BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Just a short and sweet update here folks…

Suite101.com has been running a series, written by Janice Hally, on the rituals and habits of mystery authors. I received notice this morning that a Q&A type interview I did with her on that very subject is now up on their site.

So, if you happen to have any interest in such random silliness as where I write, when I write, and what I use to write, you may want to swing by there for a quick read… Or not and say you did… Or do and say you didn’t… I’ll let y’all decide.

Just in case, you can find it here:

The Mysterious Writing Habits of Crime Writers from Around the World

More to come…

Murv

Part 11 of 12

Continued from: Mahwage: Trick Or Treat!

Okay… So you got me to admit that E K did not actually stomp on the little groom guy from the cake topper… I suppose y’all are real proud of yourselves now, eh? Well, here’s the thing: I’m willing to bet you she thought about it,  really, really hard. As a matter of fact, I’m sure she did.

How can I say that, you ask? Easy, she’s evil. (E K … Evil Kat… Get it? Of course you do…)

So, there you go, case closed, she’s just plain inherently evil. However, if that isn’t enough  to convince you there is also the fact that I happen to know she  really likes to stomp on things… I mean, you should see this woman with an aluminum can that’s destined for the recycle bin… she gets all giggly and stuff… Then all of a sudden it’s just flat out metal carnage, I tell you! (Get it, flat out… Yeah… Okay… Well, I thought it was funny…)

Yeah, yeah, I know… I’ve said all manner of wonderful things in this blog series to purposely dispel any myths and/or rumors about the evil redhead, but I have to do that. It’s all in the script she wrote for me and if I don’t say all these nice things about her then she’ll beat me and lock me in a closet. Really… Seriously…  She will…

I’ve just lost all credibility with you folks, haven’t I?

Well… Maybe I can get some of it back.

How, you ask? (You know, y’all ask a lot of questions)… Well, I’ll tell you. It  just so happens that I have photographic evidence of E Kay’s evilness, complete with full color depictions of cruelty, betrayal, calculated deception, and no inkling whatsoever of remorse for her actions. Yes, for real. Undoctored, unfettered, pure photographic evidence that E K is as evil as they come…

Allow me to set the stage for you…

Among those time honored traditions that go hand in hand with weddings and wedding receptions, is the bride and groom feeding the cake to one another, all cutesy woodja-woodja and the like. In that same vein there is also the “smear the cake all over your new spouse’s face” collateral tradition. I have no idea who started that particular subset of the cake thing, but he or she needs to be shot. Just my opinion, but hey…my blog, my opinion. Kinda works…

Anyway, E K and I had ourselves a talk about this. In fact, E K is the very one who brought it up. (I should have known right then and there that something was amiss)… At any rate, one day as we were working on the wedding plans she looked at me imploringly with those big blue eyes and said, “Look, Murv, let’s make a deal with one another right here and now — When it comes time to cut the cake and all that, I promise I won’t smear you in the face with it, if you promise you won’t smear me in the face. Deal?”

Well, how could I resist? She was just so damned cute and convincing and all that jazz. Besides, I really and truly wasn’t all that skippy about the prospect of having cake plastered throughout my beard for several hours, so this seemed like  the perfect solution to me. Therefore, I did the only thing I could possibly do under the circumstances. I responded in earnest, “Yeah, honey.  No problem at all. I’d say you’ve got yourself a deal. I promise to not smear any cake on your face.”

Now, being from the south I knew better. And, I knew I knew better.  In keeping with the theme of things I knew, I also knew in my heart, and in my head, that I should have spit in my palm, made her spit in hers, and had a handshake on the deal right then and there, but I didn’t. Instead, I trusted my soon-to-be-wife without hesitation. Of course, even the handshake probably wouldn’t have mattered, what with her being a Yankee and all… It stands to reason with all that northern blood she wouldn’t have honored a spit promise anyway, so that would have only made the situation worse. I mean, if  she had broken a spit promise of all things, then she just would have gone from being a Yankee to being a Damn Yankee… Obviously this would have presented a major problem, because while it’s a forgivable offense to be married to a Yankee, (after all, they can’t help it they were born in a foreign country,) marrying a Damn Yankee… Well, that’ll just get you hanged.

However, I promised you evidence and so here it is. I give you Exhibit A. (left)… Notice how I am placing the cake carefully into her mouth. However, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to be able to see that her aim is way off. My mouth has never been on the side of my face and she knows that.  No… she was purposely assaulting me with the “cake smear”. If you look closely at my expression, posture, and the position of my other hand, you can also plainly see that the photo caught me right in the middle of a serious, “WTF?! You promised!” moment.

Now, had it merely been a case of poor aim on her part, she wouldn’t have continued to grind the icing into my beard, as evidenced in the next photo, which we shall label Exhibit B.

Unfortunately, what you are unable to see from this particular photo, is her satisfied grin. There were witnesses… But, I think she might have paid them off… Now I ask you… Evil or no?

What? Sheesh… I really don’t see why everyone is taking her side in all of this… I mean, yeah, I do get that she was merely establishing dominance in the relationship so that I would know who was really in control,  but hey, she promised… (One of these days I’m going to find out exactly what it was she had crossed when she made that promise, because I’m pretty sure her hands were in plain sight at the time…)

So, back to the title of this entry. “Where’s everybody going?” refers back to what I mentioned in the Fool For Your Stockings chapter of this series,  (Feb 22, 2009), when I spoke briefly about us hitting the sack in the evening as opposed to the very late night, or wee hours of the morning. I told you we’d get to it, and now here we are.

You see, soon after the smearing of the cake, someone must have mistaken the purely evil gesture as playfulness and then passed the word that E K was feeling frisky or something. I surmised this because it wasn’t long before a mass exodus began. People started patting us on the back, congratulating us just one more time, hugging and kissing us, then winking as they said their goodbyes. A couple of them even flat out mentioned to us that they were clearing out so E K and I could have… Ahem… “Alone time”…

WTF? E K and I had already been living together “in sin” for a year. Yeah, we’d been sinning left and right. So, it’s not like we had gone through this whole process in order to get a “free bedroom pass” or something. Truth is we already had ourselves a “big ol’ bag o’ tokens” for adult activities and we’d been spending them whenever we had a chance. Now, please understand, it’s not that we weren’t interested in visiting the “grown up amusement park” on a regular basis, or even having a go at some of the “rides” we hadn’t yet enjoyed, but on that particular night we wanted to have a party. We had spent every bit of money we could scrape together on food, a keg of beer, and fixing the place up enough to be able to have a shindig. We had worked hard to make this happen. We wanted to share and enjoy it with our friends. We could jump on the “tilt-a-whirl” tomorrow… Hell, two or three times if we felt like it.

However, no matter what we said, folks would just give us the “wink wink nudge nudge” and be on their way. By 10:30 PM, my hot and sexy bride and I were standing in the middle of our living room, just us, the cats, and no one else, surrounded by empty chairs and a whole mountain of food. Now, I know 10:30 PM sounds like night and not evening as I had said… These days, at my somewhat more advanced age, yeah, I’d call it night too. But, back then at the wet behind the ears twenty-something stage, when we were immortal and could drink a hell of a lot more, 10:30 PM was merely evening… Night was still on its way and wouldn’t be arriving for at least another half hour or so…

But, yeah, I know, that’s all just a matter of semantics… You say tomato, I say roundish red thing that goes on my sammich… Still, 10:30 PM? That’s just too damn early to pack it in when you have the youth combined with the level of party fixin’s available that we did…

So… We took one last look around and proceeded to do the only thing we could do. We put everything away, filling the refrigerator to the gills in the process, locked the doors, closed the windows, slipped out of our Sunday go to meetin’ clothes, went into the bedroom and… Passed out from sheer exhaustion.

Yeah. Sleep. That was it. No roller coaster, log flume, bumper cars, scrambler, or even a quick spin on the merry-go-round… Nothing… But, it was all good… If were weren’t going to have anyone staying to party with us, then what the hell… We’d just catch up on those 287 1/2 hours of sleep we’d managed to miss getting ready for this whole affair.

E K could tie me up and beat me later when we’d both be awake enough to enjo… Er… Uhm… Never mind.

But, honestly, in retrospect we both desperately needed the rest. Besides, if you recall, E K had lost the feeling in her legs and we needed to get her out of those rubber bands…

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the serendipitous, (depending on your perspective,) benefits of everyone bugging out so early… And, I’m not just talking about the sleep.

We ended up with almost an entire keg of beer to ourselves… Not a quarter barrel, mind you, we had ordered a half-barrel. And it was the good stuff… Well, as good as commercial big-brewery beer can be and this was in the days before Microbreweries became truly popular. Still, before everything was said and done, I was filling gallon jugs 3/4 full and putting them in the chest freezer downstairs so I could use the flat brew to cook with at a later date, while at the same time I was staying tanked the whole day. We washed our hair with it. We gave it to the neighbors. We invited folks in off the street to have a beer. All I knew was that we’d paid for it, so that metal barrel wasn’t going back until it was floating…

I was never so glad to return a keg in all my life… Really.

On top of the beer-en-dipity there was also food-en-dipity… I didn’t have to cook for a week and a half. We just took stuff out of the freezer and ran it through the microwave. Ham sandwiches, apple-rice curry, veal parmigiana… Good thing too, because with all that extra beer I was sucking down, I was just too damn drunk to cook.

And so we had a relatively anti-climactic end to one of the truly climactic points in our lives… We spent our honeymoon here in town, shopping for furniture with the money we’d earned for getting married, (what a racket… I’d be willing to do it once or twice a year if I thought folks would keep forking over the cash), and just generally hanging out.

But, before I can formally end this proverbial stroll along memory lane, we still have one more little pothole to investigate… And, to do that, we have to get back to the subject of food…

More to come…

Murv

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