimes racy jokes, unsavory words, and often tongue-in-cheek innuendo  my posts generally contain, I have to wonder how long it will be before I get called to the principal’s office…

Oh, do you think they’ll let me bring my notebook computer with me to detention? I have a lot of work to do and I could use the quiet time…

More to come…

Murv

Part 7 of 12

Continued From: Mahwage: Mobile Bachelor Party…

… Morning arrived way too damn early that particular October 31st. I mean, I know morning pretty much always arrives early, which is part of its job description as “morning” after all. But on that one Saturday in 1987, I am firmly convinced that it arrived several hours ahead of  its regular schedule. Hangover aside, I’m telling you, someone was screwing with the fabric of time, probably just to f*ck with me personally…

You just watch… Some physicist will eventually figure out that when they first switched on that new Large Hadron Collider, a minuscule temporal ripple shot backward through the space-time continuum and completely f*cked up the clocks on October 31st, 1987. Mark my words, it’ll come out someday…

For the record, I really believe this. Well… Not really… But you have to admit it sounds good…

But, let’s move on…

Yeah, I was hung over. I was hung over like nobody’s business. In fact, I have not been that hung over again since that day, nor do I believe I was ever that hung over prior to that day. I was H U N G O V E R with a capital everything… Shoot me now. End my misery. Oh toilet bowl, you are my only friend… Whatever God is up there listening to me, I promise I’ll never do it again… Yeah. That hung over.

And E K had absolutely no sympathy for me whatsoever… The Bitch!

Now I suddenly knew what all those people at ComputerTrend were talking about. My bride-to-be was just plain heartless…

Okay, again, not really. And I’m just joking about the “bitch” thing… Really…  I am. Just don’t tell her I said it, okay? Good… Now, the truth is, looking back on the situation I can certainly understand her lack of sympathy… And,  in reality I could even understand it back then too, even as I hugged the porcelain and told it all about my friend Ralph… I mean,  after all, I had done it to myself… But, of course, that didn’t make me whine any less…

And then to make matters worse, (as if they weren’t bad enough already), there were these things called Belly Bombers churning around in my gut… We will just skip any details surrounding my ingesting of those evil little burgers, (which, to this day, I still ingest), or more accurately my inevitable expulsion thereof… Suffice it to say, the throne room was my kingdom for quite some time that morning, and much air freshener was sprayed from flowery painted aerosol cans…

Once I managed to get myself cleaned up and my eyeballs moved back to the proper side of my face, (although they still weren’t actually working properly, and kind of had the whole overused teabag sort of feeling for the rest of the day,) I set about helping the lovely, though miffed, E K set things up for the evening. Of course, one of my duties was cooking, so I managed to stay out of her way some of the time by doing just that. I had prepared the sauce for the veal parmigiana a couple of days ahead of time, the ham was already cooked, and my soon-to-be mother-in-law was handling the apple-rice curry, so most of the prep work had been done…  It really just came down to a bit of frying, heating, assembling, and arranging in the chafing dishes.

Sometime around early afternoon, E K was going through her mental checklist to make sure we hadn’t missed anything too important in the grand scheme of the evening. As she rattled things off, I answered check, yo, yeah, or whatever response was warranted for each thing. Eventually she came to an item for which I had no answer, therefore I remained silent…

After  a handful of heartbeats, assuming I had not heard her, she asked again, “Your suit?”

And again, I remained silent…

Assuming I had gone temporarily deaf, my soon-to-be-wife raised her voice and queried once more, “Murv? What about your suit?”

Finally, after a bit more awkward silence, I cleared my throat, hemmed and hawed, then replied, “Uhm… I have sport coats. I don’t have a suit.”

At this juncture E K was looking at me like I was a puppy who had just left a big piddle puddle on the carpet for the 37 thousandth time. I wasn’t quite sure what she was going to rub my nose in, but I could clearly see that it was coming.

“You don’t have a suit?” she asked.

“Uhm… No,” I replied.

“We’re getting married in a few hours. What were you planning to wear?”

“Uhm… I dunno.”

I knew that was the wrong answer. Hell, most of the time even I won’t accept it as a valid answer unless I really and truly believe the “answerer” doesn’t actually know, in which case I generally don’t even bother to ask in the first place.  E K didn’t want to accept it either, but by this point she knew that her soon-to-be-husband was pretty much a hopeless case, at least in his present condition.

“Okay, come on,” she announced in a huff as she snatched up her keys and purse, then all but took me by the hand and led me out the door.

Now, at this point in the story, I have a question for all of you… Were any of you folks aware that unless you spend right around enough to buy a compact car, it is impossible to purchase a suit and have it altered the same day? You were? Well, it came as a shock to me. I figured what with all those sewing machines and stuff they could at least do a nip here and a tuck there… You know, just enough to make it presentable for the evening.

Well obviously, such services were nowhere within our budget. And, what with me having Basset Hound legs and Barney Rubble arms, the suits we found on the rack were definitely going to need a bit of a touch up. We finally found something on sale, at a decent price, that E K approved after doing the reverse Pretty Woman scenario with me. (Once again, it is my contention that the scriptwriters had to have been in St. Louis and witnessed the Dillard’s shopping spree, because we did this long before the movie…)

But, since I’m not going to get any royalties, I suppose I should move on… But, you know, I’m just sayin’… Yeah, okay… I know… Digressing again… Back to the story…

So, with new suit in hand, even though the pant legs  and arms of the jacket were 49 feet long, we raced back home. The wedding was scheduled to take place right there in our living room at 6 PM.  At this point, we were only a scant few hours from achieving critical mass… But, while I now had something to wear, my new fancy duds were pretty much going to make me look like Tom Hanks, (still not speaking to him, by the way,) from the end of Big. (given that said movie didn’t hit the screen until 1988,  this is yet another flick that obviously stole a scenario from my life… Damn, I should be wealthy off the residuals by this point…)

Back to the story again…

Anyhow, in my way of thinking, there was no real reason to worry about my oversized Sunday go to meetin’ suit. Why? Because E K happens to be an A1 seamstress, and I knew it. In fact, she used to make all her own clothes and had even considered making her wedding dress, had there been enough time between all the rehabbing, cleaning, running around, working, cooking, etc… (obviously there wasn’t… enough time, that is… hence the whole Kmart® dress thing… but like I said, she was flat out gorgeous anyway, off the rack  Kmart® togs or not…)

But, as we well know, my way of thinking isn’t always on the same page as the rest of the world’s, and in particular, E K’s… You see, I don’t sew. I mean, I can darn a sock, but when I once tried to really, really sew something clothing wise with actual sleeves and such, it pretty much came out as a misshapen pile of fabric with random threads hanging all over it. Therefore, it hadn’t occurred to me that there was no time to actually hem the pants, tack up the jacket’s sleeves, etc.

Of course, my dear E K knew this, and simply patted me on the head with a sad look of pity in her eyes. Still, we had a wedding on the near horizon, so she continued on undaunted without threading a single needle. She went to the toolbox, pulled out a roll of double stick tape, warmed up the iron so she could make a few creases, and there you go… Taped and tailored… Just like downtown.

And, you know what? That suit was still hemmed and altered with double stick tape when I finally gave it away to Goodwill, and it looked just fine. (Yeah, I finally gave it away, very recently, in fact. Yes, there was some sentimental attachment there, but it was no longer in style and I would never fit into it again, no matter what. I can only lose just so much weight…)

So… there we were. I had a suit, E K had a dress, the food was just about done, and we even had some fancy luminaries E K had made to line the sidewalk and porch. All systems were go, people would be arriving soon, and the clock was ticking as it counted down to the climactic zero-hour…

You know, I wonder if those wingnuts over at “24” stole that one from me too…

More to come…

Murv

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