Zombie Classics: Ishmael

Of course, reading is dead. Now, this is not to deny the fact that people still read, as someone is presumably reading these very words and taking umbrage at this assertion. But just as god is dead and priests still exist, so too is reading dead and readers still exist. These wakes are all-night affairs, and well attended.

Many lament the death of the great slow art, one of the finest aesthetic experiences available to humanity, but how to resist the final closing of the coffin? Can the dead yet rise again? People devise all sorts of desperate schemes to bring books to the disinterested modern youth, ranging from graphic novel adaptations of literary classics to stylish, modernized film versions of Shakespeare acted out by teen idols. These attempts, while done with the best of intentions, seem doomed to fail, as they are rightly perceived as the Trojan horses of high culture and never allowed past the gates.

My solution is simple. What do the kids love? Zombies. These lumbering, ridiculous monsters are slowly becoming ubiquitous among the youth of today. Zombie escape plans, zombie parties, zombie parades, amateur zombie films--the trend calls for more and more zombies. One can easily see it becoming a new personal style comparable to goth, with high school students putting on fake blood and dirty clothes each day before school, forming zombie cliques, only going to see zombie bands, et cetera.

To capitalize on this trend, I propose Zombie Classics. Combining a wide range of respected literary writing with images of the zombie apocalypse promises to introduce youth to a world of culture beyond the narrow range of George Romero and “Thriller.” This edition, the first in what I hope to be a long-running series, features Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, described as “one of the most beloved and best-selling novels of spiritual adventure ever published [with zombies].” Enjoy.

1
The first time I saw the flyer, I nearly burst into tears. I tore it down, which was irrational. Why should I prevent others from seeing it? I put it back up, which was also irrational. What if someone else saw it? I took it down again and tore it into several pieces, and then finished stocking up on canned goods from the deserted grocery store. I left the store and then marched right back in and picked up the pieces of paper, just to reassure myself that I had not imagined those words: “Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.”

Save the world! What a joke. What a farce. After all this time, someone had decided to save the world. I couldn’t believe it. Not just the fact that someone wanted to save the world, but just the fact that there was someone else out there. It had been months since I had seen another human soul. And now here was someone advertising their heroic delusions in the grocery store among all the old flyers on the bulletin board, tacked between the homemade posters saying “room for rent” or “couch for sale, slightly used.”

Once, several years ago, when things had begun to get bad, I had felt that way. I would save the world. With a buxom lady at my side, I would rescue the scientist (who would be too nerdy and plain to really be any competition for the lady’s affections) and work with him to devise a cure. I had pictured it all in great detail, right down to the undead hordes breaking through the doors of the lab as we desperately did the final test, injecting our last hope of a cure into a captive zombie and watching in amazement as it fell back into the normal sleep of death, freed from the insane disease that had destroyed the world. Gathering together a rag-tag group of survivors, we would spray the area with the cure, slowly bringing normalcy back to the beleaguered human race.

How stupid could I have been? You might say that it was unavoidable in the circumstances, but please, don’t spare me your criticism. It was naïve and delusional. I was a fool. The few survivors I found were more brutish and violent than the zombies that eventually ate them. All I encountered was cowardice, avarice, or at best, idiocy.

But I couldn’t let this flyer go. It bothered me. I needed to meet this supposed hero, if only to tell him of how stupid he was acting and prevent others from being sucked into his folly. After all, how could I ignore the message? There were so few of us survivors left.

More after the jump...

2
I hated going downtown, but I had to do it. I had to see this so-called teacher, even if just for a moment. Gas was getting scarcer all the time, but I felt this was a worthy excursion, so I packed up my jeep and navigated an obstacle course of burnt-out cars and zombie hordes until I reached the apartment building where this person was supposed to live. Fortunately, the building had secure underground parking, so I could leave my vehicle safe and out of sight.

The building seemed deserted. There were no zombies wandering the hallways, so I relaxed my guard a bit. Just a bit. I’m not stupid, of course. Not that it should be difficult to escape. Frankly, I never really understood how I became one of the last survivors. I firmly believe there’s no excuse for succumbing to zombies unless you accidentally parachute right into the middle of a group of them.

I knocked on the door to room 105, but received no reply after several minutes. The door was unlocked, so I entered cautiously, only to discover an empty room, the air stagnant with the smell of decay. There was a lone chair seated in front of a glass partition. On the other side of the glass, there was a zombie.

I looked around, expecting to see someone else. Was this a joke? Surely the zombie did not put up the flyer. But who would do such a sick thing? I walked closer to the caged creature. It watched me, but with a vague air of superiority, almost disinterest. I had never felt so insecure of myself around a zombie before. It was like the creature thought I was too inferior to be worth eating.

A sign above the zombie’s makeshift cage caught my eye. It read:

With Zombie Gone,
Will There
Be Hope
For Man?

The question unsettled me. It seemed so obvious at first. Surely there would be hope for man without zombie--wasn’t zombie the whole problem here? Or did the question suggest that man would destroy himself without zombie? But the implication of this interpretation was that somehow zombie averted humanity’s self-destruction, an idea I could not fathom.

More disturbing: did the zombie write it, or was it all part of some sick menagerie being put on for reasons beyond my understanding? I should have run out of there, but something compelled me to sit in the chair. The glass was not thick, and if the creature wished, it could have broken through easily, but its calmness soothed me. I sat and watched it.

“Urrrrrr,” it said.

Startled, I jumped from the chair. “Urrr,” it said more gently, but with great authority. To my own amazement, I sat down again. I could hear the creature’s words in my head, and I realized that it could communicate to me. For the first time in months, I was having a real conversation.

“Urrrr,” it said.

“I will call you Ishmael then,” I said, studying him more closely now that we had been properly introduced. He seemed much like any zombie I had ever seen--lumbering, unsteady, except with a certain drive to his movements that suggested a keen intelligence lacking in the others. His face was in particularly rough shape. A hole in his cheek allowed me to see his tongue, which writhed like a worm moving across a sidewalk. The jaw was fractured and hung lower on the right side.

“How did you get here?” I asked.

“Urrrr,” Ishmael explained. “Urrrr. Urrr; urrrrrrrrrrrr.”

“Incredible,” I said. I was fascinated by what he had to say, even though it occurred to me that if someone had entered the room at that moment, I would probably have appeared to be a madman talking to a grunting zombie. They could not possibly appreciate the richness of my dialogue with Ishmael. “And you want to teach me to save the world?”

“Urrr,” Ishmael said, nodding.

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Urrrr,” he said sternly.

“No, really, I don’t know what to say.” He frowned at me, glaring through his dead eyes. “Okay,” I said, “I do know. Yes, I see what you’re saying--zombie does, in a certain sense, rely on man. We are your food supply and parents, I guess, so we are intertwined. But does man really need zombie?”

“Urrrrr,” Ishmael explained, idly picking up a severed arm that I had not noticed before and chewing on it absent-mindedly. I tried not to stare, even though I was naturally quite unnerved by this action. If Ishmael noticed my discomfort, he did not let it show. “Urrrrrrrr.”

“I hadn’t really considered that. It isn’t really a matter of us needing you. We are you, and you us. But at the same time, we are fundamentally different. I don’t eat other people. I can procreate and live. These aren’t minor differences, are they?”

He waved the arm in the air and then made a great show of dropping it. “Urrr,” he said, pointing at it.

“Wow, just like that,” I said, shaken by this wisdom.

“Urrrr,” he added.

3
During the course of the next several days, I returned to Ishmael, always seeking to understand the depths of his parables. He was a difficult teacher, apt to scold me when I struggled and unsympathetic to my ignorance. Perhaps he was simply impatient. These were not minor issues that could be hashed out over the span of years. Zombie and man were fatally intertwined at the moment, and the situation was much like a person chained to a corpse and then tossed in the river. I suggested that the solution was to break free from the corpse and swim to the shore. He politely pointed to the folly of this solution--if I could break free so easily, then it wouldn’t be any real sort of dilemma, would it? His solution was to join the corpse, which he reckoned to be the more harmonious, natural alternative. I struggled with this idea. The implications of it hung over me like a shroud.

This day, when I entered room 105, I found that Ishmael was not behind the glass. I paused in the doorway, but he just looked up at me with mild disinterest and then returned to flipping through the book in front of him. I swallowed my fear and shuffled into the room, walking a bit like the undead myself. I wish I had the words to describe this strange, stumbling walk. At first glance, it looks comically clumsy, too stiff and slow to be threatening, but its implacability is terror itself. It suggests nothing less than the unstoppable desire to keep moving forward long after your ability to walk has decayed into a parody of itself. If you wish for more detail than my description can provide, I suggest you go to horror section of the nearest video store and start researching. It’s really for your own benefit.

I sat in my chair, as per usual, and awaited today’s lesson.

“Urrr?” Ishmael asked, finally looking at me. I noticed the hole in his cheek had grown larger since last time.

“I believe you were explaining to me how there are really two basic types of people, the Dead and Undead.”

“Urrrr?”

“Well, the Dead delude themselves into believing they have achieved that illusory state of perfection--which they call “living”--while the Undead are free of that illusion.”

Ishmael nodded, seemingly pleased with my progress. He rarely offered praise for my learning, but he sometimes betrayed a hint of satisfaction. “Urrrrr?” he prodded me on.

“The Undead have broken the barrier of death, that’s why. The Dead live in fear of death, the state they are naturally evolving towards, which is what drives them to such foolish behaviour. They live in fear of what they must inevitably become, constantly trying to put it off with all sorts of destructive “cures,” bad medicine and foolish schemes. We’re prey for every two-bit huckster with a miracle cure, and in the process of prolonging our so-called lives, we bring pain and suffering to everything around us.

“But the Undead are simply the Dead liberated from that fear. Having faced death, they see nothing to fear in it. It is simply a natural progression in the development of the human race.”

“Urrrrrr.” Ishmael shuffled back and forth, and I found myself almost hypnotized, as if I were watching a pendulum swing back and forth.

“So then the way we were trying to save the world was all wrong--the failed cures, the soldiers gunning down zombies--all of that was just a prolonging of the inevitable?”

“Urrrr.”

“I think I’m having trouble here. Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

Ishmael frowned.

“No, you’re right, I see what you mean. Perhaps I just have a hard time giving up this illusion.”

“Urrrrr.”

“Well, I always saw the zombie process being reversed through sheer human ingenuity. But that wouldn’t change anything, would it?”

“Urrrr.”

“Because we all still die in the end. This is just evolution deferred.”

“Urrrrr,” Ishmael said, and as he spoke, I heard a faint, bone-cracking sound that made me jump in my seat.

“Are you okay, Ishmael?”

Ishmael frowned at this, waving his hand dismissively. “Urrrrr--” he started to speak, but the right side of his jaw detached and hung momentarily by the skin of his left cheek until it ripped apart like an old rag and clattered to the floor. Ishmael said nothing. He stared at the jaw that lay at his feet.

I stood up awkwardly. “Listen, this isn’t right, something’s wrong. You need help. You’re malnourished, or sick, or something. I want to help.”

“Rrrrrrr,” he rasped. The words came out guttural and distorted, sliding helplessly off that writhing tongue into the stale air of the room.

I held out my arm.

He scraped his upper jaw along my forearm, drawing blood but unable to bite off any flesh. He shook his head sadly and pointed to the door. “Rrrrr,” he said. “Rrrrrrrrrr!”

I had seen Ishmael irritated many times, but this was the first time I had seen him angry. Upset and confused, I left.

4
Of course, that was the last time I saw Ishmael. When I returned to the apartment the next day with some food for him (don't ask), he was already gone. Do the Undead die? I wish the lessons had covered that. Perhaps he had gone on to the next stage of human development, a mystery so obscure that not even Ishmael, in all his wisdom, could have warned of it.

I walked around the apartment, which had never seemed so empty now that Ishmael was gone. Some of his books remained; the chair lay on its side, as if the spirit had left it now that Ishmael was no longer there to animate the room. He had seemed so wondrously alive with ideas, while I--I was utterly dead without him.

Standing at the window, I could see several zombies inspecting my jeep. It was parked outside the front door. Ishmael was not among them, but I watched with curiosity. Were all of the Undead as wise as Ishmael? The fundamental distrust between the Dead and Undead made it futile to hope of any communication between their disparate worlds. You might as well build a bridge between Earth and Mars.

I turned away from the window, rubbing my forehead. I felt feverish. The blood seemed to be draining from my face. But where could it possibly go? Didn’t it travel in a cycle, meaning it would inevitably return to the place it had left behind? I had never understood such things, and I feared I would never find any more answers without Ishmael.

As I shuffled about the apartment, I felt something beneath my shoe and looked down. The sign was on the floor, which bothered me for some reason. It seemed like the sign was made to be hung on a wall and shown respect, not trampled under foot. I picked it up and noticed there was writing on both sides. The phrase I had first seen when I entered the apartment reversed itself on the back:

With Man Gone,
Will There
Be Hope
For Zombie?

It seemed that Ishmael had posed one last question for me. I picked up the chair and sat down, rubbing the wound on my arm, waiting for the answer.

Summer

Next month will be my two year anniversary of being in Canada, and I still can't get used to the summers here. I come from the land of hot and humid for nine months out of the year. Just to give you an idea, the area is the same subtropical latitude as Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and southern Iraq.

Now that you have that geographical comparison in mind, I'll proceed to describe the summers. Just wait and let me finish before you say "I'd give my right arm to have that weather!" because you might change your mind by the time I'm finished.

By the time late February rolls around, all the plants start to come to life. When you start to see little patches of green, you know to brace yourself for the excruciating summer that's to come. By mid March you're already in shorts and a t-shirt and you're planning a weekend to the beach to lay out. When Easter arrives, most of the flowers have bloomed and you've already had your first sun burn for the year. A little bit after Easter, the air conditioners buzz making the electric bill a stupid amount. In July, you're sweating buckets. Then the hell month (August) arrives and it really does feel like being in hell.

After it rains, you can see the steam come off the roads. It's not a little bit of steam. I mean, it's enough to make the whole area foggy. For those who are brave enough to venture out, you don't wear jeans when doing so. As soon as you open the door, the humidity hits you like a wall of bricks and sometimes you even lose your breath and have to gasp! Your hair immediately frizzes, and if you're wearing any hairspray it melts. There's no hairspray on this earth that can withstand the humidity. Your clothes feel damp almost as if you've just thrown them in the dryer but didn't let them dry completely. Your breathing gets heavier and every stitch of clothing on you feels so much heavier as well. You might think "that's probably only during the day." Nope. My dear friend, it happens day OR night.

Usually starting in early July we'll begin water conservation for the outdoors (or what I call water rationing). You'd think a breeze would be a welcome relief in the day, but it's not. In over 100 degree weather, the breeze will feel like a hot hair dryer blowing on you but it's blowing hot humid air.

There's no point in having leather seats in your car down South. Your car's interior seems to melt. You can't touch your steering wheel (even with the windows cracked!) and you can't sit down or your ass will burn. When you get to the car, you roll down all windows and turn the a/c up full blast. If you're unfortunate to have leather seats, you use a towel or something in an attempt to protect the area that your ass will grace for the commute to and from work.

Hell month is our hottest month. Imagine temperatures that will rise above 100F (40C) with 90% humidity and there will be no rain for weeks. You'll be rationing water STILL, you have to cake the wax on your car to protect the paint, and not to mention this is when the hurricanes start rolling in. There will be a few that'll hit but September is the worst month for hurricanes. There have been times when hurricanes have traveled up the Savannah River and spawned tornadoes in my area. But for the most part, we get the remnants of the storm and that's when we make up for all the rain we have missed all summer.

Canadians take full advantage of the summer and they are out every day and all day doing something outside. For us, when it gets hot you stay inside until it's somewhat bearable.

I don't miss the summers back home, but I do miss hearing the crickets, tree frogs, and June bugs at night. It was like a little insect symphony playing a private concert for my sole enjoyment. It was my lullaby that put me to sleep. When we had our a/c on, I bought a little alarm clock/radio/sound machine that had the insect symphony on it so I could fall asleep even though the windows were closed. All I hear now is the sound of traffic from the highway and sirens.

On summer nights there's a little bit of relief, but you still have to contend with temperatures that would maybe sink to 92F (33C) at around 10pm. You would sit on your front porch in your rocking chair with a glass of iced sweet tea and listen to the bugs singing. Occasionally you'll hear bull frogs calling for ladies. Even on those cool nights you're still sweating. You might not sweat as much, but it's still yucky.

So, when I hear Canadians say "it's gonna be a scorcher," giving advice on how to prevent heat stroke, or say it's hot when it reaches 86F (30C), I laugh. Are you still willing to give your right arm for that weather?

I came to save you all but I am too late

The lunatics were right.

I speak of the lonely ranters and pamphleteers that approach you on street corners, all of them carrying the burden of some horrible truth that only they know, be it the secret satanic motives of Christian rock or George Bush’s planning of the 9/11 attacks. I shrink from these poor souls, even as I can’t help but admire their willfulness in professing a reality completely contrary to the accepted facts. Would that I had such self-confidence.

But I have slowly come to realize there truly is a conspiracy lurking beneath the surface of the everyday. Its tendrils burrow into the most innocuous moments of our lives and claim them for its own purposes--purposes that are beyond knowing not only by those outside the conspiracy, but those inside it as well. The size of this conspiracy might as well be infinite, for like infinity its exact proportions can never be contained within a mortal mind. Its goals are unknown; they could be either benign or malignant. It is possible that the conspiracy has grown to such proportions that ordinary moral categories can no longer be applied to it.

I apologize if this all sounds vague, but I have only begun to grasp the significance of the conspiracy. All I can tell you is that it exists. I know this because I am a part of it.

Not willingly, of course. The conspiracy works like some sort of terrorist organization, drafting people into its shadow army before they are even aware of what is happening. By the time they understand, they are in too far to resist. Individual operatives are unaware of others in the organization. They may encounter another agent briefly, but only once. There are no regular contacts.

Years after the fact, I only realize now that my first encounter with the conspiracy occurred when a cashier at the grocery store casually noted how closely I resembled her brother-in-law Jim. “Hi, Jim,” she would say whenever she saw me. It became a harmless joke between strangers, and I accepted it. My face is just a bit common, I would tell myself. There’s nothing strange about looking like someone else. It happens all the time. If it had ended there, I would not have thought any more of it.

My second encounter with the conspiracy occurred when I worked at a fish market/restaurant. Some of my coworkers claimed that one of the regular patrons of the restaurant looked almost exactly like me. One waitress even liked to say that this man ate just like me. How does he eat like me, I would demand to know. How do I eat? What on earth does that even mean? And the waitress would half-heartedly say something about how he holds his utensils, or sits at the table, or something like that, and then she would carry on insisting that we were practically identical in every way.

This went on for some time without me ever seeing my double. Still, my coworkers kept me well-informed of when he had been in, what he had eaten, how similar to me he had looked while eating, etc. Undoubtedly, he was just as well-informed of my own comings and goings. Christine, one of the waitresses, even took to calling him Joe, much like I had been called Jim by the cashier at the grocery store. All three of us were linked, switching names as casually as hats, all of us as interchangeable as front-line soldiers in a war (but what war did we fight? The generals told us nothing). And still, I had not yet met this other Joe.

Finally, the encounter happened after weeks of build-up. As I was standing alone behind the counter, I watched as a man left the restaurant. His hair was a light, sandy brown, and he had a mustache. He seemed a couple of inches shorter than me and probably thinner. But as he passed, he stared at me and I met his gaze. Neither of us spoke, but I could read his thoughts and he mine. We both were thinking the same thing: this is my twin and I look nothing like him.

But despite the fact that we did not look alike and were years apart in age, we recognized each other. How could we recognize each other as identical twins and not actually be similar in any way?

That is the conspiracy. Jim and Joe, Joe and Jim, the unseen army, a legion of pseudo-twins, all vaguely reminiscent of each other and yet completely different. What is the source of this indefinable similarity? Were we born out of test tubes? Grown in pods? Are we robots? Is our blood oily and black? Were we siblings back on the old family homestead on Mars? I fear I may never know.

We walk among you. Aren’t you afraid of us? My god, I’m afraid of us. Don’t you see that something horrible is at work, some unseen force shaping life into a grotesque parody of normalcy? And yet, the conspiracy runs so deep that its corruption of reality may well pass for truth. Perhaps we have lost all reference points, and now we wander this desert guided by mirages and drinking down sand like a cool glass of water.

I wish I could turn myself in and blow this thing wide open, but what hope is there in that? What could I say? I know no one else in the organization, except one person I never met and another I saw once. I do not know when I will be called, or what I will be required to do, but it is inevitable and I am helpless before it. Deep down, buried somewhere in my brain like a microchip sending me secret messages, I know there is a purpose to these coincidences that will slowly, monstrously unveil itself to me.

I have said too much; I haven’t said enough. You may scoff, but do not feel so secure. Someday, you too may be approached. We all may be drawn into this eventually. The entire human race--my god, think of it, every single living person--may be involved in this thing. Yes, it could be that big. Do you think the lunatics were making this conspiracy stuff up? Like me, they know because they’re part of it already.

So remember, if someone tells you how much you look like some person named Jon or Jay, know that it is already too late. You were part of the conspiracy from the start.

Were ya born in a barn?

No, but I work in one.

(Note: When I started writing for this blog, I truly wanted to adhere to the rule of "no discussing work [except in the vaguest of terms]," so I hope this is vague enough. But seriously, who can help it? For 10 hours a day, I'm bound to The Company by either work or commuting to work. That's a good chunk of time, considering the next biggest chunk involves me unconscious and drooling on a pillow. Work has become such a main part of my life that the creeping majority of who I call friends are also co-workers or former co-workers. How can I not write about this place when it consumes a healthy fraction of my day and therefore my daydreams?)

I was born one of those fortunate girls who doesn't have a horse face. I don't gather in gossipy hen parties. Nor am I a cow (well, hopefully not too much of one). I was born in a hospital, not a drafty barn. I drive a car, not pull a wagon. I take showers in a bathroom, instead of getting hosed down 'round back. I eat with a knife and fork, not my face.

And yet The Company treats me and my colleagues like cattle. Well-liked cattle, but still...we're not even free range.

First of all, the main feature (Gasp! Not our personalities?) is the Barn Door. Our ex-Big Wig had it installed to muffle the sound from the rest of the office, but really it's a toy he swings open and shut like a two-year-old when he takes guests around for the grand tour. No one simply calls it "a door" anyway; it's the Barn Door. How demeaning.

And not long ago, an epiphany sprung up and hit me: the whole room is feng-shui'd like a stable. Desks lined up against the longest walls of the room; each pen, er, work station separated by a partition; the floor, were it a few shades lighter, would almost look like 2-D hay. And maybe I've been in this room too long, but it's starting to look good in the yummy sense.

We even work on a regimented schedule, like farm critters do:

08:00 Work begins
10:00 First 15-minute break begins
12:00 Lunch

Lunch at noon is when they herd us out to the lunchroom to graze, chew the cud, and cluck around.

12:30 Resume work

We head back to our pens so The Company can keep milking the effort out of us.

15:00 Second 15-minute break begins

But every now and then, we're given a treat, like a birthday cake, barbeque, or bonbons, and we all hoof it down to the lunchroom to collect our prize. The Company loves us! we exclaim. But in another 15 minutes, it's back to work. No grazing here for long.

17:00 End of the work day

After a few more hours pass, The Company quits milking and riding us for the day. The pigs, cows, cocks, chickens, sheep, asses, and mother hens all ride off into the sunset.

But we're not unruly animals. We're people—with families, not herds; homes, not coops; kids, not offspring. We'll eat our dinner off fine china, not out of a trough. So why is it that for eight hours a day, five days a week, we're treated like animals? Is it that human beings as a group are untamable, unpredictable, and unkempt? Do we really require dress codes, regimented break and meal times, and memos to keep us civil in the corporate barnyard? Does The Company, and others like it have so little faith in us working responsibly between 8 am and 5 pm that they use the laws of the animal kingdom to "behaviourly modify" us?

Cakes and sugar cubes can only satisfy the beasts for so long before the beasts get restless in their pens. Acknowledge us as humans, damn it!

If Jane Schmo needs a smoke break 14 times a day, let her have it—a good person will make up that missed time. If John Doe needs to get to a non-work appointment, let 'em. If my stomach growls and my work is caught up to a reasonable point, let me head out for lunch at 11:37 (because I'm hungry) instead of 12 noon (because The Company says so). I don't want a parking lot anally ordered into who-gets-what-spot or segregated from the "outer lot beasts"—it makes me feel fenced in and claustrophobic. Let us flow freely, yet safely through each other's lives.

The human world is calm and in order, but we can't find out what exactly that is or how it works unless we give up this barnyard society.

I am not an animal.

- Ewe/Girl on the Corner (I wrote this during my sanctioned lunch hour!)

The Beginning of the End

I bought some make-up the other day. That may not seem like a big deal to anyone else. Trust me; it is a huge deal. Cause here’s the thing. Make-up is the beginning of a very short road to being elderly. I bet you can’t name one old woman who won’t leave the house without “putting her face on.” There is a certain age that a woman decides that her friends, family, and even perfect strangers should not, under any circumstances, be forced to look upon her naked face.

Next in the short road to elderly-ness is being paranoid. Now that I’ve bought make-up, I predict that it won’t be long before I’m tying my purse handle to the shopping cart and shredding every piece of paper that comes into my home. I’ll start asking friends at lunch to “please watch my purse” while I run to the ladies’ room and I’ll refuse to order anything on-line.

Then it’s a slippery slope to wearing pastel-coloured polyester pants with elastic waistbands and shirts with kittens outlined in sequins. I’ll have short, curly salt-and-pepper hair, beige nurse-shoes, and eyeglasses hanging by a chain.

I bought make-up. I’m afraid.

Itchy Feet

I have a confession to make. I, Nan Eff, suffer from itchy feet. I’ve racked up credit cards, told white lies and missed spending my own birthday with family and friends just to scratch the itch. And yet, in the same way a gambler does, I lie awake at night reliving the last fix; dreaming of the next.

Vancouver, Frankfurt, Spokane, Budapest--they’ve all satisfied temporarily. I’ve been content to walk through torrential rain just to drink a latte at a Starbucks in Vancouver, and more than happy to carry 30 lbs of personal belongings on my back through the streets of Frankfurt to eat pasta in a diner. Both of these things I could have done at home, but neither would have made the itch go away.

It could be hereditary; my grandmother rarely spends more than a month in one place. Or maybe it has to do with my commitment issues--every time things get a little comfortable the itch gets worse.

But mostly, once you’ve breathed in the humid air of the Danube, eaten sweet poppyseed dumplings in Prague and wandered casually through a Sunday market in Cracow, you know something different exists.

And that something different might not be something better, but having experienced it, having translated unfamiliar signs and adjusted to illogical store hours, is enough to remind yourself who you are and what you are capable of doing.

Don’t ask me where I want to go next; I can’t tell you--I want to go everywhere. I want to experience cockroaches in my bed in India and losing my passport in Kenya. I’m willing to try dog meat in Korea and frog legs in Peru. I could have my bags packed in 15 minutes, and wouldn’t think twice about charging another flight to my credit card. You think I’m exaggerating? Try me.

I have nothing to say

I've never written for a blog before. I've read them though, so I feel like I'm an expert on what is and what isn't a blogworthy subject. All the same, I have spent the last two weeks trying to decide what to write. I've come up with hundreds of ideas (well, tens of ideas, but that doesn't have the same ring to it). And all I've ended up with is a list of subjects that I think are unblogworthy. Subjects that nobody in their right mind would ever want to read about. Naturally, I've made a list of some of the subjects I won't be blogging about.

1. Recipes.
My aunt's brother-in-law's wife's great-grandmother once made some peanut butter cookies that my uncle's father's friend Tom really, really liked. I know you're all thinking that you must have this recipe. I mean, Tom really loved these cookies and so it's pretty much guaranteed that these are the best peanut butter cookies that you'll ever taste. Seriously? Is there anyone out there who needs this recipe? Doesn’t everybody already have a peanut butter cookie recipe, and is anyone really thinking, “I’ve always loved my own peanut butter cookie recipe, but Tom has never raved about my cookies. Maybe I better try this random blogger’s aunt’s brother-in-law’s wife’s great grandmother’s recipe that random blogger’s uncle’s father’s friend Tom really liked?” Don’t worry I won’t be blogging about recipes.

2. My fifth birthday party.
I wore a yellow dress with a green satin ribbon belt. I don’t actually remember, but I’ve seen pictures. Ironically I seem to be pretty happy, despite the fact that my mom went and got all my hair cut off so that the only way you can actually tell that it’s a girl in the picture is the yellow dress with the green satin ribbon belt.

3. Mustaches.
Mustaches don’t really lend themselves to good blogging fodder. Besides listing off different kinds of mustaches, what else is there to write about them. Sure I could tell you about how you can tell what kind of man someone is by how he dresses his upper lip, but that could just become a bitter diatribe about stupid people I’ve met in my lifetime and who really wants to hear that. Mustaches are not something I’ll be blogging about.

4. Work.
I have some great work stories. And great work gossip that very few people know. I could go on and on about things I’ve heard about certain disliked people in the office, but…alas…blogging about work is off limits. Shoot. I really wanted to share.

5. Music.
If you google “music blogs,” you will get over 71 million hits. I’m guessing (because the first sentence took all of my research skills) that most of these blogs speak somewhat intelligently about the subject of music. I do not. I am not at all sophisticated in the way of music. I can’t discuss the riff in the fifth stanza; I do not know the difference between a violin and a viola (besides the obvious fact that one of them has more letters than the other). I don’t know everything there is to know about any genre of music; I don’t even know the names of most of the bands that play songs on my current radio station. I do know all the lyrics to the songs on the RENT soundtrack. I can sing and play drums with all the songs in RockBand (I can’t play the guitar, though; it hurts my thumb). All I’m trying to say is that I won’t be blogging about music.

That’s why I don’t blog. I have nothing to say. I’ll keep thinking though; you’ll be the first to know as soon as I think of something blogworthy. Promise.

A quick n' dirty blog

Hmm, a blank text box. I know what you want from me. You have a one-track mind. You want me to blog in you. Well, maybe I'll just turn off this screen and twiddle my thumbs, or go for a long walk, or take a cold shower—because you're not getting any of my words today. No sir. You're just using me for my fingers and my brain just so I'll put cute, serif-y letters in you forming snarky and quasi-entertaining sentences. You don't care about me. And I don't want anything from you.

Okay, I'll admit it was kinda fun when we wrote about hair metal. And writing for NaNoWriMo was exhilarating. But that was long ago, and I'm ready to move on. No more of this silliness. If I'm going to blog in you, it should be a meaningful and beautiful experience. Not just some "quick and dirty" non-sequitur. I'm not some wham-bam-thank-you-text-box kinda girl.

See, now look—we've gone too far already. This is only going to hurt one of us. Just moments ago, you were a pure, clean text box and now look what you've made me do. What if someone catches us, is watching us right now? They'll see me sullying your good nature with my clumsy fingers and bumbling, rambling thoughts. This is not passionate blog-making; this is blogging hard and fast with no regard for the consequences.

And just when I think I'm done with you, when I've filled you up, little text box, you give me more. You spare me an inch and I steal a mile. You're taking all of my thoughts, you don't even care what they're about. Maybe I'll give you my B-material, huh? Save my good stuff for a more worthy text box, a text box that appreciates me for who I am.

Take this then: fingernail growth, sexy grandmas, tractors on the highway, and the joys of ironing.

Don't like it rough? Well, that's tough and that's all you're getting: worn socks, staplers, low-income housing, hairy backs.

Have some more: paper or plastic, coasters, travel packing.

Yeah, it's all random and it's all meaningless. Not like my other text boxes. You don't deserve meaning—just random, pointless blogging. And that's just how you need it, and need it bad. Now here's the part where you say my name.

Say my name, text box.

Say my name!

- Girl on the Corner (yeah, I just made this text box my bitch)