The Outbreak

2005-12-22T16:11:00.000-05:00

So that's that. I guess we should have seen it coming in November when everything started to change so rapidly--when the outbreak seemed to metastasize, is that the right word for it? and everyone who died turned. Of course by then it was so hard to get reliable information, let alone compare it to a wide enough sampling of information elsewhere to put things together for yourselves, especially after the Coast and the clampdown...will that let up now? I guess these reports are the first sign that the wall is coming down again. Maybe. I don't know. Good news is the only news, maybe. We'll see.

I'm surprisingly calm. That's how I'd look at it anyway. But when Pa-Pa died I remember thinking the same thing, so perhaps I shouldn't be surprise.d The person who brought you happiness in life would not want you to be upset. No matter how things ended.

I don't know why he wouldn't stop drinking. Even when it was obvious what it was doing...the TIA and everything...oh, I can't. He was my dad, fuck it, I'm not going to run him down or hate him, I'll always love him, my dad. I've been there and I stopped, but I don't know what everyone else goes through. He had a hard life. His dad dying when he was 7, no birthday parties ever, taking the bus home from graduation alone, the uncle who robbed them. I don't know why he did what he did and never will. I don't know why I'm angry with my mother other than that it's okay to be angry with her because I've been angry with her before. But I love her too. I don't want this to have happened to her. I don't wnat her to feel this way. I don't want her to have been so hurt. I don't want to leave her behind. I miss my dad and I miss my mom & dad, momanddad.

Amy...what it boils down to is I can't go through this again. I love you and that is why I'm doing this with you, but it's also for me. I can't have it, don't want it. You starving is like him drinking--didn't you pick up on that? So that's why I'm doing this. There won't be a hospital to take you to for a long time, no treatment center. It's me, it's on me, do you understand? And I know what you say to that and that it's self-centered bullshit and I can't help it, I'm sorry. Failure failure failure. I've got to do this, even if you DIDN'T want to. I've got to save SOMEBODY.

After Dad and Grandma the house was useless--that was obvious. And no I'm not going to talk about it too much. I'm dissasocialaksj;lkdjlkj whatever from it, I know that, and that's fine. I was so used to it by then anyway, never thought of who they used to be. (But that's not true at all, is it? Look at that Mr. Stone post down there! This case was this case, is what I respond to that.) Nobody saw it which is what I'm grateful for. Nobody saw until it was alread done, a fait accompli if you will as it were so to speak in a sense. I'd nver seen them go so berserk before and I'm grateful because that's what I concentrated on, Ryan too. Just flailing, tearing things apart, trying to get up, down, out, wherever. I wish we'd known--known for sure--that it was all but over. Maybe we could have toughed it out another week? Not fallen apart? How I hate that this happened. Hate it, hate it, it's so black and bitter because what can you do but choke on it and HATE IT SO MUCH, everything since March, HATE IT? Regret is what frightens me you know. Mistakes you can't ever fix, things you do wrong that you can't ever make up for. That's the scariest. I mean isn't it? I learned that when I cheated. And the night I ran out of the apartment and woke up by the dumpster. That's unfixable, isn't it? Is it forgiveable but unfixable? Does that stay broken? Oh Daddy, Daddy, I love you!!!!!!! Why?

Ryan's gonna move in with Samantha's family until things get moving again, and Caitlin is going back to Philadelphia after Christmas, and Mom is going with her and we are going to Colorado with our cats and Mom is taking their cats. We're not waiting till they let the planes back in the air--we're driving. We wanted to leave by sundown but that's not happening. Maybe after dinner. There'll be rough spots but hopefully we're tuned in enough to avoid them and now that they're not coming back anymore it should get better and better. Amy needs her family and I need Amy, so really, that decision is made. Watching it all fall apart, well, I need

My christmas present for everyone was a big kiss. For you guys I don't know. I'm glad that you made it through. I might try to get back on here again in Colorado, if I can. But maybe not. Maybe not. Well, good luck. Good luck to you. I'm okay, I'm okay, don't worry about it. That's all.

Goodbye, Dad

2005-12-19T22:07:00.000-05:00

I've got nothing

2005-12-01T23:25:00.000-05:00

Sorry

Away. That's where I want to go. Maybe if we remove ourselves from the equation they'll stop killing themselves, both of them. \
But that's not true. I can't save either of them. Make that all three of them, even if she's in less danger now. Something's wrong there too. My brother and sister and I and the cats are trying.

I keep seeing old Mr. Stone's face at the window again. The window here in the computer room, that's where I finally saw him. I knew that old nightmare from when I used to live here would come true, I just knew it. I still had that total moment of collapse when it happened, my heart instantly felt like it had just disappeared and blood rushed in to fill the vacuum and I fell out of the chair. That was a while ago now and the next time he showed up from wherever he'd been hiding I was ready for him. I guess I broke YOUR neck, asshole, ha ha. And afterwards I threw him in his fucking rose garden before I called the crew to dispose of him. That time he yelled at Ryan and Peter from across the street about the roses, that was maybe my first memory of this house. I think that now this is going to be one of the last. Maybe I wanted to bring it full-circle.

Suddenly a dead face appear s in the window. shave and a haircut two bits

2005-11-21T21:37:00.000-05:00

Why are these decisions that *I* have to make? Answer me that. I did not expect to h ave to be doing this at age 27, that much I can tell you. Fucking grow up, you babies.

And if I get one more comment telling me "you have problems but I'm living in dumpsters in the woods" or whatever I swear I will fucking hunt people down. Whoop dee shit! You're wandering around scared and alone! So is half the fucking country! Your problem isn't any more unique than mine, and if you think mine is less serious because I happen to have a house to live in and family to live with, I cordially invite you to suck my fucking dick. I am really sick to death of being invalidated, of having no one think that my problems are worth caring about because other people have it worse. It makes me feel like I'm going crazy and I know I am NOT going crazy.

That fucking guy. I'm ready for him tonight. Scared the shit out of me the other day, but no longer. If he comes back around I'm going out there and taking his head off myself, I don't care how dark it is.

2005-11-19T22:36:00.000-05:00

alcoholism
depression
denial
self-pity
learned helplessness
post-traumatic stress disorder
anorexia
anger
borderline personality disorder
cabin fever
fear
fear
fear

2005-11-17T16:59:00.000-05:00

Is it me, or does almost everyone turn now?

And there's nothing mroe fun to watch than the disintegration of your famiyl, is there?

2005-11-07T11:10:00.000-05:00

the main thing we're concerned about now is our next-door neighbor. It's funny--he used to be the real stereotypical "mean old man next door"--he threatened to break my brother's neck if he broke any of his roses, and we're reasonably sure he shot our cat with a bb gun and left antifreeze out for him. But after his wife passed he really mellowed, and over the past few years my mom says he's become really nice. The thing is that no one has seen him for a few days. And they absolutely are more aggressive and determined when they get stuck someplace and are unable to feed for a certain period of time, I mean even *I* in my limited experience could tell you that. So we're worried about him in a couple of different ways, basically. He has had heart problems.

Amy and I got in a fight last night. I couldn't tell you what it was about, really. But we haven't been close in a while now. How did we not really notice that before? Or did we, and did we choose to ignore it? Last weekend was very nice, but since then, virtually no "meaningful touches," snuggling, that sort of thing. Very little talking about anything of import. We sort of go our own separate ways in the house. We don't really snuggle when we go to sleep or get up.

My brother is a mess too. He's actually been working, doing financial stuff for one of the fleets, but they sold him a real bill of goods in terms of what his responsibilities would be. He's working all the time, coming home late in the dark which none of us like. But he won't quit, and he won't look for another job. When my mom is able she tries to help him but he refuses the advice, so now she's got another thing to worry about, the last thing she needs, I assure you.

2005-11-02T22:04:00.000-05:00

Free moment at the computer, this is so rare these days, it is cold and kind of close in here all the time.

Amy and I had sex for the first time in months this weekend. (It's a crowded house, but we managed. We had some experience in this regard, after all--we dated while I was in high school.)

It was nice, very nice. I wish it were the kind of Stephen King deal where the horrific end-of-the-world tragedy makes people all kinds of horny, but this has not been the case for us. Well, it has been for me, maybe. But everybody brought the same problems they had before the revenants into this whole situation with them, and they didn't go away. The things that are wrong with you are always wrong with you until they get fixed regardless of the external circumstances. I thought when we got married that that was the sign she needed to trust me again. I really thought that would change everything. What can I say? I'm not the world's most insightful person. the anniversaries of people's deaths come and go and I'm lucky if I remember it at all. I miss the intimacy. I feel robbed of it.

Do you ever get to wondering, especially now, if you are "worth" having survived? Not really "worth it," or "deserving of it," but like, why? It's amazing how arbitrary things are. It occurred to me that I could just as easily be gay as straight, I bet. So much of love is just a buddy-buddy relationship. Would that be hard to replicate with a man? The sexual aspect, yes, but the rest of it? I don't know. I don't think so. What's been happening has shown everyone (read: me) how really random what you consider the integral aspects of your life actually are. You envision yourself as a grown-up and part of your own family and the next thing you know you are in high school again, a high schooler. No one has any goals anymore, no one has any long-term plans, because no one really knows what's going to happen. Everything gets scarcer and more expensive because fewer and fewer people are doing anything. Is that true where you are? Without goals, without an endpoint as a constant, everything just becomes a big gray washout, too fluid to care about. I don't care and nobody cares. Everyone's life is just a sort of diseased parody of life. A dry spell that's lasted for five years, who gives a shit? It could last for five, ten, twenty more years if anyone lives that long--what difference does it make? It makes a big difference to ME--I guess that's hope?

2005-10-26T21:43:00.000-04:00

I don't blame people who have it much worse than I do for being pissed at me. Dave, I don't even think that you ARE pissed, but I wouldn't blame you. We have not had it so bad. One family member, one best friend, a few friends of friends--that's all. Other deaths, other difficulties and tragedies and setbacks...I mean, these things could happen anyway. I try to keep that in perspective. But what can I say? Amy and I built a life in that apartment and now it's gone. I called over there yesterday and no one would answer the phone. I just wanted to see how they were--I care about those people, we lived in Fort Apache together for half a year. It's jarring and it makes me sad that we're not there anymore. Now I get to watch my family up close and personal as it falls apart, as my parents fail to hold it together for the first time in their adult lives, Xanax and cases of wine, tears and silence, boarded-up windows, cat shit, cold, dirty towels, yowling, rain, cabin fever, out of money, out of prospects, sitting around waiting to see what happens as the weather gets colder and wetter and snowier, waiting for Long Island to become the next Pacific Northwest or the next Gulf Coast, waiting for famine, waiting for the flu, waiting for bronchitis and pneumonia and laryngospasms, years of resentment never fully addressed, unequipped to deal with mental illness, two kids who never got anywhere and one who never got a chance, graduated too late, killers, dead neighbors, crazed neighbors, survivor's guilt, fighting over nothing, fighting over misplacing something, cats fighting, missing her family, the holidays, hopelessness.

2005-10-18T13:37:00.000-04:00

I'm sorry about that. God, I was so tired--I was getting MAYBE four hours of sleep a night for the last few days. Working overtime on clearing out the apartment. A lot of stuff got left behind.

Anyway. It came to blows, ultimately, and really Kevin was no match for Kurt, who limited himself to one punch but it was still all he needed. Knocked out teeth, broke his glasses. Kurt himself broke a finger. Mike and John and me broke them up as quickly as we could. But by now the atmosphere in the house was poison. Somebody was going to leave, clearly.

Everybody retreats to their corners. Then we start hearing hammering again and we figure they must have made up, or at least calmed down enough to get back to work. I'm halfway down the stairs to help when I hear shouting and pounding, like with hands. So I run right back up the stairs again, thinking it's the youknowwhats. Fuck 'em, I'm ready, I grab the pole with the knife and head back down and knock on the door to Kurt's area of the house. But there are no revs--Kevin's begun boarding himself into the basement. Apparently Kurt told him he wanted to buy him out of his share of the place, and this is what happened.

And me? I'm just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Kurt was very nice and very polite, but he asked us to leave. As soon as possible. They need the breathing room.

The next couple of days are spent packing and crying. This was amy's and my first apartment together. We moved in right after we got married. We'd been there for three years, hirings and firings, cats, Christmastimes, summers. I didn't wnat to leave, and I keep thinking to myself how UNFAIR it is. I think I'm angrier about this than I have been about anything. Not at Kurt, because who can blame him, really? I thought he'd kick us out about a week into this thing. I'm mad at, I don't know what. The world? God? The zombies? What fucking difference does it make?

We were lucky to get a U-Haul, since most of them have been stolen. Most of our furniture is still sitting in the U-Haul. Some things we had to give up. Amy's grandmother's piano--goodbye, no more lessons for you. She's devastated. They didn't want me to bother with all my CDs and I said fuck you. I brought them anyway, I don't care. We have the one segment of the sectional that Bobo used to lay on and Amy sits in it all the time--the rest is in the garage for now. I brought all the knives of course. You just felt like such an idiot packing up the TiVo box and the surround sound system but you do it anyway. I don't want to give up on that.

Seven adults and four cats in our house now. The cats are freaked out, fighting. Everybody is miserable. It rained for like a week so lots of stuff got ruined.

2005-10-17T23:19:00.000-04:00

Okay. We've got the internet connection at my parents', which is where we live now. So here's what happened.

Kurt and Kevin had been arguing. Not so much that you'd necessarily notices--well, not so much that I'D necessarily notice, though Amy did. I think it' s just hard having this many adults living in one house, and would be under any circumstances, let alone the semi-siege conditions we've all been living in for months now. They're brothers in law so they tried to make it work, and it did for a long time. But it's just too much now, you know? Just too much.

The blow-up came when we were replacing the boards for the fall. We wanted to make sure everything was sturdy as the weather got colder, since to be honest we figured a non-trivial number of old people would be succumbing to the cold this winter, what with fuel so hard to come by. And right from the start Kurt and Kevin were snipping at each other. Snipping gave way to outright yelling.

Oh, a;lskdj. I'm too exhausted to finish this tonight. When my Dad got home late last night it meant I had to spend the whole night watching my mother. Too tire d now and I miss our old apartment, our old life. Holy God I msis it soo much.. Goodnight.

We're moving out

2005-10-14T23:10:00.000-04:00

2005-10-10T23:03:00.000-04:00

Tensions run high. Not really sure how much I can/should say beyond that. Not really sure how much I know beyond that either. It's a landlord thing, basically. Things are coming to a head. I'm concerned. It could end very badly for us. Still sick and exhausted.

2005-10-06T16:44:00.000-04:00

Still sick. Coughing, achey.

I don't know why I acted, a few days ago, like it was this big revelation that I wanted to write for a living. I ALREADY write/wrote for a living, of course--what I mean is write fiction/comics for a living. That's what the whole purpose of this blog was at first, remember? Getting out of that funk I was in. I agree with all the writers who say there's no such thing as writer's block--there's just unproductive patterns you get into that you need to muster the willpower to get out of. To break out of. The Outbreak--that was the origin of the name, if you recall. Go back and check the first entries and see. And then lo and behold, out come the revenants. Is this what Alanis would call ironic? I can't remember anymore.

Cough, cough.

I've been rereading Clive Barker's Books of Blood lately, a) because there's nothing else to do; b) because it's October and it reminds me of Halloween, which I guess very few kids will be celebrating this year, huh?; c) because life is a giant Clive Barker story now, so why not? If things were normal I'd take solace in the fact that Clive was over 30 when he became the Hot New Thing with these books. I've still got a few years to accomplish something lest the sneaking suspicion that I'm worthless, which I used to assuage by hooking up with lots of girls and now try to ameliorate by creating fiction and stuff, actually become a reality. Or I would if things were the way they used to be. Maybe there'll still be a market for this stuff in a few years, maybe not. Who knows. No new TV season this fall. that's a bad sign, right? I really wanted to learn what was going on in Lost. Were the Sopranos supposed to come back this fall, or was it next year? Star Wars III? Cough cough cough cough cough.

Sick

2005-10-04T10:38:00.000-04:00

Amy got sick over the weekend. Bad cold, cough, a fever. The fever broke overnight on Saturday, so that's a relief, because most of the clinics don't seem to be open anymore around here. Now I have the cold and I feel like hell. The drug store was out of cold medicine. How does that happen? My guess is that people are hoarding. We should have.

2005-09-29T23:24:00.000-04:00

I wonder when we will next get to see Amy's family. All this business with my ___ lately has made her miss them more, and more vocally. But Colorado is a long way away. If there's a flight we can get on, great, but what are the odds?

I used to get commenters around here all the time, you know. From the stories they told I'd guess they're mostly dead now. Including my old friend Bill from high school. He was the best Dungeon Master I ever knew. Well, he was the only Dungeon Master I ever knew, or ever played with I should say. But he was good. I had the biggest thing for his girlfriend back when I was a, what, freshman in high school and he was a junior? That's how we met. I "did not impress him as a person" at that time. Yet we're still friends, and where's the girlfriend I wonder now? I don't wonder too hard though because you never know what the answer is and more often than not you don't really want to know. It's like the time--I have this t-shirt "class of 1992" from middle school with the names of all the kids in my class on the back, and sometimes I'd forget I was wearing it (as a pajama shirt or workout shirt mostly) and Amy would be behind me and go "Oh, hey, what about Joe Schmoe? What's he up to these days?" like she knew who Joe Schmoe was but really she's just reading it off the back of the t-shirt, and I'd start to answer before I realized what she was doing. Anyway, one time she asked that about someone, and my answer was that he was killed on 9/11. I've heard of some more names on the shirt since this all happened so I don't really wear it anymore.

I'm frustrated because I wonder if this is the end of my hopes of one day being a famous and successful and rich comic book writer. Don't laugh, it could have happened, it had been happening a lot more often these days I would think. At any rate I'm now 27, older than Kurt Cobain when he died, which he did when I was a sophomore in high school. I'm now years past when many people have already made their mark on things. This is not a novel observation but what do you want from me? If I had novel observations to make I'd already be a rich comic book writer and we wouldn't be having this conversation. I'd be safely ensconced in my rich comic book writer estate with armed guards and shit. "Socks and shit--" "oh, things I came up on lootin'!"

I'm just going with the flow, just flowing in the breeze, is what I'm doing.

Look! There comes one of them now!

2005-09-26T14:47:00.000-04:00

I have a family member who is not eating, not sleeping, completely apathetic, 180-degree turn from the normal personality. I feel helpless now. More helpless than when it started, or with my cousin, or with Josiah, or with my grandfather's actual death. I think things are getting better, but who can say? They shouldn't have to have gotten this bad to begin with. It makes me so sad. Helpless.

They're not going anywhere, and it's time everyone faced up to that. And by everyone I mean "me." Surely I'm not the only one, though, who was holding out hope that they'd starve to death or decompose or re-die in some other way eventually if they couldn't get ahold of things to eat? I don't know why the government decided to make the announcement now, just days after the Gulf. Well, yeah, they wanted to justify it. But it's really just more awful news, isn't it? Enough already, for Christ's sake, how much can we take?

Today i was waiting on line for gas and there one was, waddling down the sidewalk a few blocks away. It looked like someone from a group home, which happens. By the time I gassed up she'd already been shot down, bagged, and taken away.

2005-09-23T14:35:00.000-04:00

God help me, but I'm semi-tempted to join an fantasy football league. It'll give you something to do, and it's the only game in town.

Rich

2005-09-21T09:42:00.000-04:00

I found out last night that one of my old co-workers was killed/came back yesterday. By coincidence I called another one of my old co-workers to see how he was doing, and he'd just heard from someone who'd heard from someone. There aren't really any details, beyond "it was someone in the next apartment" who got him. My favorite memory about Rich was bumping into him at the Harvard-Yale game in Cambridge last year. I was dressed up as a real blue-blood and drunk as a lord. He found it very entertaining. Now that I think of it I don't even know if they put him down or if he's still at large.

radio silence

2005-09-20T14:38:00.000-04:00

Things are much worse now. Not in terms of the amount of revenants that you see--that doesn't appear to have changed much, and there's no real reason why it should. But everything's harder to come by and more expensive to acquire when you do come by it. People travel less--the road to my grandfather's wake and funeral was nearly empty, and that was the L.I.E. Everyone's bracing for the winter, too, though it had been much warmer for a while there. And the shellshock from the Gulf and the 9/11 anniversary is still setting in. My cat also got very sick. I find I don't have much to say.

Eulogy

2005-09-17T18:41:00.000-04:00

This is what I read at my grandfather's wake this past weekend.

-----

My mother ended her eulogy for my grandfather by referencing his frequent use of the phrase "men of our talents." He’d use it in contexts like when I was little and he was helping to put together a big G.I. Joe vehicle or playset or something like that: “I’m sure we can figure it out, men of our talents...” That was always my favorite saying of his. He was a man of many talents.

One of these was his adventurous intellect. He was always borrowing the latest mysteries from the library (his nightstand, as my mom pointed out, never had any less than three books on it), checking out the latest movies at the theatre (he went to the movies a lot more often than I did, and I was a film studies major), following the latest series on TV (we'd often compare the relative merits of Vincent D’Onofrio on Criminal Intent and Tony Shaloub on Monk), trying a new sport or hobby (when he had to give up basketball because of his heart back in the ’80s, he switched right over to golf, and he was also quite the bocce player, and there wasn't a word game in the newspaper that he couldn't solve). He's always been such an inspiration to us grandkids as we discovered our own interests through the years, and there was no one better to have a conversation with about them at family gatherings than Pa-Pa. Even when there stopped being new books and movies and TV series and even newspapers for a while, I always looked forward to having new topics to mull over with him.

Another talent was making us laugh. I remember in their old house in Franklin Square, he and Grandma had a fridge with the freezer on the bottom, which he explained by saying Grandma got really angry one day and punched it so hard it flipped over. Then there were the passionate debates he and I had over the reindeer decorations in the basement around Christmastime, from which Rudolph had been omitted—he insisted that Rudolph was just a myth, not real, as opposed to the other eight flying reindeer. More recently, he cracked Amy up in the motorcycle shop in Port Jeff when he read aloud the words on a t-shirt: "If you can read this, the bitch fell off," he said in a deadpan voice, before explaining to Grandma, "See, hat's the back of the shirt, Joan..." (Pretending to be exasperated with Grandma was another one of his talents. I’m sure he was always pretending, though.)

I am sad that he's gone, sad for all of us that no new memories will be added to the list, no new evidence of his talents will be produced. But I'm also happy, because more than anything, bringing happiness to everyone he knew was Pa-Pa's real talent, and that happiness will never leave or dim or fade. He will always be there for me and with me, standing at a party and quietly cracking jokes with a bunch of unsalted peanuts in his hand, or working on word puzzles in the newspaper with golf on in the background, or telling me about the horse operas he'd go see at the movies when he was young. I will always remember the smile he wore as he made us smile too, and even today I'm happy because of it. I hope all of us keep that smile in our minds and in our hearts. A man of his talents deserves no less of a remembrance.

Pa-Pa

2005-09-08T13:42:00.000-04:00

My grandfather died yesterday.

It wasn't the nightmare scenario; my grandmother was able to get away in time, and neighbors did what had to be done, though even then I'm told there was no sign he had succumbed.

Amy and I had gone to see them just this past weekend. It's harder to get out there than you might think but it's not impossible, and we'd been meaning to do it for a while, so finally we did. We had a wonderful time, just sitting around, fixing lunch, chit-chatting and listening to music. Grandma and Pa-Pa also knew Josiah, so they were able to relate when I told them of my worries, worries now confirmed of course. But aside from that unpleasantness, it was just delightful. He was so funny--a jolly fellow, as Amy likes to call him--and seemed so healthy, though we knew that his health problems would be serious bad news if they recurred now.

I'm doing okay, really. Even on top of Josiah and the whole gulf area. My family dealt with this with my cousin and we'll deal with again, I'm sure. And as I said, things could have been so much worse. I know I will always be so grateful for that last visit. It just breaks my heart to hear all the "grown-ups" in the family, as I instantly retreated to calling them, so heartbroken and devastated. Days after caring for me I now have to care for them, and wonder how much the human heart can take. I'm ready to remember the past and be glad of it, but I think I'm alone.

2005-09-05T00:33:00.000-04:00

maybe there was no other way. That's what I'm telling myself. As they execute Josiah, and my old work buddy from New Orleans's best friend who according to my old work buddy was sealed up in his police station, and however many hundreds of thousands of other people who were actually still alive. as they turn the entire Gulf Coast into Dresden.

2005-09-01T15:04:00.000-04:00

They don't really swim, but they can float. They can float right into large groups of people, actually. They can also just rest there, underwater.

I heard from my friend Sean, who managed to get ahold of Josiah's parents. Josiah and his girlfriend are holed up in the veterinary hospital where she worked (on a volunteer basis for the last five months), alone, surrounded by the stranded animals. I couldn't make that up if I wanted to. I tried the number of the hospital but I only got the same beepbeepbeep I hoped I'd never hear again.

The Guard was already stretched to the maximum down there, dealing with the revs. Now, nothing. Watching it spread through the big groups, that's the worst, that's the absolute worst--just like 3/27, but worse, since now we all know where it's headed. We're not watching the TV anymore. We don't need to be told what this means for us up here. We know. We can see the guy at the gas station.

The tipping point?

2005-08-31T19:53:00.000-04:00

No word from my friend Josiah. This is not unusual, I guess, but I don't know whether he evacuated, whether he drowned, whether he was crushed, whether he was killed by the revenants that apparently now have free reign, whether he turned.

There are two upsides: 1) They are not strong swimmers; 2) The flooding and the destruction of the infrastructure actually probably destroyed more than a few of them.

Jesus Christ. Awful, just awful, as awful as anything I've seen since the outbreak. It would have taken months if not years to get things back up and running before the revs came--will we ever manage now?

New Orleans

2005-08-28T17:46:00.000-04:00

I don't even want to think about what is going to happen in New Orleans tonight. I never had the chance to visit, but it always seemed like the kind of city I'd love. I know it fared poorly in the initial outbreak, though it never became the totally lost city the rumours pegged it as for a while. (That would be Seattle, and to an extent Portland, I guess.) But this...the reports are non-stop, mainly, I guess, because the newspeople are happy to have another story to talk about finally, and they're terrifying. I did a quick google search and discovered that before the outbreak the projection was that a category five storm could kill anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 people. That's not injuries, or people made homeless--that's fatalities. And we know what happens with fatalities now. And with the current leading origin hypothesis leaning toward Banda Aceh and the tsunami, you can't help but see the fearful symmetry.

I miss my friend Josiah. He was my best friend in college, and we want to do comics together someday. I've only been able to talk to him two or three times since the outbreak started. (He was always hard enough to get ahold of even before dead people started killing and eating live people.) He lives in New Orleans.

It's not all resurrected dead cannibal misery around here

2005-08-25T23:53:00.000-04:00

AMY: I see you haven't shaved this morning.
SEAN: Yep. This is my rally beard.
A: [silence]
S: Because I grew it in hopes that you'd be getting up soon!
A: Your rally beard? Sean, why would you call it your rally beard when you know it has nothing to do with me?
S: Because I'm just kidding around! Ha ha ha!
A: [pause, then gruffly] You are a--
S: [interrupting, protestingly] --a what? No! Not a something mean! A something nice!
A: What makes you think I was going to say something mean?
S: Call it a hunch.
A: What if I was going to say you were a sight for sore eyes?
S: Am I, Amy?
A: [pause] Yes. [pause] You're just also a jackass.

later that day

SEAN: Oh my God, Amy, I totally thought of you on the way to Home Depot--"Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" came on my iPod, and I sang along to the whole thing. And not only do I not know ANY of the words except "don't stop 'til you get enough" and that at one point he says "eternal," the whole thing is ALSO in falsetto. So I sang along to EVERY WORD, loudly, in complete gibberish, in falsetto--your four least favorite things for me to do while singing along to a song. If you were there, you would have jumped out of the car while it was still moving. You know, and done one of those barrel rolls on the pavement.
AMY: I'd have jumped out and hit the ground running. To keep up the momentum. [pause] No, actually, I would have thrown you out of the car.
S: What, like undone my seatbelt and kicked me out with both feet?
A: No, sorta like roll you up in a little ball and slam dunk you off a bridge. Or maybe just into a passing convertible. [pause] Or hog-tie you. You know, hog-tie you? [mimics giving a hog-tied Sean the old "on three: one, two, THREE" heave-ho out of the car]

and finally

SEAN: [standing in the corner of the living room, silently making chopping motions]
AMY: What are you doing?
S: Karate chops.
A: Why?
S: Because of my skills.
A: What skills?
S: My skills as a karate chopper.
A: ...
S: This is going on the blog, isn't it?
A: Well now you're just deliberately saying things ridiculous enough to post about.

Real-life conversations, verbatim, people! Such light-hearted frivolity! Post your own in the comments! Learn to throw your voice, fool your friends, fun at parties!

2005-08-20T21:35:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow is my niece's first birthday. This will be the only world she will ever know.

It's your anniversary, happy anniversary

2005-08-17T15:07:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was our third wedding anniversary. While it's safe to say that neither of us could possibly have imagined where we'd be at this point in time...well, I'm happy, is what I'd like to say. Happy with her, anyway, Me, not so much, but I'm trying. I'd imagine she feels this is a fairly accurate assessment of things. I've asked a lot of her since this started, asked her to forgive the drinking, asked her to forgive nearly getting myself killed. She, too, is trying. That's enough, more than I deserve. I do know that I love her more with each passing year, as cheesy as that sounds. I still think it's amazing that we even met (at a wedding reception for one of my cousins in Delaware, because we were the only ones there who knew how to do the Time Warp from The Rocky Horror Picture Show). To the extent I believe in things being meant to be at all, a notion which has certainly received quite a challenge to it if you ask me over the past few months, I believe I was meant to be with her. I'm lucky.

I think the most stressful thing is knowing that each night is a crap shoot. The other night I had a laryngospasm and woke up suffocating for a few seconds before I could breathe. My laryngospasms were always fewer and farther between and less severe than my dad's, but it scared the shit out of me this time. I don't want to die in the middle of the night; I don't want the last time Amy wakes up to be to me killing her. I don't want the last time I wake up to be to Amy killing me. I don't want Lucy to die either, the little mushpants that she is. I honestly think that this may have been harder on her than either of us simply because we couldn't find her usual cat food anymore, and are constantly giving her new brands. She gets sick all the time. But she's resilient, which is good. If she had snuck out the night when I blacked out and jumped off the deck, I never would have forgiven myself.

Right. Happy anniversary, honey. I love you.

Storm's coming, Ani

2005-08-15T15:56:00.000-04:00

Last night there were some huge thunderstorms around here, and while I was in the bathroom at one point, the power went out for about a second. It was like I was a three-year-old kid again, scared of the dark.

TGIF

2005-08-12T10:11:00.000-04:00

Another drive, another sighting: A pair of revs this time, a young black guy and an old Asian woman with half her foot missing. These two seemed more potentially hostile than the junkie-zombie I saw the other day. They too were walking down the grass toward oncoming traffic, but they were a lot closer and had that look they get when they're hunting. But they must have figured out what happens if you get too close to a car moving at 50 mph, because they weren't just launching themselves at the nearest vehicle like a lot of revs did when things first started. I can't decide if this apparent capability for learning, at least as much as animals that live near a road can learn, is good or bad for us. I'm leaning toward good in this particular set of circumstances, because even though those kamikaze revs at the beginning may not have been able to smash open a moving car and pull people out, they caused a lot of accidents, at which point they either created more revs or ate the survivors. (I'm sorry to be so callous about it, but that's what they did, so let's not mince words.) That's a lot less likely to happen now.

As you may have been able to gather we've been doing a lot more driving recently--since we got back from Boston, really. As crazy as that journey may have been, and I think I've been so quiet about it BECAUSE it was so fucking insane to do--believe me, I could be telling stories almost daily--it was an enormously inspiring taste of semi-normalcy. (Hate that word. It's not really a word! Normality, people, normality. But English is a living language, so oh well.) It was sort of like an anti-cowardice inoculation. Now if a day goes by without spending at least half an hour in the car it feels like a failure. Let's just hope those emergency gas reserves hold up, because god only knows when they'll start being able to import from Saudi and Venezuela again.

On a final note, I decided to import my blogroll from my old site to this one. If you really want to bring yourself down, click around and see how many people are actually still alive and updating. Johnny Bacardi's family put up a lovely tribute to him, at least. He was a good blogger and a good guy.

Parkway sighting

2005-08-09T16:46:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I was driving on my way back from visiting my folks, and I saw a "woman" walking down along the grass, on the wrong side of the parkway. She had long, frizzy bleached-blonde hair, a striped short-sleeve shirt, denim shorts, and white tennis shoes, and her face was frozen in this weird rictus of a smile. She must have been a junkie.

UPDATE: I meant "She must have been a junkie, before."

Another today

2005-08-06T16:44:00.000-04:00

Today I have "Star Me Kitten" by R.E.M. stuck in my head for no discernable reason.

Today I received an email from a person I don't know asking me to stop visiting his blog, and it's really knocked the wind out of my sails. I posted a comment on a post he had up about toilet paper, and he emailed me and told me he'd prefer for his blog to remain "friends and family only." At this point I don't even remember how I'd stumbled across it, but I'd been reading it pretty regularly, as I'm assuming you folks read this one. Of course I'll honor his request. I don't know why he'd start the blog if he didn't want people to see it, but "this heat" (new euphemism) does weird things to people. Lots of people don't want to drwa any more attention to themselves than is necessary. The outbreak took the lid off a lot of things and I don't know if we'll ever be able to put them back. How many people have you killed, for example? Live people, I mean, since this started? And how many of those of you who've killed are now in prison or awaiting trial? You see? Have you stolen cars or food or appliances knowing full well that you will never be prosecuted even if anyone knew? We've all gone a little bit predator, just as we've all gone a little bit prey. (I still wonder what my subconscious was up to when I blacked out and roamed the streets at night, or when my entire family drove from Long Island to Boston. Actually, I DON'T wonder, which is my point.)

But more than all that, today, it's the simple request to delink and de-visit that's hit me so hard. I start feeling like most everything is futile, especially attempts at recreating normalcy, and that there's no real human connections to be had. Like, there's nothing that you can do that will have a lasting impact a hundred years from now, so what's the point? Do you ever feel that way?

Amy's asleep in the other room. Maybe with the cat, I don't know. We had another one of those "What do you want to do?" "I don't know, what do YOU want to do?" "Whatever YOU want to do" semi-fights, and I think she just gave up and took a nap. I've been roaming around the Internet, looking at photos of hipster parties taken before, and getting asked not to visit people's sites anymore. Has anyone else noticed that Angelfire is gone? There are no Angelfire sites anymore. And my first reaction to discovering this was "ha ha, fuckers, serves you right for being such dickheads about hotlinking to your images, even through Google image searches, fucking lameasses." Angelfire, shit, that reminds me of surfing the internet in college almost nine years ago now. Looking for sites dedicated to the Prodigy and KMFDM and the Illuminatus! Trilogy. Bad html backgrounds. Now what the fuck happened to them, they're phased out.

2005-08-04T10:08:00.000-04:00

When this post goes live, another month will be added to the archive list over on the right. Looking at it just now I'm struck by how the time just goes on and on, stretching out like a gray ribbon ahead of us, no end in sight. Not to be maudlin or anything. Well, fuck it, yeah, to be maudlin or anything. It sucks. It's fucking terrible is what it is. These little shopping expeditions, watching Law & Order on DVD, blah blah blah. We've all of us still lost people we'll never get back, and society's lost something it may never get back too.

I don't know. I take it back--I'm sorry to be maudlin. As i write this I'm listening to "Mary" by Scissor Sisters. Maybe that's got something to do with it.

This heat is beastly. Yesterday our refrigerator looked like it was dying. The compressor kept trying to click on but failing, like every 30 seconds or so. Amy and I got a little panicky because we'd finally accrued a decent stock of perishable food, and with the temperature the way it is we could well have lost it all if the fridge crapped out. And who knows how easy or hard it might be to replace it? We'd end up having to share with the Leopolds, and there are too damn many people in this house for that to work out well. By the time Kurt (still our landlord, y'know?) came home and came up to look at it, though, it had apparently fixed itself. We cleaned out the back of the fridge, half-filling the vaccuum with dirt and dust and crap. Maybe the buildup was the problem, though Kurt said it wasn't as bad as it'd need to be to have a real effect on the fridge.

The last time our refrigerator crapped out on us was the big summer East Coast blackout in, what, 2003? I think that's when it was. I was at work at the time, and the computers stopped working. This was not at all an unusual occurrence for that office, so we didn't think much of it until we realized playing with the fuses wasn't bringing anything back on. By then the guys in the office next door came by saying their stuff was off too. And by then you could look out on the street and figure out that this was going on at least up and down the whole block. And by then you heard it was the whole city. Then the whole East Coast. Then you were filing out of the building down the darkened stairs, hoping it wasn't terrorism again. But it wasn't--it just ended up being a big blackout, and basically a citywide block party. It actually would have been fun if it wasn't so goddamn hot, and if Amy didn't have to go to the residential treatment facility the next morning. I ended up walking from the West Village to someplace in Brooklyn to hang out at my coworker's house until it blew over. My plan was to take the train from Flatbush Avenue to Jamaica to Bellmore, because the estimates said they'd get the power back on by like 1 or 2 am or so, and Amy and I had to leave for the facility by 8am that morning if she was to be admitted this week. But Amy wisely insisted on driving out to Brooklyn--with no lights, no stoplights, nothing--and picking me up; wisely because of course they didn't get the power on again for hours and hours and hours. I waited for her on a corner, watching people walk by. She'd gotten directions from me from the guy whose house I was at, but they had the exit she needed to take closed, so she ended up driving around Brooklyn looking for me, asking people where such-and-such intersection was. We ended up getting four hours of sleep that night, in 85 degree heat, and the next morning I drove her down to Philly and she checked in. Anyway, we lost most of the stuff in the fridge, and there was a thin layer of melted chocolate ice cream on the bottom of our freezer for months until Amy finally got fed up with it and cleaned it up.

Looking back, more than anything I miss the way everyone came together.

Question and Today

2005-07-31T21:52:00.000-04:00

Do they ever die of natural causes? Has anyone seen this happen? I really haven't seen enough to know and I haven't heard anything about it, but that doesn't mean it's impossible, I guess. They obviously eat meat, but do they starve if they don't get it?

Today Amy and I drove over to Target and I bought new sneakers. My old ones had started to hurt my left foot and ankle whenever I wore them, and obviously you kind of need to have dependable footwear these days. WalMart is closer, but it's also closer to the hospital, and even though the Leopolds reported that the place is locked down tighter than anything they've seen since all this started, you know what? No thanks. The selection was for shit of course but like most of the stores that we see around here the joint was jumping. People are just happy to be able to do this sort of thing, and the bad patches in the Midwest and the West Coast don't seem to interfere with the flow of your basic goods and things that badly. The big chains appear to manage better than the little shops of course. Anyway I got some nice sneakers. We also popped in the Stop and Shop.

I wonder if I should start thinking about getting a new job? I have to try to get in touch with my old coworkers. I wonder if they're thinking about restarting the magazine. My guess is no. My guess is that the revenants succeeded where the bursting of the Image Bubble failed.

Public access

2005-07-29T15:42:00.000-04:00

On public access the other day I saw unedited footage that I assume was taken in the Midwest someplace, some small city. A huge horde of revs--the biggest I've ever seen by far, though to be fair I've never seen a very large group all in one place; but seriously, there were probably hundreds--had massed outside some gated community with an electrified fence. You could see a bunch of their bodies already stuck on the fence and lying around it, and the ones that were left had learned to leave it alone, but they were still sticking around, apparently. Suddenly a helicopter gunship, the kind I guess that kept crashing in Afghanistan, that sort of thing, hovers down into the frame and just unloads on the zombies. And then around the cameraman a big group of soldiers get up and open fire with machine guns. They even tossed a few grenades. I've never seen anything like it--as always there was very little blood, but there were just pieces of revs flying everywhere. Some made a run through the fence, which had pretty quickly been destroyed, but for the most part they were wiped out within twenty minutes or so. It was amazing. It makes me think we're winning.

2005-07-25T16:27:00.000-04:00

I've noticed that people are calling revs "zombies" a lot more often these days. Nobody wanted to use the z-word at first, but now you see it fairly frequently. I think there are a few reasons. When things first started happening, I imagine nobody really wanted to come to grips with what was actually going on; calling them revenants or revs took some of the boogeyman edge away from it. On the flip side, having a semi-scientific-sounding name for them also made them sound less ridiculous than something out of a b-movie, and whatever else they are they're not ridiculous. But now that we're used to the idea, the truth comes out.

On an unrelated note, I stabbed a man to death a couple of weeks ago. That's what I've been alluding to. A living man, I should say, not a revenant. It was the guy whose mother-in-law lived next door. Like I said, he came back here after all this time with a gun, in another car, absolutely shitfaced. He parked it on the front lawn and got out and sat there and waited, with the gun in his hand. Kurt was out, and we knew that if he showed up in the middle of all this the guy would just end up shooting him as he drove up in the van. Amy passed by the window at one point, going into the bedroom to use the bathroom, and he took a shot at her. It didn't hit the window, it just hit the house. But then he started hitting the front door with the bullets, and I heard some glass break and I heard Mike downstairs yelling. I grabbed a kitchen knife and took my familiar route down the deck. When I snuck up to the front yard he had his back to me, trying to crawl in the window he'd broken, and I could still hear Mike shouting for help. I just walked right up to the guy and stabbed him right in the back, with a downward motion, like Psycho. I remember wondering if I'd done it right, because of that scene in 12 Angry Men where Jack Klugman explains that real people stab each other with an upward motion. But whatever I did it did the trick--he let out this gasp, or sucked it in, whatever it was, and went still almost immediately. I almost forgot to pull him down off the windowsill and stab him in the eye, too, but Mike reminded me.

When the crew finally showed up they took Mike to the hospital, which none of us were happy with, but he's okay--just got shot in the foot. They don't seem to be planning on charging me with anything.

2005-07-19T12:20:00.000-04:00

Amy and I had a big fight this weekend.

She was on the Tori Amos message board she always hangs out on. Of course there are no Tori concerts anymore for her friends to follow around on tour, so what they've been doing is making up what the tour would be like if it were still going on. Set lists, improvs, how the band was, what kind of seats they got, interpersonal drama, travel mishaps, the whole nine. It's really pretty amazing what a convincing fiction they've developed. They're all such funny and bright people, and they're hardly letting the deaths affect them at all. The dead fans are incorporated into the fiction as living, you know.

I figured Amy would be at this for a long time, and I was bored, so I threw a movie on the DVD player--Kill Bill Volume One. We got as far as "Bill, it's your babyBANG" before Amy said "I never said I wanted to watch this, Sean," so I turned it off. Then she got real quiet and started just staring ahead, and I said "What's wrong?" And she goes with this increasingly hysterical tone in her voice "I didn't like thaaaaaaaaaat--" and starts bawling, curls up in a fetal position. Backstory: I'd been suggesting that she might like this movie for some time. She doesn't generally like violent movies but I figured this was a very good violent movie, and she'd like the Bride character. But when I put it on just then I thought "Well, she's not going to be paying attention unless she finds herself intrigued and starts watching it, so if it seems too intense for her she'll just ignore it." This was always her strategy when we'd watch Lost--she'd always be doing something else to avoid the intensity of the show. But as she proceeded to point out to me as I explained all this, she doesn't have my ability/disability to completely tune other things out and focus on one thing (in this case blotting out the movie to focus on the computer), so she was stuck with the movie the moment i put it on. I promised her I didn't think it would bother her, because I didn't, and that I thought her using the computer would mitigate the rougher stuff, which I did. But in retrospect it was all wishful thinking on my part, like the time I thought she'd be able to handle watching Saving Private Ryan and we got about two minutes into the landing sequence before we had to turn the tv off.

What turned it into a fight was twofold. On my end, I got pissed off when she said something about how "It's like with you and serial killers--you're fascinated by them but i can't get past the victims." I got really angry about that. I can handle being told that I'm callous about movies, because I probably am, you know? Ultimately it's a movie, so if I'm callous there I'm not convinced that makes me a bad person. But about serial killers, which I admittedly am fascinated by? That's real life. Those things really happened. Those were real people who killed dozens of other real people. And i'd really have to be some sort of bastard asshole to not think about the victims, wouldn't I? What the hell do you MEAN, *I'm* able to get past the victims??? Don't you remember the breakdown I had a few months ago--a la the Ol' Dirty Bastard breakdown and the Pakistani madrassas breakdown--where I fucking sobbed on the couch after watching a documentary I'd TiVo'd on Leonard Lake and Charles Ng because their victims were all complete, whole, real other people whose lives were their own stories, and now their stories were just subsumed, just footnotes, their lives just cut off, they were there and now they're not because someone killed them and now that's the story? How unfair and horrible that was? That was ME saying all of that! I'm exactly like you, Amy! I think of the victims too! And I mean FUCK after what happened last week we're going to talk about how callous I am about kiling living people????? Who the hell

But Amy said all that was beside the point. All she was saying was that we think about serial killers differently or I wouldn't be able to watch those documentaries, just like she isn't. I guess that's fair, he says calmly several days later. But the main thing she was upset about is not that I may or may not be callous about violence (traumatized? how does shock trauma sound in terms of my relationship with violence? but I guess I can still handle watching a kung fu movie). It was that when I like something I convince myself that Amy will like it too and when she doesn't like it I find that unacceptable. First of all she thought I was being passive aggressive even putting the movie on, like I was doing it to punish her because I was bored. I assured her and I assure you this did not even remotely occur to me--I had all sorts of reasons why I put it on as I said earlier. Second she thought I was REALLY actually getting mad not because I was taking offense but because she didn't feel the exact same way about Kill Bill that I did. "And then you just end up looking for someone who'll echo your opinions about everything." So like that we're back to the cheating and the lies from college, all this horrendous emotional energy that I swear earlier that day I'd actually commented on how much less often we fight. The main argument, though this was never said in so many words, is that Amy fears that in my heart of hearts I'm a solipsist, and that I fear she's right. My protracted suicide attempt in early June is probably proof enough of that for both of us, but we try to ignore that and get through that and whatever that.

The main thing, Amy said, is that she's sick of death. She can't approach it snarkily. Even if, as I said, it's just "bad guys" getting killed. "Don't you think that movie's cool?" "Yes, but I don't think the act of killing is cool. I don't think what I did last week is cool."

Amy always has said that death is not a natural part of life. I agree with her. Death is degrading. Look what it did to us.

We're okay now, though, we worked through it pretty quickly actually, once the two of us calmed down. Saturday's post was not about how unhappy I am in the marriage or anything--it really was just the thought of Amy's sister and brother having to explain what's going on to their kids. Anyway, yeah, we're okay now. It's all Flirting with Disaster all the time on our DVD player from here on out.

2005-07-16T23:02:00.000-04:00

I'm just glad we don't have any kids.

2005-07-12T16:53:00.000-04:00

Has anyone heard from Dr. John? Frequent user of the comment threads here? Last I heard from him he reported he'd been bitten, and I've spent the days since then trying to convince myself he's one of the bullshitters. Trying. There are other things I could be thinking about.

Dream

2005-07-11T17:08:00.000-04:00

The new Twin Towers have been built, and the revs have started a small outbreak in it. I need to get across Manhattan to where Amy is (a hotel?), but I left my cell phone in my own room. Soon I find myself struggling to figure out which direction I'm walking in--it's supposed to be Manhattan, but it feels a lot more like New Haven; more green, more residential areas, fewer skyscrapers. Then I see two huge explosions, one in each tower. There are now huge outbreaks going on in both towers. The zombies are spilling out into the streets and I'm afraid to be below 14th Street but I've decided that I'm going to risk everything to be able to protect Amy. I end up trying to cut through some bar or something to get where I'm going, and when I get to the street behind the bar it's full of guys in business shirts and ties with their sleeves rolled up and ties wrapped around their heads like bandanas, wielding torches and bats and swords, chanting about how they're going to wipe the revs out. There's some sort of weird ultra-modern cathetdral with a glass spire nearby, up on top of a small grass slope. I manage to get to my hotel(?) room and find my phone, but by now it's dark out. The kitchen knife is in my hand.

2005-07-09T17:32:00.000-04:00

Remember the guy who we got in the fight with when he came by to find out how his mother-in-law was? He came back, with a gun.

How does it feel, suck suck suck

2005-07-06T17:06:00.000-04:00

I'd never seen a revenant actually kill a human being before Monday. I'd seen revenants. Too many. I'd seen people who used to be human beings and weren't anymore. I'd seen dead bodies, like real dead bodies. I don't really remember too much of the coverage at the beginning but it seemed like they never showed anything actually happening--the self-imposed clampdown was almost instantaneous. I might have seen something there, I suppose. But I'd never seen an actual killing take place in real life, in front of me. Until Monday.

We were woken up in the middle of the night by this huge incomprehensible racket in the street. It took us a minute to realize it was the immigrant family on the corner, the one whose dad yelled at me once for parking in front of his house after I voluntarily offered to move the car since I saw they were having work done. I was like man, you have the whole corner, you can't TELL me where not to park! This man was now dead. I'm going to assume heart attack. And they'd taken him as far as the car (parked not where I used to park btw) when he started moving again. I don't know why they didn't immediately put a knife through his eye, which from what I understand is the easiest way to do things. A Muslim thing? That's if they are Muslim, which I guess I'm not sure about. They could just be some other Eastern European/Balkan/former USSR culture I don't know about. But the old women are always covered and there's that masjid up Newbridge that clearly used to be a Friendly's. The point is that this man came back to "life" and when I looked out the window he was attacking another man while the rest of the family tried to pull him off. But he had such a good grip on the other man's head because his thumbs were dug into his ears, as far as I could tell. The man's head was tilted back and screaming and that's when the zombie-man bit his neck.

There's the slightest delay before blood really starts to flow. There's that split second where the stage manager goes "okay, you're on!" and then out it comes.

Anyway Kurt was on his way out already and shot them both. A few of the girls went after him but he just sort of pushed them away, hard, and backed back toward the house with the gun facing the family. who thank god had thought better of going after him into the house. But we boarded up the windows anyway and they're still boarded up. Amy and I used earplugs for the rest of the night.

Apparently and you'll fogive me if this doesn't seem very urgent considering what I saw which required nothing but a dad having a heart attack, but apparently they can semi-hunt. They don't just wander aimlessly unless they're very new to the surroundings, which is why even when things were at their worst you didn't see too many except in the big swarms. Once they see that nothing is there they hide out someplace and wait for a target. They lurk is I guess what I'm saying.

We are thinking about moving in with my parents.

2005-07-02T10:16:00.000-04:00

Did I mention this yet? When we were in Boston I got in a big fight with my cousin Meg. You can't blame her for being so upset, so I don't. But I just wasn't in the mood to hear how this was America's fault, you know? For the past three or four years I already felt like I was going completely crazy, like the Omega Man. You don't know how it feels to know that everybody you know disagrees with you on something fundamental, something that if they are right and you are wrong makes you stupid, crazy, or evil. I don't think I'm any of those three things. I may be stupid I guess. I have some mental issues too. I've done some evil things, yeah. So maybe I'm wrong. And shit, this is Meg's thing--I remember that one time we were talking about the Simpsons and she kept enthusiastically endorsing the show because of the way it shows how we're all just stupid Americans. But how could this be ANYONE'S fault? It's the tsunami's fault, or the earthquake's fault. Nobody did anything to deserve this. What did that old lady next door do? What did Chris do? What did Ken's mom and Dave's parents and Caitlin's boyfriend's sister do? What did Dr. John in the comment threads do? I guess I should reply directly to him, but I can't bring myself to do it. Everyone I know who's died was killed right away. You hear about the wasting away and it just sounds, like, I don't know, I can't deal with it.

This is probably less coherent than mormal because I am exhausted. Things got much worse around here over the past couple of days. Teach me to be optimistic, ha ha. It was that bigb storm a few days ago. The flooding on the roads cut people off, and when there were accidents no help could reach them, and before long it started to spread and spread. We had revs wandering around the neighborhood for the first time in I don't know how long. I'm worried that it spread that quickly. Those pockets of disaster should have been sealed, shouldn't they? It's like we all just got lucky when things died down. Now I feel like they could get worse at any time, like we're just balanced on a see-saw, and things could get piled on the other end at any moment and things will sink. Or go up, I guess, to follow that particular analogy, go up and buck us off. Anyway I was up all night and I'm still up.

That traffic-accident explanation's too facile. Something must have happened around here, I know. Gas leaks, carbon monoxide, untreated diabetes, heart attacks, falls, untreated cancer, on and on and on.

There and Back Again

2005-06-28T10:47:00.000-04:00

Made it to Boston, made it back home.

I can't really believe it either. But eventually we were just like, "How bad could it be?" I wonder if everyone is now borderline suicidal, in the not buckling your seatbelt, smoking even though you know you'll get cancer, anorexia sense. Maybe people are just shocked past the point of giving a shit anymore. I didn't feel fatalistic when we caravanned up, though. Not at all. I felt brave. I felt defiant and good. I wanted to be there for my family, and I wanted to show Amy that life was going to get better. There's no other way to interpret the fact that we made it to Boston and back.

The army/guard/whatever they are is crawling all up and down the major highways. I think that the initial crumbling of authority structures resulted in a lot of individual initiative that proved successful; now that individual initiative is being extrapolated upward. (I would also not be surprised if we've pulled nearly every soldier from overseas home, though you'll never ever ever hear anything about that, I'm guessing. Also, when was the last time you heard about Korea? Anything? I'm really just morbidly curious, as I'm reasonably sure North Korea is one of the only countries that's completely lost.) Things moved slowly, but they moved.

I don't want to talk about the service. No, no thanks.

Every time something happens to us, I think "well, we're not the only people this is happening to. We're part of a trend." Travel of this magnitude is a good trend. The trucks are coming more and more frequently. I haven't seen a revenant in a long time. I'm growing more and more incredulous of the "horror stories." Communication and news media are improving.

I'm probably just putting an overly optimistic spin on things because me and my family (and our cats, god bless their furry chins) were able to take what should be a 10-hour round trip journey over the course of a four day weekend without being cannibalized by a dead person or shot to death by a live one. But can you blame me?

Amy didn't like dragging Lucy along. It was tough on the little lady, poor thing. She's over there on the catbird seat by the window, with her little paw over her face, sleepin'. Shhhhhhhhh, baby's sleeping.

2005-06-23T15:14:00.000-04:00

My grandparents want to drive up to Boston for my cousin's funeral. My parents think this is crazy, and I really do to. It's a miracle that Grandma and Pa-Pa were able to make it from Florida to here as it is, and there's no sense in pushing their luck. It's not like my aunt and uncle wouldn't understand. On the other hand if you're at my grandparents' age and this is the world you find yourself in, maybe you just say "to hell with it--we're going to do what we want to do." I don't know what I would do in their shoes. These situations are supposed to bring out the best in people.

I really didn't know my cousin anymore. We always saw them least of all our family members. It's family love. I don't know. I remember when I went to college and a former friend of my best friend there was murdered. They had had something of a falling out and I didn't really like her anymore, but I was still "friendly" with her of course. Then one morning we get a call that she was stabbed to death the night before. I had such a bad headache for no reason at the time she was being murdered, isn't that weird? The next few days were spent grieving for a person I'd learned not to care about anymore. But it was grief, oh you bet, was it ever. Another body murdered.

Goodbye

2005-06-20T16:21:00.000-04:00

It has been decided that my cousin Christopher is dead. Or whatever. They will be having a small service for him in the now-outdoor church in Newton next Saturday.

2005-06-18T20:41:00.000-04:00

It was a beautiful day today, so do you know what we did? We went out on the deck and fired up the grill. And as we looked around we saw that half the neighborhood was doing the same thing. People were even running food up to the crews at the intersections of North Jerusalem & Newbridge and North Jerusalem & Bellmore. It was like a block party almost.

Which still isn't normal. It's just abnormal in a nice way.

On a not unrelated note, some people are going to start needing to make money again soon.

Follow-up

2005-06-15T19:24:00.000-04:00

I don't wanna get into it too much. We've all got better things to do than police comment threads. The people who are full of it know who they are, and the people who aren't also know who they are. It's not too hard to figure out.

I told my parents about the boozing situation yesterday. It did not go over that great. Mental illness of any kind is always going to be a failure to them, no matter how much they are educated about the reality of it. This is the stigma Amy had to deal with for all these years I guess. I only experienced it once, when I briefly went on medication for ADD. My mother reacted like she'd found out I was being sexually molested. Same way she used to react about my hair, my clothes, the hours I kept, my job, how often I saw Amy, blah blah blah. What the fuck, man? When I was in high school she was always so accomodating about that sort of shit. (Not Amy, but everything else.) Only after I graduated college and moved back home did she start having these twice-annual freakouts. I guess in high school she was okay with it because she assumed it was a phase I was going to grow out of. Never grew out of it. Tough tootles, Mom. As for the ADD medication, it made me feel gross in the middle of the day so I stopped taking it. Score one for the anti-psychiatry contingent here in the Collins family.

I don't know--am I really? I don't see myself twelve-stepping anytime soon. I had a problem. I'm dealing with it. I stand a decent chance of losing my wife and getting thrown out by my landlords if I don't, after all.

Sometimes I get resentful because it's not like I threatened shit after all the sexual problems, going on so long with no end in sight. But there's a lot of stuff I owe her for anyway so I probably don't have a right to. We'll just keep adding dysfunction onto dysfunction until we're square. Even steven. You know there was a time where I figured that if we were together and I was faithful to her for as long as we were together and I was unfaithful then all the problems would magically disappear? Hell, I thought just getting married might do it, did you know that? Amy says she doesn't want my apologies. I don't think she has choice and she never will. Sorry Amy. Shit, there I go. Never will.

All you people who are legitimately in dire straits, if it's even remotely feasible, come to Long Island. It's not that bad here. Stay aware of the disposition of those close to you, stay home unless you need to leave, stay in at night and you're okay. The bridges are fine, the roads are decent, the crews are in really good shape. Avoid Manhattan and the Bronx if you can, because as you can see things are the kinds of things you want to avoid there, but yeah. Strong Island represent.

Bullshit

2005-06-13T20:50:00.000-04:00

I've got to come out and say this now, though I've been putting it off, figuring shit, people have worse things to worry about, and if that's how they need to blow off steam, then that's how they need to blow off steam so whatever, but now I'm sick of it, so here: STOP POSTING MADE-UP BULLSHIT IN THE COMMENTS. Everyone with a copy of 28 Days Later that they looted from a Blockbuster is suddenly writing apocalyptic fiction with themselves in the Mad Max role. No, this is not directed at everyone in there, because I know there are pockets in the Northeast and New England and throughout the whole country that are out of control, and of course there's the West Coast, but when I see things about how the South is lost and how cities and towns in upstate New York are totally overrun, I'm like, "I know that's not true." My grandparents are living proof. Shit is awful everywhere, God knows it's awful, but we're not at Game Over yet, and spreading disinformation about it isn't going to help anyone. If you want to be an outlooker be an outlooker. Don't do it on my page.

I've got some good news

2005-06-12T10:07:00.000-04:00

(I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching to Geico. Jeez, remember that? The gecko doing the robot, too?)

From the comments around here nearly everyone's news seems to be at least as bad as mine, so I thought maybe letting you know this might help, in the sense that it's never gonna be ALL bad: My grandparents showed up at my parents' house last night, around 4 in the morning. I'm told they look worse for the wear, exhausted and dehydrated; that they were in a different car (an SUV) than the one they started out in; that my grandma has finally let her hair go gray; and that they're alive, alive, alive alive alive!!! My Grandma and Pa-Pa--I love you guys!!!

What a couple of tough hombres they turned out to be. I've yet to hear of anyone covering that sort of distance since this really started getting bad so I'm going to try and grill them on things as much as I can. But wow. I'm surprised to discover just how much I really DID expect to see them again. Which is incredibly naive when you think about it, but I really don't care.

PS: My thoughts are with you, Dr. John, Mister Mind, Jeff, Bill, Davey, everyone.

2005-06-08T21:43:00.000-04:00

~~My name is Sean and I'm an alcoholic.~~

I debated for a long time how I'd start this post. Should I get to the point, or would that be too melodramatic? In the end I decided to split the difference. So, yeah. Alkiehaulick.

Then there's the other question: Would people be pissed off because I worried them for no reason with that abrupt cut-off and incoherent follow-up, or would they just be happy that I was back pretty much safe and more or less sound? Normally I'd think I'd be being egocentric to ask a question like that of myself, but I've looked at the comments for the last few posts. Total strangers want to know if I'm okay, which is both--what's the word--flattering? comforting? surprising? pleasing? well, it's both that and embarrassing considering how shittily I've been acting. Looking through those comments I can also see that some of my oldest and dearest friends want to know the same thing, which is all those things I just listed, only doubly so. Humiliating. And then there's Amy, who--I can't even begin.

The long and the short of it is that nothing "happened" on Thursday. I just got tired of writing, tired tired tired as Chris Rock used to say. I was also more than a little exhausted by the issue about which I was writing, which I hope you'll understand. So I gave up on trying to wax eloquent about it and slapped the little orange Publish Post button. And then I grabbed a beer. That's it, that's all, except I'm not sure if I was without a drink for the rest of the weekend. Drinks and pills, too, might I add. Mild enough for a while. After all there was only so much to go around.

What really set it off was when I went out on the deck on Sunday morning at dawn after waking up to use the bathroom and saw a half-eaten golden retriever in my neighbor's yard.

Have you ever seen a black explosion? Like a big burst of dark like the Death Star exploding in reverse negative? Like when you press against your closed eyes with your fingertips and you see those big black blobs--that kind of blackness, only bursting. That's what I saw then.

After that--fuck it, I'd be lying if I said I didn't remember much. The part of me that could still formulate coherent and complex decisions decided that I didn't want to let Amanda know about this, and I didn't want to run the risk of her spotting the body when she woke up. So I slipped on my sneakers, crawled down the side of the deck, swung against the side of the house, and dropped down. I grabbed a shovel from the shed and hopped the back fence. Immediately you could tell that our neighbors weren't around anymore, at least in the traditional sense. The sliding glass doors from their deck were broken and the boards were torn down on one side. My guess, which as I'm sure you all have experienced is no longer just a guess but instinct from your solar plexus, was that the family had taken care of whatever had happened and split, not that they had all been slaughtered and were wandering around in there someplace. Four or five revs a few yards away from us? We'd have heard about it by now. Fuck, I probably would have heard about what DID happen that night if I didn't go to sleep pretty much toasted. No, that's not fair. I slept with earplugs in as always. Maybe that's dangerous, but it's definitely the only way to get a good night's sleep without waking bolt upright every time your sleeping self hears a noise.

Anyway, my hunch was right. I peeked through the hole and there was one on the floor face up with its forehead bashed in, the skull shattered and cracked like an eggshell where the skin was torn away. As usual lately it was old, an old lady. I tried to ignore the fur gummed to its lips but obviously I couldn't pull it off.

It didn't take too long to dig the hole and bury the doggie, poor doggie, poor man's best friend. I'm sure I overexerted myself because my arms still ache. (Remember Ronnie Cox in Deliverance?) The bright idea came after I filled the hole back up and slid the table back over it. It was difficult to do all that climbing against the force of gravity with the bottles and the cans, but I managed. When I was rummaging I found a backpack they'd left, so that helped.

It was pretty much downhill from there. I already have a tendency toward bouts of extreme self-pity and nihilism, did you know that? It doesn't manifest itself very often, but there it was. Strange things can set it off--one time it was because Ol' Dirty Bastard died. Another time it was because of the Pakistani madrassas. This time the cause was obvious, and I'm sure you've felt it too. Only this time I was loaded for bear. By the time Amy woke up I was half in the tank, and she immediately grabbed some things and went down to the Leopolds. Didn't I understand what this did to her? Not just because she needs me, but because she's scared? The emetephobia--what the fuck is wrong with me that I didn't give that more thought? But I didn't. She left me alone, which was fine by me.

At some point Sunday, Kurt came home and found out what was going on. He came upstairs to talk some sense into me. I told him okay, fine, I'll go easy, just send Amy back up plese, because I really love her. She didn't want to come back up because she was terrified I'd vomit--she'd come up when I was sober the next day. That went over great, as you can imagine. At some point late that night I apparently started making noise, which besides being annoying is dangerous. Kurt decided to come up again. When he got there I was sipping Jack from a big red cup, like I'd done at the Game this year when some stranger handed me a cup of what I'd thought was beer. I did a lot of yelling of the words "fuck you" from what I remember/have been told. Before I threw the cup at him I drank a shitload too much of it. The next thing I can vaguely sort of remember is crawling down the deck again. I can only see flashes, remember little snippets and sensations from then on. This is only the second time I've ever blacked out from drinking, you know. The last was at Matt O'Neil's party freshman year when I helped make that grain and grape concoction. Then I remembered saying to myself "I'll pour myself one more cup and then head back over to that conversation I was having." I was found several hours later passed out around a toilet that several people had used while I was sleeping there. One shoe was missing. At some point I'd screamed about how "dope" (that was the word I used) one guy's female friend was while that friend was standing right there. That morning I had to go to class, still drunk, hung over, bursting at both ends, could barely make it back to my dorm room to get my books first, felt like it took two hours to walk over there, missed half the class from being late and being in teh bathroom sick, I think I'd prefer to talk about that now rather than this.

In my own defense even as far gone as I was I remember thinking I needed to get as far away from Amy as possible to vomit, which I did, again and again.

I woke up because it was hot and sunny out and I felt like I was on fire. I was wedged behind the dumpsters at the Walgreens up the road. The second I realized where I was and what had happened I got sick again. This is going to sound stupid, but I literally could not decide which was worse, leaving myself out in the open completely incapable of defending myself, or disappearing and leaving Amy thinking that I was dead. She would never forgive me, ever ever ever. As soon as I could get my sea legs back under me I ran back home as fast as I could. There was a crew parked outside talking with Kurt. They'd been looking for me, of course, so nice of them. I went inside and back upstairs and suddenly the whole hangover hit me at once. I was vomitted out thank Christ, but I could barely move. I fell on the bed and the last thing I heard before I crashed out until that afternoon was Amy crying.

I don't really want to talk about what we said to each other yesterday night into this morning. I'm kind of apologizing to you for that. I'm tired of the reticence about dealing with this issue in my family. Hell, I'm even reticent about saying which member/s of the family need to deal with it, as you can gather. But you don't need to know. Only Amy needs to know and she knows it. All the old issues, the dishonesty and lack of self-control issues...totally different context but too fucking familiar. We are still married, I think. But not through any effort on my part.

I nearly threw away my wife, my home, and my own life this weekend is what it boils down to. I thought writing about it would help me wrap my head around all this but I'm not sure that's possible. I don't want to be destroyed by this, any of it. I don't want me and Amy to be destroyed by it. I love you, Amy, I love you so much. I'm sorry. No more, no more.

Drinkingt he last beer

2005-06-05T03:48:00.000-04:00

split it with Kurt because he aske me too

call the police when you see them alltogether like that call the polivr

2005-06-02T01:15:00.000-04:00

Is anyone else having a harder and harder time distinguishing dreams from reality? I find myself sitting around in the middle of the day thinking about how scary it was when I got trapped in that diner, only to realize after about fifteen seconds that it never actually happened. Today when I went to shave (with the last of my Schick Quattro cartridges--anyone on Long Island who wants to barter, my contact information is to the right) I was 100% convinced that I was going to have to shave a spot that I'd missed the last few times where the hair had subsequently grown to about an inch long.

MEanwhile my friend Dave is in hell, my cousin is missing, I would be attending my five year college reunion sometime this spring if any of my friends from college were still alive, and I was informed today that my grandparents left Florida a week ago. It's been two days since they've been heard from by anyone.

Amy ate better today, I

2005-05-31T23:58:00.000-04:00

This is in terrible taste. I laughed anyway. Sometimes you have to.

Happy Memorial Day

2005-05-30T17:48:00.000-04:00

Today we've been keeping the doors between the floors open and having a barbecue to "celebrate." None of us are quite feeling confident enough to go outside, not since the business at NUMC yesterday, but I brought the indoor/outdoor George Foreman in from the deck, cleaned it up, and it pretty much has worked fine. The Leopolds had some frozen patties they were saving for a special occasion. This was special enough. Amy and I still had like one veggie burger that had fallen out of the box and was hidden behind a big vat of Edy's ice cream at the bottom of the freezer. That's what she had. Pretty much.

The main thing is that when we were down on the Leopold's floor playing with the dogs Amy went into the bathroom, and I followed her in and saw she was standing on the scale. 96 pounds. With clothes. I don't know how I didn't notice before. Part of it, I guess, is that everyone stays so bundled up, even inside. It's a tough habit to shake. Another part is that obviously we've all had other things to worry about. On the other hand, how SCREAMINGLY OBVIOUS should it be that an anorexic vegetarian with almost crippling mortality issues might have trouble with a massive epidemic of cannibalism? Our therapist is dead, she hasn't been able to get in touch with her own therapist since this all started, he's probably dead too, the Renfrew Center god only knows, and it's ridiculous to even think about that anyway. Meanwhile there's only so much food to go around, and there's only so much she'll eat anyway. The oatmeal plan has been pretty helpful, so I'm going to make sure she's sticking to it, like glue. We'll save other things for, you know, special occasions.

I know she misses her family, her dogs. I know she doesn't want to lose anyone, doesn't believe that loss is "natural," feels like she can't survive the everyday tragedies of life let alone this hideousness. I know I couldn't save her from herself before and I can't do it now.

More tips from here from what I can gather from people, here at message center central

2005-05-28T05:06:00.000-04:00

* If you see a huge group of revs together, let the authorities, however they are constituted, know. When things were at their worst at the beginning the crews would deliberately lure as many as they could to one spot. It is much, much easier to take them down en masse than one by one house to house. I realize in some areas this may be a problem, but as soon as you can get the word out to someone, do it.

* Stay inside. Common sense, simple common sense. Everyone goes stir crazy now and then, I know, but stay off the roads unless you absolutely have to. That is the easiest way for it to spread. Again, when things were at their worst they barely needed to go inside anyone's homes--they could just grab them out of cars like a fucking buffet. Stay inside, stay off the roads.

* Things to stay away from: Old people. Sick people. Bitten people. Hospitals. Outlookers. (as in "I'm gonna go out looking for 'em. Hand me those shells, will you?") Apartment buildings.

* Stock up on oatmeal. Three bowls of oatmeal a day and you'll be fine, if this is an issue.

* A gun beats a bludgeoning implement beats a stabbing implement beats bare hands.

* If there is a rarely spoken-about history of substance abuse in your family then do not drink so much.

* Take it when you can get it

Dave? Sam? All my favorite online friends, why the radio silence? Why why WHY

Know where to run

2005-05-27T00:12:00.000-04:00

A propos of the comment thread below: From what I understand the exurbs are hit or miss. My in-laws live in one in Colorado about halfway between Denver and Boulder, all brand-new development homes. Theirs is okay, but they know of ones that have gone dead. People just flee into the prairies and hills since there's so much open road, and whoever's left is dead or revved. So the empty areas around them are probably hit or miss as well. If shantytowns or camps are being set up you might be better off steering clear, I'd guess. The official news is almost 100% bullshit at this point--when was the last time you saw a reporter you recognize from before the outbreak?--but an occasional nugget of truth filters through if they can use it to justify something or other, and even they're talking about hijacking.

Things here are not nearly as bad, but I'm thinking of going with a crew. Maybe. We do our part.

I would like to add: I remember the days when I used to read Disinformation.com and Robert Anton Wilson's "nonfiction" books. I considered myself a Discordian. I suppose I still do. I remember posting pages from the Principia Discordia on the doors of the Skull & Bones tomb--this was BEFORE both major-party Presidential candidates were Bonesmen, by the way. Then I grew out of my conspiracy phase because I realized I don't really believe in much of anything. Skepticism makes better sense. And yet I stand by what I said above: the news is now bullshit. The thing to note, though, is that there is no puppetmaster pulling the strings that I can figure. Now it's just a collective drive on the part of the infrastructure to cover its ass. Meanwhile people still die every day. Something like 237,000 people died in this country last year I think. Figure half of those? Even being conservative and saying a third? Plus the bite victims?

How are my in-laws you ask? They're fine. But I get the sense they're keeping something from us. Blunt and prosaic but the true story of our life today.

I fell off the wagon

2005-05-24T15:01:00.000-04:00

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.

Two things that would have happened this weekend

2005-05-21T23:33:00.000-04:00

1. My sister would have graduated from college. Villanova. She was actually much better situated for post-college life than either Ryan or I were. I wonder what she would have ended up doing--last I heard she had some sort of internship lined up in Philly. I talked to her today and I think we'll be going over there tomorrow, if possible. I know she misses her friends, and her boyfriend. I'm pretty sure she's been able to talk to them all.

2. Star Wars Episode III. I was so, so tired of having to defend loving Star Wars to the hipper nerds back in the day. Now I guess I don't have to worry about that anymore. Good. I don't miss it. I've had no fewer than four different dreams in which I "watched" major chunks of this movie, and I hope I have more. The last one was actually hideous. It involved some sort of prelude to episode IV, in which Luke was from earth and was involved with a gang of children who were slaughtered by another gang of children. I'm talking shotguns at point blank range, children strangling each other. It ended with Luke hanging a man from a tree with piano wire.

I'm sorry, my heart is not in this today.

Oh, wait, update on the Leopolds, our landlords. They're not making us pay rend anymore. No one is sure how much that sort of thing matters anymore, or for how long it might matter, but it still feels nice of them. They've got a lot to deal with since Mike's girlfriend disappeared. Kurt joined one of the crews, mainly to find medicine for Jim in abandoned houses. And that's the WAY it is.

Back on the ambien tonite!!!

Two dreams

2005-05-18T15:10:00.000-04:00

First dream
I'm driving home from work, or trying to, but it's the apocalypse. Terrorists are conducting spectacular attacks on virtually everything taller than two stories; you can watch the highrises and apartment buildings as smoke and flame billows out of all their windows, floor by floor. I know that civilization cannot withstand this conflagration. I'm racing home to be with Amy, but the Tappan Zee and Throgs Neck bridges are both about to give way. Many of their steel beams are burned, curled up, twisted, and broken apart from the roadway. I have to speed across the bridges at 90 mph in order to get clear of them before they collapse. I watch my car hurtle down the bridge from above, like the O.J. chase. Once I reach the other side of the bridge, I'm suddenly looking at a Hot Wheels car, rolling back and forth at the end of the bridge as the momentum carries it almost over the edge of the rising terrain, then gives way to gravity as it rolls back down. I'm also feeling the controls like I'm playing Grand Theft Auto, trying to fight against momentum and inertia. Eventually I get back home but home is one of those huge institutional spaces I always dream about; this one is more like a hospital. Actually, now that I think about it, it's like the brightly lit, empty hospital at the beginning of 28 Days Later. In addition to the terrorist attacks and reprisals the apocalypse is being brought on by plants that grow out of control, huge thick (like the thickness of a car) tentacle-like vines that simply grow and grow and grow and impale and wrap around and crush any humans they come across. The whole world will be swallowed by them. Suddenly the policemen and firemen we're with realize that water causes the plants to disintegrate. They start battling the vines back with fire hoses.

Second dream
My sister is dead. She died of a violent allergic reaction to something. I find out and drop to my knees, crying. I worry how we're going to tell her boyfriend. I think to myself that I just don't get it--she was there, and now she's not. The line of her life has simply stopped. I miss her so much.

Real life
Still absolutely no word of or from my cousin Christopher.

Lovely day

2005-05-14T12:52:00.000-04:00

It is beautiful outside today, and despite myself I can't help but want to go out, at least for a little while, and enjoy it. But I'm so tired of wearing hats and gloves and jackets and multiple layers, and the thought of being buried under all that when it's warm out is too much. It probably doesn't even matter--most likely it's like duct-taping your windows after the anthrax attacks. But you have one run-in with those things and you just can't help but want as much between you and them as possible. Every little bit helps, as they say.

Maybe I'll go out on the deck for a little while. That's safe enough.

I am the message center

2005-05-13T12:25:00.000-04:00

Hello to Benjamin and Edgy Mama, who left comments in the post below. Hello to everyone who visits this page. I myself go to a lot of blogs every day--reminding myself that everyone is going through more or less the same thing is a big part of my routine now. Sometimes it's helpful, sometimes it's the opposite of helpful, but usually the former. Welcome everyone.

Ken:

Sunday was Mother's Day. You know what? It was the first day since this all started that I didn't think of them. Is that weird? I wonder how she would have dealt with all of this.Sean - have you heard from Dave since last week? I had a couple of emails with him since you found about his family, but I haven't heard anything in a while.

I thought of your mom and everyone on Mother's Day, too. I wasn't able to see my parents that day--the situation on the Southern State was always bad enough on Mother's Day even before all this shit, so I didn't even try. But I was able to talk to my mom for a bit, and I realize fully how lucky that makes me. Actually, I said that to her a couple of times, which made her cry, which I didn't want to do. Hope you got through the day alright, Kenneth.

And no, I haven't heard from Dave. Given how things are in Seattle (same as in Rhode Island? Who the hell knows) I don't know if that's because of his parents or because of something worse, and I can't believe there could even BE anything worse. You know what? I've got to get over this disbelief nonsense. This is just how it is now. We all did it a few years ago and we can all do it again.

2005-05-11T09:20:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I went to try and drive to the supermarket to see what they had, and when I turned the corner onto North Jerusalem, there one was. It looked older than any I had seen before--I mean that it looked like it had been a rev for longer, not that it was an old man. It was just standing in the middle of the road by the funeral home, where I'm assuming it had come from. I turned right around and called the squads, but I wasn't really all that scared. What was scarier to me than the thing itself was the fact that the squads must have MISSED it when they swept the area, and since I know how long it took them to work on that funeral home, they were either completely thorough and somehow this one slipped through anyway, or they were slipshod about it. I don't know which one I'd prefer to be true--I'd prefer neither to be true, really.

Still no produce at Stop & Shop, by the way, though I was able to grab a jar of applesauce that someone had stuck behind the soup cans. It was a little like how when I used to go shopping at Tower Records and I didn't have enough money for a certain album, but it was the last one in the store and I really wanted it, so I'd tuck it behind some completely unrelated artist's CDs so it would be there when I came back later in the week with enough money to finally buy it. Someone must have done this for this applesauce for whatever reason. Sorry.

Trying not to resent what this has all done to my sex life is very stressful. Stupid and stressful. But what can I say? It's been such a struggle ever since we got married and we were finally making some progress. Now she's not eating again. You can feel the weight of it on your neck, just pushing down.

Hospitals

2005-05-06T16:41:00.000-04:00

You forget little things about your old life. Don't you? Mine was our therapist. He was a terrific therapist--kind, funny, insightful, able to validate both of our feelings without putting the other person on the defensive. We'd all but annihilated the awful, gut-wrenching, screaming and crying and storming away type fights we used to have--I mean, we hadn't had any like that in a long time, but we really put them in the ground with Dr. M. And we were making progress in everything, even the sex department. Then along came the attacks and all this goes on the back burner.

On Wednesday I found out that Dr. M. had died. It had nothing to do with the revenants and everything to do with them. He woke up one morning with a terrible pain in his side. His wife rushed him to the hospital, but there was an outbreak going on and they were funnelling everyone through this labrynthine security detour into shitty makeshift facilities, and by the time the doctors got to him the aneurysm had burst.

I miss him a lot. I don't understand death, I don't think. It's like your life is a line that's being drawn, drawn, drawn, and then all of a sudden the line stops. He was there and now he's not.

This also highlights something I've been meaning to say, and I wonder if they'll ever start saying it officially: Hospitals are accidents waiting to happen. I've heard about a couple of situations that got totally out of control, even AFTER the initial outbreak was quelled. And yes, that's on the East Coast. You take sick, wounded, bitten people and concentrated them in big buildings, and all it takes is one person to slip away in his sleep. Pretty soon you could have a whole floor full. And not every area has the kind of security infrastructure that Nassau seems to have at this point. Hell, you see what happens when they stumble across a pocket in Manhattan. Hospitals are self-resupplying pockets, basically. I do not like being so near Nassau University Medical Center, that's for sure.

And I miss my therapist.

North Korea

2005-05-02T21:33:00.000-04:00

I was wondering when we were first going to hear this sort of news. If you had told me a month and a half ago that the government of North Korea had fallen I'd have been overjoyed. Now I just wonder what it fell to. But I have a feeling we all know.

2005-04-30T02:09:00.000-04:00

I drank milk today. Fresh milk, for the first time in how many weeks? I poured it into the big little white and blue mugs just like I always used to, and gulp gulp gulp, ahhhh. Amy had to stop me from refilling it too many times in a row. We got it from the food mart down the block. The 7-11's boarded up and still inoperative. But mmmmm, milk. The word traveled so fast around the neighborhood. Good news, more please.

2005-04-27T21:26:00.000-04:00

Today is my birthday.

Tour

2005-04-26T21:39:00.000-04:00

The reason we were gone so long is because we went to see Dave's parents. I just got tired of seeing him beg for information in the comments here, so we loaded up and off we went. I guess we were tired of being here, I don't know. The notion that your life is proscribed is the hardest thing to deal with, for me. Anyway it took us forever to get to Sea Cliff, and we couldn't remember exactly where we needed to go anyway. Every other exit it seemed there was a checkpoint, and they weren't exactly comfortable with letting anyone through regardless of your explanation, unless you were an 18-wheeler carrying food or a tanker. After what seemed like a couple of hours they just started waving people off the road onto an exit ramp, and then from there into a big lot next to a Target--apparently there'd been a rev-related accident and their SOP is to clear the roads so it doesn't spread and leave hundreds of stranded cars and kill the road. That is actually where we spent the first night, which scared us to death. I'm not sure how concentrating everyone into a lot is any safer than leaving everyone stranded on the road. It's safer for the road, I guess.

And you know what? I'm tired of writing this out because the ending just fucking sucks. When I emailed Dave to tell him I sat there for hours, literally hours, trying to think of how to put it. I never thought I'd write a message like that, ever. I still remember when I'd go over to their house in Garden City and chit-chat with Mrs. G. about politics, and how she was so far out, bless her, that she made me look like Pat Buchanan. I remember Mr. G.'s reaction the time I clogged their toilet and they didn't have a plunger in the house. I remember getting stoned and watching Texas Chainsaw, playing D&D and drinking Sam Adams, being young in the home of a family that no longer exists. Gone, wiped out, devoured by tragedy.

Tell me how you are

2005-04-20T17:06:00.000-04:00

Whoever you are, all of you, how are you doing? Leave a comment. I'm trying to take my mind off of the one who was running up and down the street today, and I feel like the more people I am connected to directly, the better things are. I'm sure that this is not true, but I don't care.

2005-04-19T17:07:00.000-04:00

The big truck fleets are rolling again--that's the major news here on Long Island today. They take forever because of the security on all the bridges, which took about twice as long to clear as the major arteries did, but they get there. The moment I see one I will cheer, I swear. Putting off the inevitable, which is how do you rebuild from something like this? Unless they come up with ~~a cure~~ a vaccine it will never, ever stop. Every time you see footage from a developing country it's a holocaust. Trickle-up economics. And trickle-down, too: Weeks of completely arrested commerce means how many millions will starve to death? And then what?

2005-04-18T17:23:00.000-04:00

Lovely weather today, and yesterday.

So they've established that not everyone comes back. Bite victims, yes. And some non-bite victims. But not all of them. What does this mean, besides that they're really going to need to work a lot harder on figuring out the epidemiology of this? Does it mean that I'll be able to worry a little bit less about having an aneurysm or something overnight and dying and coming back and eating my wife? The answer is no.

I think the trick is to not let yourself get worn down by the fact that you have to ask yourself these kinds of questions and worry about these kinds of things. I get to a point every day where all my brain wants to do is yell "not fair, not fair!" and it's so tempting to self-medicate or go to sleep. But you can't do that. I just say, "Things are getting safer and safer every day." Which isn't always true, but it is generally.

2005-04-16T19:11:00.000-04:00

Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Underworld, U2, David Bowie, Tori Amos, Nirvana, Roxy Music, Joy Division, Massive Attack, Nine Inch Nails, Rolling Stones, Nick Drake, Dandy Warhols, Doves, Orbital, Pink Floyd, The Who, Iggy Pop, Azure Ray, Death Cab for Cutie, Interpol, Guns n' Roses, Wu-Tang Clan, thank you, thank you, thank you. You still sound the same. Thank you.

2005-04-15T16:16:00.000-04:00

Next time I leave for this long I will post something first, I promise. I didn't mean to scare anyone, but then I get back and I've got all these emails. Here I am, I'm here, I'm okay.

After we heard about Ken's mother, that was it. The next morning at dawn we packed up a few things, put Lucy in the carrying case--because we had no idea if it would be feasible to come back once we'd left, and we didn't want her starving to death or becoming yet another animal for the Leopolds to feed--got in the Altima and started driving to see my family in Garden City.

By now you've probably done this yourselves, whoever you are, in some fashion or another. My guess is that's why there's been this relapse over the past couple of days. Once people got the message that traveling was potential suicide, they stayed in. But at a certain point, you start running out of food, water, supplies, sanity. So people start emerging. And even if most of the revs from the breakout days have been put down, now we know that it's self-perpetuating. There will always be new ones, usually quicker than the crews can get to them. If a dad in a family of six dies of a heart attack in the middle of the night--oh, Christ. Get out, out, out, out of my brain, get out.

Anyway, the car ride. I don't know if you remember this anymore, because it seems like it happened so long ago, like the '80s. But if you remember the big ice storm/blizzard thing that happened in February, I guess it was? It took me five hours to get home from work that day. It alternated from being the scariest driving I've ever done--zero visibility, couldn't go any faster than 20 miles an hour without careening right off the road, terrified that at any moment the car ahead or behind or, god help us, passing might lose it and smash into me--to the most exruciatingly dull driving I've ever done--15 miles in three hours.

This was like that. And thinking of it like that helped: "It's like being stuck in a blizzard. Yes, it's scary, and frustrating, but if you go slow you'll be okay." If you repeated that last part often enough you believed it.

They'd cleared the Southern State, mostly. I mean, there were wrecks everywhere, more wrecks than they could tow away, but they were at least moved off to the shoulders, or at worst to the far right or left lane. Crews were EVERYWHERE. Flashing red, blue, yellow lights as far as the eye could see, cops standing on top of the cars with their guns out at each exit. Each one had a little pile of bodies next to it. There were more of those than they could tow away too, I guess.

We took a guess as to what exit to get off at, trying to figure out what roads would be the clearest. We went with Hempstead Avenue. Our guess was that if we took side-ish roads, there was just not enough volume on them ever to produce much wreckage, and hopefully all the neighborhoods were cleared out enough to travel through. We got lucky. Garden City South was clear enough that people were actually outside, mostly just sitting on their porches or standing in driveways and talking to each other. Or not talking to each other. We saw a lot of people just standing around, not doing much of anything except staring at us as we drove past. Some people were like us and covered from head to toe with coats, gloves, scarves, hats, sunglasses. Sweating like bastards. Other people were in their pajamas. There weren't a whole lot in between. You either have your act together at this point or you don't. It makes it easier to know who to steer clear of.

The house was pretty much the same as it always was aside from the boards. It wasn't until I stepped inside that I realized how fucking scary the whole fucking fucking thing fucking was fucking. I was 100% convinced that someone would pop out of the backyard and grab Amy the second we stepped out of the car and walked the three feet into the side door, I realized. And we did it anyway. I don't know what that says, does it say anything?

Mom, Dad, Ryan, Caitlin, all okay. All glad it happened at Easter so Caitlin was home and not in Philly. Cats okay, Dad looking thinner, thank god. Neither my mom nor my dad drank a drop since it started, they told me, which i had been worried about. But I think I remember that from 9/11, too. Or did I make that up? I went to Amy's apartment that day the moment she got home from work and slept over. Years ago. Anyway, he was eating better. My hero. I love my Dad. I always think about him being in the Marine reserves at Parris Island, like, what the hell was he doing there? He's my Dad! They better be nice to him! He and Ryan were so quick that they hadn't had to kill anyone, not even poor Mr. Stone next door, who finally twigged out--that whole place looked like a hurricane hit, or that tornado that went up and down the block the week we moved in in 1985. They said they'd never been so happy they lived near so many nuts--for days they were in the basement not because of the revs but because of the bullets. Even Mr. DiFazio, finally out of the closet, so to speak, a bunch of "friends of his" took an afternoon last week and went house to house before any of the crews.

News of the extended family: Grandma and Pa-Pa got one phone call out of the rescue station. They are NOT fucking around in Florida, which stuns me, but people made it their business to focus on those retirement communities first thing, which makes a lot of sense if you give it any thought. Which someone obviously did. It's all individual initiative that gets anything done right, i'm completely convinced. Cousins, aunts, uncles okay. Except for my cousin Chris. He was on tour and they haven't heard from him. I am trying not to expect the worst. It is impossible not to suspect the second-worst, though. Impossible. You hold onto the second-worst as hard as you can, actually. Don't YOU?

Why did we come back? Because we had to. It's not our house, and things are not so bad that getting back to a semblance of real life is completely out of the question in a month, two months, maybe less. Staying there is just--well, well, it's like this. If you can go back and forth, how bad can it be? "See you next week, Mommy. I love you." Say it and mean it. Mom was really upset, didn't want us to leave. And I'm worried it inspired Ryan to try and get Sarah. But maybe he should.

When we got back today the people who ran away from next door, their car was gone. But Kurt said one of the people down the block took it, hotwired it, took it. That's all.

2005-04-12T13:14:00.000-04:00

Hello, Ken. I'm so sorry.

Ken's mother was killed last week. I've known her since I was in sixth or seventh grade, I guess, and she's the first person I'm close to to die from this. As communications get better, I'm only going to find out about more. It's like you're taking a step and your foot just keeps moving downward and downward. There's nothing to stand on.

My best friend

2005-04-11T13:51:00.000-04:00

I haven't heard from Ken since this started, really. I know his apartment hasn't been destroyed because the server that houses my old email account is located in it and the email is still working last I checked; that's it. Everything is so maddeningly spotty is the thin; sometimes I think I'd prefer that everything was melted down, rather than all this "sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, cell phones no, land lines yes, email yes, wireless no, power yes, cable no" shit. You just get so frazzled, never knowing what the hell is up with this or that, how long it will last, what's going on. The upside is that thre is an upside, really--things still seem to be getting better. And I'm getting more and more anxious to try to go see my parents. We've talked to them on the phone now and then--except yesterday, when a crew actually took out a whole utility pole as they were getting chased down by a rev; they're never going to finish finding all the ones from the funeral home; but miracle of miracles they fixed it by noon today, working through the night, which takes more courage than I'll probably ever have. IT workers are the firemen of this whole disaster, I mean, just keeping Blogger up and running must take a small army of civilians who are literally willing to die to maintain it. Anyway, yeah, no idea if the roads are clear for that long, but we are running low on food and we're going to have to try at some point.

This was extremely disjointed. I'm sorry. But then, why am I apologizing, who cares about this sort of thing now? The other day I actually wrote "spoiler alert" in a post. Can you believe that?

I don't want it to happen again

2005-04-09T19:33:00.000-04:00

Our wireless connection went down yesterday and it scared me to death. It turned out just that something got unplugged or something like that, but it took forever to figure it out because we weren't even sure who's connection we'd been using, and Kurt was asleep when it happened and we didn't have the heart to wake him so we just sat there like idiots, not having anything to say, just pulling the towels and blankets to the side and staring out the window. It's not like we need it to keep in touch with people, even--the phones, while spotty, have been okay for the past few days. It's just that each time something fails or shorts or goes down, you think, "Well, that's it for that. That's the last time we'll have that." I don't want entropy, I don't want things to disintegrate. If there's anything good you can take from the horror of the past two weeks it's that things haven't fallen completely apart, at least not around here. And then you think about the places where it HAS fallen apart, and then you cry and cry and cry.

I'm going to try to visit my family. Soon, soon.

2005-04-07T20:32:00.000-04:00

I think things are going well, but here's what's bothering me today. The couple from the other day, their car is still parked next door. But they're not there. Nobody is. Maybe they got picked up by the crews. I keep telling myself that and I keep going to the window and looking at it. It's still there now.

Ken, are you there? Taft, Marlaire, Savas, Patrick, Gary? Karolyn?

Turning the corner?

2005-04-06T22:39:00.000-04:00

Woke up today after what can only be described as a bender. I know I said I was done with all that but after Sunday--I know, this is not a good habit. I've seen some people I'm close to, very close to, get in the habit and really hurt not so much themselves but the people they're close to, very close to. I don't need that, Amy doesn't need that, the people downstairs don't need that, my family in Garden City, where I hope to go maybe next week, they don't need that.

What I was trying to say yesterday is that they went house to house all day, into the night, and then all day again today. Up and down, block after block, cops, firemen, EMTs, and the occasional military person, though I really don't know well enough to tell you what branch. The word is that things are okay. Not great, but not Manhattan, which I don't even want to think about and probably couldn't if I wanted to. God, I hope all my friends are alright. That almost sounded like a direct address, that last sentence, didn't it? That is not something I've been in the habit of doing for the past, I don't know, decade or so. I do not think I will get back in it now.

So yeah. You hear the occasional gunshot, and you can definitely hear the big dumptrucks roll through when they roll through, and you know the difference between them and the fire trucks or transports because the dumptrucks smell. They always say it smells different than anything else but you know what? It smells familiar, like every other awful thing you've ever smelt, only you can smell it in your mind, if that makes sense. Knowing what you're smelling makes it worse. It was like when I was always coughing and sneezing in the city when we all came back to work in 2001. Worse because you knew why.

Dave, I hope you are still alright. Please sit tight. I don't know what the situation is like on the West Coast but they are making progress out here. I haven't heard one yelling in almost 24 hours. Sit tight.

Everyone, all my other friends and family, if your'e reading this, I love you so much. Please sit tight.

2005-04-05T21:26:00.000-04:00

We're winning

What happened

2005-04-04T21:26:00.000-04:00

Somehow the old lady next door's daughter and son-in-law made it over here. (I think he was an auxiliary fireman.) They found the place empty and trashed and as they were going through it I overheard them. I went downstairs and got Kurt and Kevin and we went to talk to them. When we told them what happened to their mother they teared up, but it's like they expected it, so they didn't break down. It was only after we told them we had her dog that the guy got mad, really mad. (The daughter not so much--come to think of it, maybe she was drugged up too.) We thought to rescue the dog but not a human fucking being? Kevin tried to explain that we didn't think, nobody thought anything for the first couple of days. The only reason we were able to rescue that dog when we thought to do anything, finally, was because they don't eat animals apparently. If they had wanted to eat the dog they'd have eaten the dog. (She would have eaten the dog, but I ddint' say that.) But the guy was completely apeshit at this point. How could you resuce the GODDAMN dog but not her? She was a HUMAN FUCKING BEING! His wife was trying to calm him down. It was going to take forever for them to get back home even though they only lived in like Levittown or something like that, I mean you could see from his Jeep that it's sstill hell on earth out there. It was all dented and scratched up and there was at least one dark brownish stain on it, and the windshield was cracked on one side. Before things got ugly with them they'd said the crews had pretty much swept the whole area but tehy can't stay all in one place for long, obviously, they've got a lot to cover what with the Army tied up in NYC. The helicopters they're using as gunships they only just got the helipads cleared--apprently a lot of people thought the'd be safe in areas like that, which was wrong. Anyway he's flipping out, she's choking back tears or whatever on whatever she's on and me Kurt and Kevin are trying to like inch back toward the house, because this guy's raising such a fucking racket, I mean they'd have to be deaf if they were around, you know? Suddenly Amy yells from the deck, like it was ripping right from her throat instead of actually travelling through her mouth first, SEEEEAAAAAAAANNNN!!!! And I can't see her from where we are, but what she said later was that she could see one just completely hauling ass through the backyards, trying to find us. You can see into like 15 different backyards from our deck on the second floor, which is exactly why we've stayed off the damn thing, but she wanted to check and see if things were going okay with this family. Anyway she says the thing looked at her for like a half a second but then forgot about it, like it knew it couldn't get to her and was just gunning for us. So this guy is still yelling and all of a sudden he hauls off and punches Kevin right in the face, smashing his glasses off his face, Pow! And then I swear to God the guy just runs, just like books right out of there, leaving his wife who's standing their slackjawed at this point. So Kurt, you can see him for a minute completely torn, because he's had this martial arts training and he's totally ready to deck this guy who's not far away yet, but his brother-in-law just got cold-cocked, and the look on his face, it was like that cartoon sound the cartoon characters make when they shake out their heads after something happend to them. It was almost comical. So he decides and bends to help Kevin off the ground, then BAM! Right through the crack in the fence comes this guy, looks like a delivery guy only the entire left side of what you can see of his body is just this one giant mass of red, from the cheek down, this giant mass where whoever killed him just gnawed and ripped away until he came back to, which is when they stop, which I don't know have you ever heard of anything like that before in nature before now? Ever? Uhhhhhhhh, he yells or shouts like he's been punched in the stomach and is trying to get his wind back, uhhhhhhhhhhh, and the woman now she runs too, in the direction of where her husband ran to. She thought to do this right away, and as I stood there what popped into my head as clear as if I was watching it on TV the day it first aired was the final episode of Season Five of The Sopranos (spoiler alert) where Tony and Johnny Sack are standing in Johnny's backyard talking after everything's blown over and they're making friends again and you're like "ahh, I'm really glad about this," then you see Tony notice something over Johnny's shoulder and he all of a sudden takes off, and there's like two or three seconds where neither you nor Johnny have any clue WHAT'S going on, you're just frozen there in the snow, and then Johnny turns and it's the FBI running over the hill to come get him, and he moves but too late. So that's what I'm seeing even as I'm standing there closest to this guy as he's making that horrible fucking sound running full tilt like he's gonna jump over me when he gets to me, like a high jumper, that's how much this guy is just flooring it with his tongue hanging out between his upper and lower jaw on the left side of his face because there's barely any cheek there at all and you can see like spittle or whatever that is literally flowing off his tongue and blowing backwards he's running so fast. So I just make this "huhhh" sound, the same sound i made that time when I saw Ryan out of the corner of my eye in the dining room and thought he was a ghost, and again I just like fall almost to the ground like I did that time. But as I bring my arms up to shield my face not specifically agains tthis thing but just shield my face I all of a sudden notice the knife is in my hand, I'd had it tip away from the man and woman so now it's like classic Psycho position, and fump the thing runs into me and I bring it down and slush right into its eye and the bridge of its nose, you can feel it scrape against the bone and then bump against the back of the skull because everything in between has slowed it down and you don't have enough momentum to push it all the way through, and the thing just falls down dead. Dead dead. I let out a couple more "huhh, huhh"s and just like back away, like what? And then I go "hooooo", as in "somebody say ho!" rather than an owl going hooo, hooo. Amy's now down at the front door and yells "get inside!" And that's enough to get the three of us sort of snapped out of it and we move inside. But i go back for the knife cause we'll need it. It pulls out pretty easy and at this point it's not even disturbing, because you know it's not alive or even ambulatory anymore, it's just matter. So we get inside and Kurt and Kevin stay by the door to make sujre if that man and woman come back, and Amy and I go back upstairs. I tossed the knife in the sink and covered it with a pot because we don't need Lucy licking at it, who knows what's in that blood. I told Amy the story and she got that quiet demeanor where it's like she knows she's expected to say something but also knows that whatever she'd say almost redundant compared to what she's expected to say. But I don't really expect her to say anything, except she hugs me for a long time, which is good and fine. It wasn't that hard to do. Honestly, it was mostly instinct coupled with an accident--instinctual self-defense. But you know how you can feel like an echo of certain physical things you do in the muscles and bones that did them? I can feel that scraping, like the way the meat of my hand vibrated as the knife scraped against the bone. In terms of things I ever expected to feel in my whole life that was not one of them, no SIR. In my worst nightmares I was always in the army or in prison or in permament high school, someplace where you couldn't control what you got to do with your life and you weren't free to just leave if you didn't want to be there. Or like when people are captured and tortured, I always thought, Don't they know my mommy loves me? I mean, don't they know my mommy loves me?

2005-04-03T21:14:00.000-04:00

Killed one today.

2005-04-02T20:18:00.000-05:00

You can hear sirens all the time now, through the wind and rain (this is the second huge storm in a week). Clearly they're regrouping and pushing things back, starting from the main roads--they all seem to be coming from the direction of Newbridge, and maybe there from the Southern State and Hempstead Turnpike. I think they use the sirens to attract them. Siren goes on, and within two minutes, bang bang bang. Still nothing right where we are.

At around 3:30 Amy woke me up to tell me that the old lady next door had gotten loose from the basement. I looked out the window and you could see her running down the street, toward the sirens. I went downstairs and knocked on the floor. Sarah came up and let me pet the old lady's dog. The poor thing, how can it understand? I can't understand. Nobody can understand this.

Dave left another comment below, if you've noticed, whoever you are. It sounds like the cities are a bloodbath. They've probably been working on them first, but god, that could take months, months.

We turned the news on today for the first time since I don't know when. They're calling them revenants, the cops and the Guard call them revs. Nobody use the z-word.

Another dream

2005-04-02T01:01:00.000-05:00

I overhear a girl I knew from work describing that she just had sex, and was still horny so she wanted to use her vibrator, but her batteries were dead. Now I get turned on, so I go look for a place to masturbate. At first my brother is around, so I look for someplace else. Soon I find that I am in one of those enormous institutional settings I'm always in when I dream--some enormous high school/dorm/train station-type thing. This one is more hospital-like than usual, sort of a cross between hospital and high school. Instantly the sexual undercurrent disappears. The building is haunted, and the ghosts usually take the shape of children or animals. I know that the ghosts are evil and want to harm people. I'm in a long, white hall with a brown carpeted floor and wooden handrails along the walls. In the distance an old woman approaches. She's heavyset with stringy red hair, a blue bathrobe and a walker. She's a ghost. I take Amy's hand and we lower our heads, hunkering down, and start walking towards her. We walk faster and faster and I say "we can do this, we can get out of here, we just need to go right THROUGH HER!" and at that moment we walk through her. That was the end of the dream.

When I woke up it was still light out and I could hear sirens, for the first time in days. I thought I heard gunfire too, but I really don't know what the hell "distant gunfire" sounds like. I do know that they are getting more agressive with houses, including this house (I just got done reboarding the patio doors). But this draws them into the open more often, and if things haven't completely fallen apart yet someone could really do some damage to them.

I am tired of feeling sorry for myself as it allows the enormity of this all to smother me. I am not going to take anything anymore. Maybe if I have legitimate trouble sleeping, but that is it. I do not need to become a subtance abuser. I'm out of beer or I'd stop drinking that too. Now I just feel mad, mad mad mad and determined.

Phones went back up. I'm amazed at how much is still functional. These people must be defending their posts like it's the Alamo. I don't want to have to kill anything. I'm mad about it but I'm sorry, I don't/can't.

2005-03-31T22:18:00.000-05:00

Today we went out to move the body off the front lawn and one of them attacked us. All of a sudden I felt a weight on my back and I fell forward. I flipped over and it was yelling and grabbing for my face. It was an old man in a suit. I didn't recognize him. I pushed upward and kept him away from me, and as I did that my arms felt totally at ease, like I could have lifted a car up just as effortlessly. John and Mike pulled him off of me. I went back inside and I really felt fine, until I realized I couldn't remember how to lock the door. I could feel my head throbbing and chest pounding and the whole everything seemed to move in and out. This time I tried trazodone.

I am sorry about my o utburst yesterday

2005-03-30T23:22:00.000-05:00

2005-03-30T22:51:00.000-05:00

This afternoon I dreamt that I was at Chaminade, my old high school. I was outside, in the front of the building, and it was very bright out. They were all over the place. You couldn't really see them--they were just shadows, black shadows in solid form. And I was trying to get in but the doors were locked.

I dodged them and ran around the side of the building, through that little parking lot on the corner. I banged on the door that opens stage left in the auditorium and someone let me in. There were a lot of people inside. I saw Bro. Rupert, my old drama teacher, showing someone how to use a shotgun.

People started ceding a lot of authority to me because I knew how to handle myself in this sort of situation. As I was making my rounds I saw that someone had left the auditorium door that I had come in through open. I went around from classroom to classroom with a bullhorn, instructing people that they had to keep the doors shut and chained. Everyone was very talkative and seemed like they were having a good time so I wasn't sure if they were listening to me.

I guess in order to pray for help, the brothers decided to have a Mass. (This was a Catholic school.) Me and some of my old friends, who were also there, refused to get up and receive Communion. We laughed about it. What were they going to do, give us detention? We were grown-ups now, and besides, had they looked outside lately? There was more to worry about than getting sent to the dean's office. The brother who was ushering laughed too, like "look at the chutzpah these guys have." This was the brother who in real life told our sophomore year religion class that and I quote the Inquisition had some good points.

Real life. This is real life now. It hurts, it hurts so bad. It comes over you in waves, like waves of sick. My chest, my shoulders, my jaw where the saliva pools, my head behind my eyes.

Three things to remember about today: My parents called and got through, and told me their cat had come back, a little scratched up but fine. The phone seemed to go out for good around 11 this morning and it's still not back up. And I accidentally made eye contact with one of them through the window and it didn't run right for the house. Learning.

Stay put

2005-03-29T16:45:00.000-05:00

Don't kick us out of the house, Kurt. He's not reading this but I want to say that anyway. We're not a part of his family and no matter how well we've gotten along in the past, everything has changed. So please don't kick us out of the house, because I don't know how we'll make it to Garden City right now. They really just launch themselves at cars and if enough get to you you crash. Last time the news was on some truck driver panicked and took his tanker onto the Southern State, crashed into an overpass, no one cleared it, as far as I know it's still burning. I am still going to slip the rent under the door on Friday.

I do know my family is alright. They're staying upstairs because there's no door between the side door and the basement. They're thinking about going outside to the garage tomorrow first thing to get the door that used to be there and put it back up. Everything's much quieter during the day but that's relative because every day is worse than the last now. I'm a little calmer, at least, but that's probably the halcion. Amy's more doped up than I am, and spends most of the day sleeping or crying. Halcion, ambien, melatonin, tylenol pm, benadryl, nyquil. I remember when she used to work in the emergency room. Already using past tense? Anyway when she'd work in the emergency room and see a dead body she'd be really disturbed. She hated it. I only ever saw one, and I didn't even really see it. There was a white sheet over it, a car accident on Covert Avenue in Stewart Manor, near Sewanhaka. Nothing.

Amy's family is okay too. Everyone I've talked to who is still okay is still okay because they haven't left their houses. Trying to take advantage of the situation, fucking, People who travel should just be shot, the fucking son of a bitches. Kill them all, kill them all.

2005-03-28T23:48:00.000-05:00

Our landline isn't working anymore. This morning it was staticky and cut in and out, then it just stopped working. Maybe it's the rain. Cellphones are useless, even Verizon. Cable, electricity, water still running. We haven't heard from either of our families since this morning. The fire engines are still on the street, you can hear them most of the time.

This morning we decided we should try and bring the lady next door and her dog over here. Kurt, his two sons, his brother-in-law, and I all went over there. Her back window was broken in and we saw the 7-11 guy, who had wandered away last night, in there. His stomach, well, you could see it out of his body. He kind of looked at us for a minute and then made a noise, like a retarded guy. He started running for us and Kurt shot him in the neck. There was a big splatter of neck torn off from the left-hand side and he stopped making that noise, but now it was like a hissing sort of sound, and he was reaching out the window after us. John (younger son) hit him in the head three times, hard, with the baseball bat. At this point we break in and we can hear her making these high-pitched squealing sounds in her basement. We just closed up the door. Her dog had been hiding behind the couch and came out when we got in there. We brought him back home.

Once we boarded everything up with shit from Kurt's van we didn't go outside again. I came back up here and I'm stayig back up here I am not going anywhere. It's not even a question, I mean where are you going to go? The answer is that I want to go to find my family but it could take five hours to get there. This is not a snowstorm. If you wantt o go outside then go, but this is part of the problem. Everyone stay inside.

You can't put it away is the problem. When you wake up tomorrow it will still be this way. It's never going to be fixed, this is what's really happening.

2005-03-27T23:44:00.000-05:00

Woke up to someone banging on the front door, over and over and over again. Peeked out the window, didn't recognize him, figured it was for the landlord. Tried to go back to sleep but the guy kept banging. I didn't want to go downstairs to find out in person from the landlord what was going on because then the guy who was banging would be able to see me in the landing, so I called. When the phone rang I heard the guy start banging even harder, like he was throwing his shoulder into the door. Sure enough about five seconds after my landlord picked up I heard the glass door break, then thudding against the wooden door behind it. My landlord said that no, they didn't know him, and they didn't want to open the door to ask him what he wanted because (what I couldn't see from up here) his right ear was missing. They'd called the police an hour ago. Then he asked me if I'd seen the news at all this morning.

Once I saw what was going on they asked me if I wanted to come down into the basement with them, but I didn't, not with that guy still at the front door. I actually figured it'd be safer up here once I hung blankets up to block the windows. Once we did that I called my parents. They were still okay except that one of their cats had jumped out of a hole that their next-door neighbor had accidentally shot through their window when he was firing at somebody. Ryan was worried about his girlfriend but I told him to stay put.

By around lunchtime when the news started ignoring the regulations and showing the bodies we realized the banging had stopped. I peeked out from behind the towel we hung on the front window and saw the guy lying on the front lawn. His hair was wet-looking and matted down in one place and he wasn't moving. I didn't want to leave Amy but I knew I needed to talk to Kurt (landlord) so I ran downstairs, but they'd locked the door. So I ran back upstairs and called again. This time they'd disconnected the phone on the ground floor, so we didn't attract any attention. I ran back downstairs and once Kurt opened the door we crawled across the living room and down to the basement. They'd had to muzzle their dog but they were otherwise okay. Basically Kurt had taken one of the swords he had from his martial arts days, opened the front door and brained the guy. Just as he was closing it up again he saw another one run down Jerualem Road after a car riding on rims. Also, something at the gas station was on fire, but he figured that if it had been the pumps we'd have known it by now. He asked if I knew how to fire a gun but I didn't.

When I got back upstairs I vomited, which scared Amy worse than anything else so far. But I think that was a one-time situation--I'm trying to keep it together much better than that now. I'm trying not to think about it. I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and ate it, and I made Amy eat something or else I knew she wasn't going to eat at all. She had ceral. We had to turn the TV off while we ate.

Finally around 2 the police came by the house, but Kurt said that they didn't even ask him any questions when he opened the door, they just saw the guy on the lawn and told Kurt to stay indoors. I looked through the side window as they drove away and there was this huge reddish-brown smear on the trunk and rear bumper. I also noticed that the fire at the gas station was out.

I don't know, I'm fucking tired, I'm writing this in a closed bathroom so that none of the light escapes. My parents and brother and sister were still fine last time we were able to get through. Amy's parents too, things aren't as bad out there still. (I want to tell you that Bobo passed out again today at the vet, because that is still important, I don't care.) We turned the TV off because of the light once it got dark out--this was right around the time they all started showing that church. It felt like it got a lot worse after the sun went down. That's when we heard the car crash, I guess into the 7-11. The last time I looked outside the 7-11 guy was in our backyard. Every once in a while he yells. Then the old lady next door's dog barks and you can hear one banging on her side door. Most of the guy on the lawn's body is gone now. Not all of it, though, not FUCKING all of it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I still, I don't know. Amy gave me some ambien.

Today

2005-03-26T22:56:00.000-05:00

Something just flew overhead that sounded like a jet.

When we woke up the rioting had already started, so I called Ken and Savas and a couple of other people in the city to find out if they had any clue what was going on. They didn't, not really, though they both thought the "shoot-out between gang members in the emergency room" explanation was pretty weak. It had already gotten pretty bad. But it did take me a while to reach them, so it's tough to characterize what the immediate cause might have been in the epicenter(s?) hours earlier.

One of the stranger aspects of whatever the hell is going on is that wherever else it's happening in the city, it's also happening in SoHo and the Village. That would be like the Rodney King riots centering in West Hollywood. It doesn't make sense to me, and neither does the Asian situation, which is totally out of control by whatever accounts are still making it out. Then you've got places like Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan where you don't really know if it's even out of character given the political climate, but the mind wants to see patterns. You really can't make any judgements from the news anyway, since the TV is pretty much just showing "all smoke and skylines all the time" instead of any on-the-ground footage; the picture being painted by the NYC-based bloggers is pretty goddamn grim, though, that's for sure.

I had to go out this afternoon to replace my glasses, which I had snapped in half at lunch the other day in a misguided effort to tighten the fit. This was around 5 p.m. and I didn't really notice anything out of whack here. Aw shit, that isn't true, is it? Now that I think of it you could see the cop cars down by the Nassau University Medical Center. Probably unrelated, but actually? Probably not, at this point. I'll see the patterns until they're proven otherwise.

Amidst all this Amy got a call from her parents telling her that her dog Bobo passed out in the middle of the night and had to go to the veterinary ICU. He was diagnosed with congestive heart failure about a year ago, and that's what caused this. Probably the last thing she needed to hear today, the day after she got back from visiting. He seems fine now but they're keeping him overnight, and they've got him on oxygen and on higher doses of medication. Amy called the animal hospital a few minutes ago and things were still normal out there.

You can hear sirens fairly frequently now, so I'm sleeping with earplugs in.

Home again, home again, jiggedy-jig

2005-03-26T00:37:00.000-05:00

Amy's back, though it took a while. Captain Oblivious here knew her flight was going to be late, which worked out fine for me thanks to a big accident on the Van Wyck and a virtual flotilla of cop cars at that Jamaica Medical Center or whatever along the way, but it was only as I unplugged my iPod from the car stereo in the airport parking garage that I caught any news on the radio about the riots, or whatever it is, in Southeast, and now I guess just plain, Asia. It was still early enough in the day that the ripple effect only added an hour or so, but I can't even imagine what it's like now that all those airports have been closed down for this long. In certain areas I can almost comprehend what causes something like this--I mean, they've suffered enough as it is--but man. I know I swore off talking politics, so that's all I'll say: man.

I'm glad Amy made it out to Colorado (and got home under the wire). Her whole family lives out there, except her brother and his family who live even farther away in California. She's got nieces and a nephew and her sister and her parents and, I think most especially, her dogs, including her best friend Bobo, who's long in the tooth though still hale and hearty. What this means is that every time she has to leave them, the process is about as clean and painless as ripping a bandage off a burn victim. I know how much she worries about losing--actually, losing not just Bobo, but how she worries about losing anyone, ever. I don't know, she's far more eloquent about this than I am, and I don't want to speak on her behalf at any rate. She does always have a swell time when she goes out there, and she does always come back with a dozen fun stories and a digital camera full of doggie and baby pictures. But she's sad to have to come back, and I'm sad that she's sad. Not just in the sense that I feel bad for her, either, which is tough to admit, but true. I'm in competition with that emotion for her attention is how it feels sometimes. It also feels like I should be doing a better job showing her just how many aspects of herself should make her happy, which is of course everything. But then I marvel at my contemptible ability to see people I care about as outgrowths of me, rather than as people I care about.

Well. For all my movie watching and Pabst Blue Ribbon drinking and staying up past bedtime and not shaving and such that I did while she was gone, I was awfully lonely (feline companionship excluded), and I am awfully glad that she's lying on the bed asleep right next to me, instead of across the continent.

Help

2005-03-25T10:57:00.000-05:00

Can anyone figure out why my Blogroll and Archive links don't show up on my permalinked entry pages? 'Cause I sure can't. Please leave a comment if you think you know what's going on.

UPDATE: Fixed it. I'm smart.

Tonight

2005-03-24T23:29:00.000-05:00

Today I worked from home because of what I thought was a ton of snow that hit where I work, which of course is about an hour-hour and a half away from here, so I have no real way of knowing. This evening I went to see The Ring Two with my mother and sister, which was fun. (Don't believe the bad reviews; it's a fine, compelling film, if not the brain-melting scare machine that the first one was.) Now I'm cleaning up the apartment (after a week of the bachelor life, it needs it) in anticipation of Amy coming home tomorrow. And not a moment too soon, if the weird news is to be believed.

Anyway, not a lot of writing was accomplished this week, and you know what? I think I'm fine with that, pretty much. I watched a movie every night this week, something I hadn't done in ages, and it felt like such an indulgence. I need more indulgences.

Ways I could have fixed The Matrix Revolutions, if anyone had asked for my help

2005-03-24T23:05:00.000-05:00

I finally saw the third film in the Matrix trilogy, and I actually liked it. But I liked Reloaded too, so maybe that’s not surprising; for some reason, though, I just wasn’t really interested in seeing Film Three when it came out. Now that I’ve seen it I think it has a lot to recommend it. The big battle for Zion was something I was extremely skeptical about—when you have access to a world where characters can fly and rewrite reality, I reasoned, why would I want to watch a bunch of people in Sigourney Weaver’s loading rig from Aliens shoot bullets at robots with tentacles?—but I was wowed by it from beginning till end. The aerial fight between Neo and Smith was terrific as well—Bryan Singer’s Superman film has a tough act to follow. And that subway scene at the beginning was just lovely.

That being said, this was a deeply flawed movie. I don’t know that the Wachowski Brothers could ever have lived up to the promise of the first Matrix, which after all was so well-received because of its many mysteries. Explain them away and the project loses much of its appeal. The first film was also so much of its moment, and benefited so greatly from the fact that it was introducing so many cinematic images and ideas to American audiences that hadn’t seen them before, that the sequels were almost bound to disappoint, unless the Wachowskis were the Beatles of action cinema and could reinvent the wheel with each new movie. They weren't and couldn't. But they could have made this one great. Wachowskis, if you’re reading, here’s how you could have done it.

1. Remember who your main characters are. Hint: They are Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus. (Okay, that was more than a hint.) It’s understandable that you need to expand your cast beyond this core of three, but you could have done this with a lot more aplomb by a) not being so profligate with the crew members from Film One (what happened to that guy Tank, anyway? I thought he survived that movie.); b) spending Film Two building up—and I mean really building them up, a la Eowyn, Theoden, and Faramir in The Two Towers—a secondary core cast centered on Link, his wife Zee, and possibly Naiobi, rather than wasting time with stock sci-fi clichés-with-feet like the Council (I’ve never seen Babylon 5, but I imagine it as full of these kinds of robe-wearing, stentorian hair disasters), the tough-as-nails commander(s!), and the rookie with a lot to prove who’s gonna show ’em what he’s made of in the end. We don’t care about these people.

2. With #1 in mind, make sure to show your three main characters doing something together at some point in this, the climactic chapter of their story. No, having Trinity, Morpheus and some cipher named Seraph kick ass in a lobby together is not good enough. Neither is having all three characters together, but in the midst of a sprawling crew of other ciphers, some of whom are inexplicably being given equal narrative weight, and where all they’re doing is debating who gets to take what ship where.

3. If you feel like you need to separate the three of them, fine, but make sure what they’re doing is equally interesting. Return of the Jedi managed this with its tripartite climax—Luke dueling with Vader and the Emperor on the Death Star, Lando piloting the Millennium Falcon in order to blow the Death Star up, and Han, Leia, Chewie and the droids helping take out the Death Star’s shield. You had Morpheus co-pilot a ship—and badly, I might add—then sort of take shelter while other people fought, while Neo and Trinity drove a ship and then got into what basically amounted to a car accident. The bulk of the climax involved none of them.

4. If you’re going to make two of your main characters into a couple whose love essentially decides the fate of humanity, try to cast actors who have even a little romantic chemistry. This way, you won’t have to have all the other characters continually say to them, “I see that you are in love.” The audience wouldn’t need this pointed out to them—they’d know.

5. If one of your main characters has to tragically die, don’t have her do it after a glorified car chase that ends up reading like a less interesting, less-at-stake re-run of the long car chase that other, less central characters just got finished having. Don’t have her die from crashing her ship into a wall. Don’t force her lover to emote with a blindfold on. Don’t shoot the whole scene in nearly identical fashion to the similar scene from the much better received first film in the trilogy.

6. When you are shooting the final scene in your epic trilogy, don’t you think one of your main characters should be in it? At least one?

7. Don’t count on the audience caring about the Oracle. We don’t—the Oracle is a concept, not a character. This goes double because—through no fault of your own, we know—you had to switch the actress playing the oracle two-thirds of the way through your trilogy. We weren’t particularly attached to her as a character before, and now she’s a whole new person, literally. The explanation for why she’s changed wasn’t particularly good anyway.

8. The second film in your trilogy introduced a lot of new and interesting characters and concepts—the Merovingian, Persephone, the whole idea of rogue programs, the Architect, Agent Smith taking over an actual real-world human, et cetera. It would be nice if these ideas actually had anything to do with how the trilogy is concluded. They didn’t.

9. In particular, the Merovingian and Persephone are captivating characters who had exactly nothing to do in this film, and disappeared with little fanfare after 20 minutes. Don’t do that next time around. Same deal with the Trainman, who you introduced in this film and therefore got even less worthwhile screentime than his boss and his boss’s wife. Same deal with the Indian program and his “family.”

9. The only innovation from Film Two that did drive the plotline of Film Three was Smith’s ability to hack into other avatars and programs and duplicate himself. But if you’re setting this up as a threat to the existence of the Matrix and everyone and everything in it, it might help to show him taking the Matrix over, rather than abandoning the Matrix for about an hour, then coming back to show Smith’s victory as a fait accompli.

10. Here’s an idea to help resolve #8, #9, and #10—we can assume that Smith is able to conquer human avatars in the Matrix without much problem, but what about rogues like the Merovingian and his crew? How about we show them fighting, and Smith defeating them, which we assume happened off-camera anyway? That way we’d feel like we’d spent so much time building up those characters in Film Two for a reason. Plus, I think it would just be plain cool.

11. The climax of Film Two involved Neo meeting the Architect, a sort of “master program” who ran the Matrix and put a sort of philosophical smackdown on Neo’s attempts to undermine it. So maybe it would be a good idea to have the Architect have something, anything to do with the climax of Film Three? In nerd terms, he is your “Big Bad,” along with Smith. If you want to have some three-way conflict, that’s fine, but a climax that’s all Neo vs. Smith doesn’t convey that.

12. Nor does the big talking Wizard of Oz head in Machine City.

13. Since this film is called The Matrix Revolutions, perhaps you should a) spend more time in the actual Matrix; b) show the result of the Revolution therein. I’m sure you’ll argue you were going for something else philosophically, but to not show Neo either a) awakening avatars within the Matrix to the actual nature of their world, or b) showing the people in the big energy pods being freed is a borderline criminal missing of what the films’ point should have been.

14. Maybe someone else should handle the dialogue writing next time around. (“Are you from the Matrix?” “Yes. No. I mean, I was.”; “You did it.” “I didn’t do it—we did.”) Also, no councils, rookies, tough-as-nails commanders or cheering crowds with arms held aloft next time. And try to get your Australian actors to work on their American accents a little more. Finally, have Fishburne lose weight—his paunchiness undercuts his character’s authority and coolness, to say nothing of being out of place in a world where humans subsist on synthesized protein gruel.

15. In many ways you are victims of your own success. Film One was as mind-blowing as it was at least in part because American audiences had never seen wire-fu before; now it’s everywhere. (Same with bullet-time.) Moreover, the vinyl trenchcoats and black shades aesthetic defined cool for its brief moment, but in a post-Strokes world, stuff that pristine and “signifying” looks dated. Actually, Kill Bill outdid you in all these regards, with terrific fight choreography, a great sense of the plasticity of time that nevertheless did not rely on digital tricks, and a dusty, retrofit denim-and-leather style. Many commentators also posit that the dot-com boom helped make the first film’s look, and plot, make more sense. I don’t have advice for you here, but these are things worth considering.

Book Meme

2005-03-24T10:36:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of Mr. Jim Treacher.

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

I'm not sure I understand the purpose of this question, but I suppose The Lord of the Rings or 1984.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Yes, when I was in sixth grade: Carrie Kelley, aka Robin, from Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. Actually, now that I think about it, I also had crushes in elementary school on Andy from The Goonies, Elizabeth Shue's character from Adventures in Babysitting, and Candace Cameron's character on Full House.

The last book you bought is:

There were a couple, from the DCBS: Seaguy by Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart, and Marvel Knights Spider-Man Vol. 3: The Last Stand by Mark Millar and Terry Dodson. If we're talking about prose books, hmm. Maybe Killing Pablo by Mark Bowden?

The last book you read:

Tokyo Tribes Vol. 2 by Santa Inoue. Prose: The Lord of the Rings, for the ninth time.

What are you currently reading?

I'm between books right now, but next is probably Planetes Vol. 4.2 by Makoto Yukimura.

Five books you would take to a deserted island.

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (and let's face it, I'd cheat and bring The Hobbit and The Silmarillion too)
The Stand by Stephen King
The Complete Books of Blood by Clive Barker
The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller
1984 by George Orwell

I would not be very popular on this deserted island.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?

The Missus, Ian, and Alan, because I'm reasonably sure they acutally read this thing.

Snapshot

2005-03-21T23:50:00.000-05:00

Past bedtime, drinking, alone, Kill Bill Volume 2.

Observation

2005-03-21T12:28:00.000-05:00

As Jane's Addiction's Ritual de lo Habitual cycled into Jermaine Jackson's "Erucu" (from The Funk Box) on my iTunes today, I couldn't help but think "Damn, that song sounds a lot like LCD Soundsystem. Like the 'Pretentious Version' of 'Yeah'? Wow." Jermaine Jackson--yet another James Murphy reference point, apparently.

Breakthrough

2005-03-21T00:46:00.000-05:00

This was quite a week for me and Amy. Bad thing happened; very good thing happened; now she's out of town and I guess we get to process things on our own for a few days. I wish she were here, or I wish I were there.

In the meantime I'm left here with my cat and my violent movies, and the belief that some aspects of everyday life are like taking a dump: It's not something you like doing, but it's got to get done, so there's no real sense in getting all depressed about it and letting it overshadow the rest of your day--just go where you need to go, do what you need to do while you're there, and leave when it's finished. Compartmentalize.

I like dragons

2005-03-21T00:29:00.000-05:00

As the type of person who, after the catastrophic failure of director Rob Bowman's Elektra, thought to himself, "Dammit! Now Reign of Fire will never get the respect it deserves!", I couldn't have been happier with Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real, which aired earlier tonight on Animal Planet. It's the latest "what if?" documentary Animal Planet has produced, this time breaking down how dragons "really" would have looked and acted had they actually existed. The special was remarkably well thought out, using the unusually uniform appearance of dragons in the mythologies of disparate cultures to create an unnervingly and delightfully plausible natural history for the creatures. It was all done in a mockumentary-style tone that, aside from one straightforward disclaimer at the beginning of the show and several implicit ones later on (after each commercial break), dropped the "what if?" tone and treated it like straight science. Apparently this was too much for some critics to process--read this, oh, I guess let's call it a review, why not? from Linda Stasi at the NY Post; you can practically smell the wood burning as Stasi tries to plow through her own confusion, and hopefully the odor will distract you from how embarrassing it is that she expects you to be just as uncomprehending--but for the rest of us it was a fascinating way to while away 90 minutes on a Sunday evening. (Less than 90 minutes with the magic of TiVo at your command, of course.) The damn thing was even narrated by Patrick Stewart. About the only false note came in the appearance of some of the later dragon species, who had forelegs, hind legs, and wings, rather than the far more feasible hind legs/wings combo; it just kind of jumped out at me all of a sudden that this evolutionary quirk, which has no analogue that I can think of in all of non-insect biology (indeed, the show's website resorts to fruit flies for justification), had gone completely unexplained and unremarked upon by the special, in a clear sacrifice of plausibility for artistic license. But other than that, all the questions you'd want answered (how does it fly? how does it breathe fire? how long did they last?) are answered in spectacular fashion, as are some you didn't think to ask (they manage to account for variations in the descriptions of dragons between different cultures, and even link the creatures to sea serpent myths). If you are a nerd, and I'm assuming you are, this is great TV.