There are certain things, that when said aloud, will bring most any conversation to a screeching halt. You know the things I mean. Stuff such as, “Whoops, my hair is on fire…” or “Whoa! Is that Dana Delany over there?”

Personally, I have an intense fondness for the Dana Delany comment, but then we already knew that, right? Well, if you didn’t, you do now… Oops… Guess that was sorta awkward, eh?

The thing is, there are several such phrases that can bring a conversation to a sudden halt. Case in point…

I was prattling on endlessly with my PA the other day. As it happens, the o-spring is out of school for the summer, so she was sitting there fiddling about with her Nook or some such since it is loaded up with a ton of summer reading for her. Since she’s all kinds of brilliant and has a high school level command of the English language, I often forget that she’s still just a tween, so my filters aren’t always in place. In this instance, they weren’t, and I was talking to my PA about Merrie Axemas, and In The Bleak Midwinter, giving him a synopsis of the stories, how they related, differed, and other such nonsense.

Well… Anyone who has read Merrie Axemas knows that there is a dismemberment involved. Merrie. Axe. Mas… You get the idea. So moving right along, as we are talking the o-spring pipes up and says:

“Did you know that when your head is chopped off you still live for eleven more seconds?”

This really shouldn’t – and didn’t – surprise me. After all, she’s my kid… But that’s not the thing that stopped the conversation. I mean, think about it. I research all manner of nastiness for my thriller novels… After all, I write about serial and/or spree killers for the most part. That’s why I’m a member of the HWA, and not the “Grandma’s Cozy Knitting Happily Ever After Ending Whodunit Club”…

But on with the story… you see, since both my PA and I know my kid, we just continued the convo, involving her at this point. Mainly discussing the fact that 11 seconds might be a bit of a stretch, but that there was some evidence to indicate that the brain continued to function very briefly following decapitation.

This then turned to different ways of dying, and before I knew it my PA and my daughter were into a discussion of which way to go would be the least traumatic. They got onto beheading, suffocation, drowning, etc, and I added my two cents, that being the fact that I was under the impression that suffocation wasn’t a particularly pleasant way to go, no matter HOW the suffocation happened. That’s when my PA regaled us with a tale of how he had almost drowned – or come somewhat close – when he was a child, and how it had gone from a fearful struggle to a simple calm… Well, obviously he didn’t drown, or he wouldn’t have been there having weird death conversations with my tween daughter.

But this was when the conversation stopper came.

Darling daughter pipes up, “Yeah, I almost drowned a few years ago.”

You could hear a pin drop. I stared at her. She stared at me. My PA stared at her. She stared at him. We all stared at each other.

Finally I broke down and said, “When was this?”

“A few years ago at blankity-blank pool,” she replied.

“How?”

She shrugged. “It was before I knew how to swim and my friend took me to the deep end and left me there because she didn’t know that I couldn’t swim.”

I stared some more. “Why am I just now hearing about this?”

“I dunno.”

“So, did the lifeguard jump in and save you or something? I mean, it seems to me they would have told us about it when we picked you up from summer day camp.”

“No,” she said. “My friend just took me back to the shallow end.”

“Well, did you start sinking or what? How did you almost drown?”

She thought about it a second and then said, “Well… I might’ve kinda exaggerated…”

Guess I can’t complain. She’s my kid. She got it honest…

More to come…

Murv

I could just as easily have called this Hell House: Welcome To Hell…

I’ll explain that in just a sec. Keep reading. Or don’t. But then you’ll never know the answer…

You see, I was listening to NPR the other day. I do that a lot. Either NPR or CD’s. It’s not that I believe they are completely fair and balanced in their reporting. There is no such organization. Even back when I was learning from Martha Ackmann that the primary goal of the journalist is to be objective and report the news, the professionals out there doing it had biases bleeding through their words. Now, it seems like it’s even worse. Or maybe it’s just that my idealism committed suicide somewhere around my 30th birthday and I was suddenly able to see the emperor’s new clothes for what they really were… or weren’t as the case may be.

However, I’m chasing a whole different chicken with that. Take notice, I said chasing, not choking… Let’s not get the title confused with the prose.

So, anyway, I was listening to NPR and they had an allergist on there who was doing a study about some manner or regional pine tree allergy in the PNW that had gone undiagnosed and untreated in thousands of people over the years. In the process he was giving some basic info about how allergies work, how they form, and how it can be different for certain folks. Like being born with them, or being exposed to an allergen in small amounts over a long period of time – sorta like death by saccharin, if you believe that effed up study.

And, in some cases, a massive exposure to an allergen triggering a reaction that just sticks with you for the rest of forever.

Enter, Hell House…

If you’ve read my previous blogs on the subject of Hell House, then you know that when my father passed, part of his estate was a house that my sister and I now own. With my sis being far and away, the bulk of the duties regarding upkeep have fallen to me. If you want all those gory details, with pictures, just look up the Hell House blogs here on BL.

But back to those damnable fornicating avians and insects…

The previous tenant to whom my father had been renting Hell House was all about plants, and had quite the weed patch going in the exceptionally large back yard. I say weed patch because if a plant isn’t a tree, grass, or something that produces an edible fruit, root, berry, or seed that I would find on my plate during a meal, then as far as I’m concerned it’s a weed.

Now that we’re on the same page… When the tenant moved out we had to do some work to the place before re-renting it. Part of that work involved cleaning up the weed patch, which ended up happening in the fall when everything was going to seed. E K and I spent countless hours one weekend, mowing, digging, chopping, and stuffing dried up, alien kudzuish whatevers into yard barges. The work was hard, sweaty, dirty, nasty, and otherwise unpleasant, but it needed to be done. And, if there’s one thing I can say it’s that E K and I do not run from hard work.

However, by the time we arrived home and I had myself a nice hot shower, something began to happen. My entire body itched, my face turned into a misshapen Murv balloon, and breathing was no longer a concept my body could wrap said balloon head around. Fortunately, a healthy dose of Benadryl re-enabled my ability to process oxygen, but it didn’t even take the edge off my case of the miserables.

Not long after that I heard the Doc on NPR.

I’d never had allergies before. Now I do. Every time the avians, insects, and weeds engage in their inter-species orgy of public fornication – spring and fall – I turn into a dwarf with an identity crisis. I can’t decide if my name is Itchy, Sneezy, Stuffy, Snotty, or Achey.

So, Hell House: 157, Merp: 0

Oh well… at least I’m not allergic to sex.

More to come…

Murv

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