BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Or: How Michele Bachmann Got Me Into Trouble With My Wife

I’m not a Michele Bachmann fan. Personally, I think the woman is off her rocker, but I am stating that as my opinion based upon her rhetoric. I’ve never met her – nor do I want to meet her – and moreover, I am not a clinical head-shrinker, so I’m not academically qualified to diagnose her as a nutjob. That said, (being a disclaimer and all, you understand) I’m relatively certain her elevator stops somewhere in between the first and second floor.

All good. I’m not about to begrudge her the right to run off at the mouth. However, as I’ve always stated, other people’s rights end where mine begin, and now Michele has directly affected said rights. How? She got me in trouble with The Evil Redhead.

For this to make sense, I need to give you a bit of info. You see, there is a routine here at E K Central. Each morning I wake up at oh-dark-thirty, start the coffee, visit the “Little Merp’s Room,” then install a 45 minute back massage on The Redhead. Trust me, if she doesn’t get her back massage in the morning, there’s hell to pay. After that, I proceed to get breakfast ready, answer email, prep EKay’s lunch, clean litter boxes, and on, and on. Somewhere in there, I take the o-spring to school, get my daily walk in, then return home in time to refill my coffee, bow and scrape to The Redhead, and then walk her out to her vehicle. It’s not that she needs an escort; it’s that she needs a pack mule. Yes, I “carry her books” for her (that’s a metaphor. I carry her lunch, extra shoes, and other stuff. Although, sometimes there are books, too.)

It’s at this juncture where her supreme evilness imparts upon me the instructions for the day. You know, stuff like, “Pick up my dry cleaning, polish all of my shoes, paint the house, build me a gazebo, make sure you prepare Beef Wellington for dinner tonight, and my vodka & tonic was too weak yesterday so if you don’t do better this evening there will be hell to pay. “

See what I mean? Normal stuff.

What does this have to do with Michele Bachmann, you ask? I’m getting to that.

On Friday morning, following standard procedure, I walked E K to her vehicle, loaded her lunch, stood still while she slapped me around, replied with, “Thank you, Mistress, may I have another?!” just as I am supposed to do, and all was good. Among her daily instructions to me was the following: Water the Basil and Oregano on the porch.

Easy enough, even for me, right? Well, not so much…

After seeing off Her Worship, I went back into the house on a mission to fill the watering can and tend to her herb garden. As I entered the door, The Early Show was blaring from the idiot box. On the screen was one of the co-hosts, and Michele Bachmann. From the speakers I heard, “Inducements inducing people to break the law to be induced to get the inducements that they were induced to be induced by, for the purpose of inducing…”

Okay… Yeah… So that is definitely NOT a direct quote. Here’s the real one:

“We’re inducing more people to break the law by giving them inducements and if someone comes into this state, they can subsequently also obtain other benefits on occasion as well,” she continued. “So we don’t want to have any inducements that will be a magnet to induce more people to come into the united states illegally.”

Even so, my overarching point here is that Michele Bachmann was flinging a ten-dollar word out there, in its various forms, multiple times in the same sentence.

I make my living with words. I notice shit like this. Especially when someone overuses the living crap out of a word. I mean, grammatically it’s never a stellar idea to use a word multiple times in a single sentence unless it’s an article or a preposition or a conjunction or something of that ilk. Know what I mean? It’s sort of like the old rule about not using a word in its own definition.

So… How did this get me in trouble?

Again, that’s easy – Inducement-gate was like a big train wreck to my ears. I stood there staring at the screen, drooling (because I was being mind-numbed), and I just couldn’t look away or tune it out. I’m sure plenty of folks are thinking, “Doooood. You’re making too big a deal out of it.”

Well no, not really. I’m not saying she should take a long walk off a short pier because of Inducement-gate (there are plenty of other reasons why I think she should do that.) However, as I said above, words are how I make my living, so a verbal train wreck like that was bound to make me go all googly-eyed.

And so, with my eyes goggled up, and my brain severely numbed, I completely forgot to water The Supreme Redhead’s herb garden – a fact that dawned on me Friday evening as I was paying daily homage to Her Worship by removing the lint from her sweater with a single three-inch strip of 15 year old generic cellophane tape, just like she’d told me to do. I guess I was still a little brain-numbed too, because instead of just going and watering the damn plants, I said with my out loud voice, “Oh crap, I forgot to water your herb garden!”

The doctor says I’ll be good as new in a few weeks if I just take it easy. He also suggested that I avoid exposure to Michele Bachmann.

I wonder if I should send HER the medical bill, or just forward it on to the GOP?

More to come…

Murv

Competition, in and of itself, is a good thing. A bit of healthy competition helps folks to strive toward excellence. It forces them to work harder for a reward, thereby helping them become better at what it is they are competing over, about, around, on, under, or otherwise with.

In the marketplace, it even tends to promote a little better pricing here and there. Sometimes it even spurs honesty – but then again, sometimes it spurs dishonesty, which is a bit less than healthy.

But, we aren’t talking about the marketplace here today. What we are talking about is “healthy competition” among friends. A contest, as it were, on an impromptu family & friend game night.

And it all starts with coffee…

You see, a dear friend of mine – we call her DeathStar because… well, if you ever meet her you’ll understand… Anyway, this dear friend of mine is a coffee roasting hobbyist. Actually, I think she has migrated from hobbyist to professional in recent months, but the real point is that DeathStar  hand roasts and custom blends some of the most INCREDIBLE coffee on the planet. And, since I am her friend I am fortunate enough to receive freshly roasted – as in less than 3 days old – coffee beans on a regular basis. If you are a coffee drinker at all you understand me when I say this is almost literally a case of “Java Nirvana. ” The aromas when you open the sealed package, the aromas when you grind the beans, and everything else that comes along with it… Because of DeathStar I even went out and purchased a French Press… Well, actually E K picked it up for me, and she doesn’t even like the smell of coffee, which just goes to show you that even someone who hates coffee with a passion knows how to respect the “Beans o’ DeathStar”.

And so… I have this coffee. And, I have this other friend who is a coffee fanatic. We’ll call her Anastasia. We won’t, however, call her ‘Stasia Mae. Only her husband gets away with that. But, if we’re going to be honest, we mostly just call her Luets. Long story there… But, anyway, Luets is a coffee fanatic, and whenever I come into possession of the sacred beans, she shows up at my door. As was the case recently.

Luets and her husband came by for freshly roasted, ground, and pressed coffee one Saturday. After juicing several of the beans and sitting around talking it had progressed into the late afternoon, so we invited them to stay for dinner. Afterwards, as we all sat around drinking Vodka-Tonics the Evil Redhead decided we should play a game (see… now I need a friend who distills their own Vodka…)

Now, normally when this happens it usually involves me wearing a collar and fetching sticks, tennis balls, and various chew toys for E K. However, on this particular evening the Redhead was looking for something we could all do, and she didn’t have enough leashes on hand to accommodate everyone.

But, seriously… E K came up with the idea that maybe we should play Uno or some other card game. Since the O-spring was involved, we let her pick and she decided upon Phase 10. If you’ve never played it, Phase 10 is sort of like what would happen if Rummy and Uno had a child. It’s a lot of fun, and we really enjoy it. And, it’s healthy competition…

Or, so we thought.

You see, Luets is competitive. When I say competitive I don’t mean healthy competitive. I mean insano, take no prisoners, needs a straitjacket competitive. With everyone…

Her husband, Mike, however, is not what you would call competitive at all. He’s more along the line of “Yay! Everybody wins!”… In fact, he is sooooo diametrically opposed in “competitiveness” to Luets, that he will literally go out of his way to help someone else win, even if it costs him points. In fact, he readily admits that he is happy to lose as long as he is able to drive Luets up a wall. It seems that when it comes to games, making Luets crazy is Mike’s real entertainment.

And so, we discovered this… with extreme prejudice, mind you…

At one point during the game Luets used a skip card, but didn’t skip Mike, even though he wanted her to. The reasoning, announced loudly and without apology, was that, “You don’t play the cards right.” You see, had she skipped him it would have set him up to help someone else win on the next round. She knew he was going to do this and was vying to prevent it, all the while seething and generally turning into a psychopath whenever anyone would inch ahead of her. To give you a verbal illustration of her behavior, Luets was even going head to head with our 10 year old, and was being brutal.

Fortunately, the O-spring can hold her own, as I shall now illustrate…

During a later hand, as Luets whined, seethed, grumbled, and shrieked, it came around to the kid’s turn. O-spring was in possession of a skip card herself, and she played it. On Luets…

Well, I probably don’t have to tell you that Competition Girl immediately became pissy. She demanded to know why the O-spring didn’t skip Mike instead because in her mind that would have been a better play. Without missing a beat our 10 year old looked across the table and completely owned her by saying, “Because just like you said, he won’t play the cards right!”

Yeah… The O-spring doesn’t fall far from the tree… Next time we play cards though, I’m thinking we might need to dial back on the amount of DeathStar Coffee we allow Luets to drink…

More to come…

Murv