The Outbreak: I fell off the wagon

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

I fell off the wagon

This ended up being a lost weekend for me. My first ever, as a matter of fact. I blacked out for the first time since that big party my freshman year, the time they found me curled around a toilet that several people had used by peeing over me into the bowl. I don't think it was the drinking that did me in so much as it was the ambien, which you can basically watch kicking in during the previous post. Booze: I got lucky and happened to be at the Food Mart down the street when a beer truck pulled in. I'm telling you, the whole neighborhood acted like zombies when they saw it--it was a flood. I paid probably five times what each case was actually worth, but what the fuck. Ambien: We've still got lots of everything, though Amy's been going through them at a decent pace. Me, not so much, but this weekend...this is going to sound absolutely ridiculous considering the amount of people I know who have lost parents and close friends and s.o.'s and children, but I got so so so pissed off that I'm probably not ever going to see the final Star Wars movie that I just couldn't take it anymore. I'm sure I'm not the only person who worried about getting killed in a terrorist attack before The Lord of the Rings could finish; same deal here, only this time it came true. Would I have preferred a dirty bomb to crazy dead people trying to kill and eat everyone? Would you be offended if I said yes at this point, oh dear readers?

Amy talked to my Grandmother on the phone for a while as I was recuperating this morning/afternoon. (Amy is not very happy with the amount of drinking that I did--the last thing she needs is me to puke and trigger her phobia--but I think everyone is very understanding of the need to self-medicate at this point so she's dealing with it.) She found out that my great-grandfather used to have wild parties and get very drunk and rambunctious, then lock the door and prevent anyone from leaving until he decided the party was over.

6 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Well, if it helps any, just remember that even if Episode 3 had been better than the last two, Lucas probably would have put in a lot of melodramatic junk. Probably would've had some cool spaceship battles, though.

But one of the many, many reasons to hate Our Current Situation is how it's even ruined the memory of the older films for me. I've got them on video and can watch them whenever the city is still able to provide power to private residences, but I'm never going to be able to watch Luke Skywalker again without remembering that, when the news of the reanimated dead started hitting broadcast TV and the major newspapers, the first celebrity who was reported as having been killed and eaten was Mark Hammill.

To switch subjects, how do people feel about staying in the cities vs. heading out to the more remote areas and trying to get away from the biggest source of potential Things, i.e. large crowds of the living? Me, I can't make up my mind, and god knows on really bad days I've thought about gassing up the Toyota and getting out of here like a bat out of hell, but the thing that I keep coming back to is, maybe there's safety in numbers. And where would I go, anyway? There are small towns that seem fine, or at least that seem to have things under control, but for every one of those there are others where nobody has attempted to contact the outside world for weeks. Nobody official will admit anything, but travel near those areas is totally discouraged, I can tell you that. And the authorities don't seem to have a plan for keeping tabs on those ... well, I guess you have to call them "ghost towns." I know government is really hard-pressed to deal with the crisis, but are we really going to just throw up our hand and cede those areas to the zombie plague as if it's already a lost cause?

Wednesday, May 25, 2005 4:45:00 AM  
Blogger Jodie said...

The problems with some of our small towns out here has been that they are easily overrun. That happened in Tiawah not too long ago.

But other areas out here have done surprisingly well, probably due to the number of people who have been stockpiling stuff for years. We don't have as many survivalists as places like Wyoming, but we do have plenty of people who are more "survivalist lite" -- more Dustbowl just-in-case practicality than unbalanced paranoia.

If you do decide to head out to parts unknown, I'd suggest plains rather than wooded areas, or maybe you'd do better with a boat on a waterway or even a lake area.

Wednesday, May 25, 2005 11:47:00 AM  
Blogger Mistrmind said...

I don't know about you guys, but when the shit hit the fan, it hit hard here.
All I heard on the radio was avoid hospitals and major highways and roadways. They were strictly kill zones for any of the living.
1st thing I did was quickly pack the car with everything that was in the pantry. My next door neighbor lent us the use of his shotgun and spare shells.
Packed my wife and the baby in our SUV. My wife drove, while I drove shotgun. We took all the backroads to Plymouth harbor. Ran into some resistance and mayhem on the way. From there we took a sailboat that was docked. Packed up the sailboat and took off for the middle of Cape Cod bay. Safest place to be right now.
The sailboat we stole came pretty well equiped. Has a radio, tv, kitchen area, with some dried food stuffs from the previous owner. Fishing gear as well as a small bedroom, and bathroom. The boat is about a 60 footer. I've been supplimenting our food stuffs with fishing. When water ran low, we straffed the Providencetown area and did some hit and runs on the empty beach houses there. I've heard bad reports from Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. Cuttyhunk is pretty safe and unaffected.
I'm planning on making another run on land sometime tomorrow morning. I might risk it and try hitting the Bourne area. The baby needs formula and I might try to hit a store or two.

Wednesday, May 25, 2005 2:30:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Prairie, maybe - I was really thinking of mountains. It just feels more like a fortress, you know? Prairie seems too open to me. A boat isn't an option where I live - where I am, it's just lakes and rivers. I don't know how to sail anyway, and besides, the Things can swim. Or at least, they float, and their thrashing around gets them where they want to go eventually. I guess the ocean would be OK, though, since I'm guessing sharks will get most of the floaters before they could get to your boat. But if I were you, I'd make damn sure nothing can climb up the side of the ship without you hearing it.

Wednesday, May 25, 2005 3:27:00 PM  
Blogger Carnacki said...

I miss beer. I know that's not as profound as the comments by the others. But I was so envious of you having beer I began to cry. And I didn't even drink that much. Maybe a beer on a Friday night once in a while watching Scare Tactics of all things.

Thursday, May 26, 2005 12:59:00 AM  
Blogger Sean T. Collins said...

I would have paid five times what I DID end up paying, I'll tell you that. But we've still got to be careful with money. If I give up on sobriety again I'm exhausting Amy's pharmaceutical collection before I do anything else.

Friday, May 27, 2005 12:30:00 AM  

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