BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

It was pretty much a typical Friday morning as Friday mornings go.

I rolled out of bed at 5:39 AM. A bit later than usual, yes, but only by around 9 minutes, which is the span of time allowed by a slap of the snooze button on our alarm clock. Not really a big deal. I just wouldn’t have quite as much “quiet time” alone in the office as I normally did prior to the hustle and bustle of getting E K off to work and the child off to school. I could easily live with that.

I hit the ground running… Or, these days, shuffling just a bit. I fixed breakfast for E K and the offspring, packed E Kay’s lunch while the coffee maker sputtered and steamed, downed a cup or two of the java once it was finished, answered some email, checked my Facebook and Myspace pages, and even took a quick look at the local news on the idiot box. (I prefer K M O V channel 4 here in Saint Louis, just in case you are wondering. They seem to have fun, and Matt Chambers is one of those honest weather guys who prefaces his forecasts with, “This is what we think is going to happen”.)

But, lest I digress…

In keeping with the regular Friday routine,  (as Friday has a few more steps than say, Wednesday, for instance), I had already run about the house  on a mission – gathering trash and replacing the bags in various refuse receptacles, then cleaning the cats’ litter boxes, (not one of my favorite tasks, but hey, it has to be done), and finally delivering the bountiful haul of garbage out to the street corner to await removal by the big, blue, noisy truck that arrives every Tuesday and Friday (except holidays, of course).

All was good… In fact, even with getting a bit of a late start, I was now actually ahead of schedule by just shy of 10 minutes. Not only had I made up the 9, I’d added 9 and some change to it. I was feeling a bit proud of myself.

I figured I could take advantage of that extra time on the back end of the morning, so rather than stop in front of the “toob” to admire Julie Chen and Maggie Rodriguez on The Early Show,  I just kept plugging away. As the clock continued ticking forward my routine progressed with little deviation from how it has gone for countless Friday mornings past.

My initial chores of the day were finished, (though there were many more on the docket for later), the offspring was in her room obsessing over exactly what to wear – as female offspring often tend to do, and E K was finally out of the shower. Since I was next up in the scrub-a-dub-dub queue, I slipped into the bathroom with my lovely wife and proceeded forward with step one of  “Murv’s Morning Routine Phase 2”.

Advancing mechanically through my usual order of tasks I had already run my toothbrush over my teeth, dragged a comb through my hair, and had even made it so far as to whip up a passable lather with my shaving brush,  (trying to be eco-friendly, I’ve used old school shaving soap and a brush – when not on the road – for several years now, as opposed to cans which just end up in landfills). At this juncture, my face was full of rapidly dissipating foam and I had just dragged a trio of  insanely sharp, cold metal blades resting on the end of a short, crooked stick, across my cheek when the demand hit my ears.

“Move over,” came my wife’s voice. “I need to wash my face.”

I gave the end of the screaming metal skin scraping stick a quick rinse and shuffled to my left. I was an inch away from dragging it along my jawline when I stopped, cocked my eyebrow, then turned to look at my bride. Her hair was wet and I knew she had just climbed out of the shower moments before. Still, not being one for taking things at face value, with a vague questioning tone I said, “I thought you just took a shower?”

“I did,” she replied. E K didn’t seemed surprised at all by my query. Of course, after 22 years together she has grown used to my random verbalizations of various thought processes and simply accepts them as old hat. I’m certain this will serve her well later in life when we are both sitting in rocking chairs, side-by-side, and I am talking to myself for no apparent reason.

I pondered her answer for a moment, then gave her excessively damp, red tresses a one-eyed stare as I added, “And, you washed your hair.”

“Yeah,” she answered. “I did.” She still didn’t seem at all fazed by the fact that I was currently channeling Obvious Man.

At this point, had I bothered to look in the mirror, I’m sure my eyebrows would have been see-sawing back and forth like a puppy trying to figure out whether to pee on the carpet in the living room, or on the tile in the hallway.

“So…” I started, then paused.

“So, what?” E K asked, amusement now welling in her voice.

“So, if you took a shower and washed your hair, how did the water manage to miss your face?”

“It didn’t. My face got wet,” she chuckled.

“Okay…” I paused again. “But, you’re saying it didn’t get washed while it was wet?”

“Of course not,” my wife replied. Her tone had made a drastic and sudden change. It was now one of sympathy for someone who is obviously a bit slow in the brainpan, so by way of explanation she added, “I have different soap for my face.”

“Different soap,” I said.

“Yes,” she replied. “Different soap.”

She reached past me and rummaged around in the medicine chest,  so I watched on in silence, now taking notice of the countless weird shaped and various sized bottles, tubes, and jars lining the shelves. I’d never really paid any attention to them before. After all, they are on her side of the medicine chest, not mine. Of course, I have to admit that I had always wondered why her side of the three-paneled chest consisted of both the left and the middle as well as a portion of the right, whereas mine was just a small sliver of said right.

Now,  my curiosity was piqued, so I focused my attentions on her task.

Oddly enough, upon initial and even secondary inspection, I didn’t see any containers with “soap” written on them. I  did, however, see things like “anti-wrinkle cow placenta apricot avocado P H-balanced age defying micro-bead moisture-rich scrub“… With “scrub” coming in at the end of the title, I suppose that stuff would qualify as soap, but it seemed to me “face soap” would have saved some ink when the bottle was being labeled. But, that’s just me, I guess.

There were other products as well, each with equally descriptive and endlessly confusing names like, “glycolic facial peeling solution masque,” and  “collagen infusing pore cleansing makeup removing pre-wash.” I figured that last one probably had pig in it instead of cow, what with collagen being first in the title.

One of the bottles that did make perfect sense had adopted the simplicity in labeling scheme I suggested earlier. It was titled, “nail polish remover.” I pretty much got what they were saying with that, so it seemed like a pretty good marketing move to me. I mean, if E K were to say, “Honey, could you hand me the nail polish remover,” I was all good. But if she were to ask me to retrieve her “face soap”, I’d probably be back to deciding whether to pee on the carpet or the tile. By the time anyone found me I would most likely be doing the “potty dance”.

There were other bottles, jars and tubes – more than I could count really – but I can’t even begin to pronounce their dozen word, semi-foreign, hyphenated and fancy-script-fonted names, (nor would I want to, unless of course, I was considering a career in Dermatology).

“I see,” I finally muttered, even though I really didn’t.

After a couple more swipes across my face with the stubble scraper, I gathered enough courage to ask, “So, do you have different soap for other parts of your body too?”

By now, E K had dried her freshly washed face and was lining up various bottles of differently named products along the edge of the vanity – each of which thankfully ended in the easily definable word, lotion. This helped reduce my confusion, but only just a bit given that there were so many containers that ostensibly all contained the same thing.  Once the linear arrangement was complete, she began working her way down the line, applying different amounts of each to various different areas of her person. Had I not been somewhat preoccupied with my confusion at this point, it probably would have been fun to watch, in an adult amusement park sort of way, if you get my meaning.

“Don’t be silly,” she chuckled in response as she adopted a Marlene Dietrich-esque leg-hiked pose, using the toilet lid to rest her foot, then proceeded to slather, smooth, and rub various lotions into the shapely appendage.

I was actually taking some amount of solace in that answer until she snorted, “Of course I do.”

I didn’t pursue the conversation. A quick glance at the clock told me I had used up my almost 10 minute surplus of time and was instead operating at a deficit, now being a little over 3 minutes behind schedule. I figured I’d better pick up the pace, because since E K had been in the shower first, I knew I was going to be spending several more minutes just looking for the shampoo amidst all of those different bottles she had lined up along the ledge around the tub.

At least now, after 22+ years, I knew they weren’t just decorations…

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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