That time that Michigan lost and I embraced my sorrow by deciding to write my zombie apocalypse novel because of that episode of New Girl

By and large everyone else has become a zombie. It's passe, I know, and I kept telling them that as they were knocking at my door and asking to eat my brain. "Just one little piece. I won't eat it all," says my neighbor, who hasn't even bothered to give back the lawn mower that he borrowed two months ago before getting turned into a zombie. This is precisely the sort of thing that gets you a shovel in the head, so I waited until he stuck his head through the window and then I bashed my shovel into the side of his head, which pretty much left the majority of his brain all over the kitchen floor, which, to my credit, I didn't even think about eating. 

I'd like to begin at the beginning, way back when everything was fine, and Ron, that's my neighbor, was just a slightly overweight guy who would invite you over to his house to jump in the pool or play a game of ping pong while being jumped on by his oversized golden retriever with him saying, "oh, we've been teaching him not to do that," which, no you haven't Ron or your dog wouldn't be jumping all over me right now that big, affectionate piece of shit when all I'm trying to do is enjoy a delicious and cheap hot dog at the pool. This is precisely the sort of behavior that is probably going to earn Ron's dog a shovel to the head if I ever see him sniffing around doing zombie type things. 

I'm going to get back to that story in a bit, but can I just say that one of the most annoying and underrated things about the zombieapocalypse taking place is that it's damn near impossible to have an intelligent converstaion. Like, I'd have liked to have invited Ron in and maybe shot the breeze with him for a bit over a cold one about the state of the Lakers, or the decline of Western Literature or something, but all everyone is interested in is taking a slight portion of your brain, which is how we wound up in this situation in the first place. The one thing you can't do with a zombie is say something like,

"hey, let's reason about this for a while, what if I just start you off with a small portion of my leg, and we talk about some issues of food supply over the long term. Have you read the Bible? You know, the part about Joseph storing up all the food for the lean years? How would you say this compares to Cormac McCarthy's The Road in terms of your expectatioins?"

This is precisely the sort of tack you can't take with a zombie because they'll just try and eat your brain, and you'll wind up spending the afternoon cleaning them up off the kitchen floor witth a sponge and a heavy heart because you didn't really mind Ron all that much, on his best days he was a pretty decent guy who knew how to throw a party. 

I was also just starting to get involved in online dating and had made some inroads, had a couple of good nights out with some women who seemed like they were just about crazy enough to go out with me again. And then you start logging in to profiles and sending messages, and you're just waiting around to see if they are going to respond and as if relationships aren't hard enough, there's a possibilty that they've been turned into mindless zombies or are just cowering in fear and not checking their internet dating profile but instead focusing on news outlets and random blog posts, fearing for their life or maybe they just didn't have a good time. How the hell is a guy supposed to know? 

Outside, Ron's dog is nosing around in my flowers, which I'm just going to let go because they're pansies, and I didn't like their shade of purple anyway as it wound up clashing with the brick. I also can't tell if his dog, Rudy, is a zombie apocalypse dog ravenous for brains or whether he's just a normal and annoying dog who will jump up on you even if you ask him to stop. These are the sort of connundrums that you'll probably already aware of if you're at all a fan of the genre. I wasn't a connoisseur, but I sort of knew what to expect in terms of little zombie children coming at your or your wife or something, which I didn't have, so I guess I'm missing a critical part of the zombie apocalypse experience, which is the mental anguish you experience over closed loved ones turning into zombies or living in fear of zombies. 

The main thing, if I hadn't made it totally clear is that the zombieapocalypse is a mix of fear and horror and boredom. There is really nothing good on television. The only channels still running things are just showing repeats of movies that I've already seen, and I don't suppose we'll be seeing new episodes of our favorite shows anymore, and I suppose one of the strange things that you wouldn't think you'd find yourself worrying about is what happens to that awful boy king on Game of Thrones? Does anyone kill him, does everyone? That's the sort of thing that I'm thinking about right now as I'm watching Rudy kind of scoot around the back yard doing dog like things. Maybe I'll go throw him a stick. 

 I knew as soon as I stepped into the yard that I'd made an error in judgement. Rudy had always been kind of terrible at fetch. He was one of those sorts of dogs who gets the ball in his mouth and then won't give it back, and even though he deeply wants to continue playing catch, he's entirley unwilling to give back the ball, which will help faciliate his joy. I'm just saying that it probably wasn't going to work anyway. It also wasn't going to work because once I got outside and saw a bit of Rudy's hind leg protruding at a forty five degree angle I knew that he'd become a zombie apocalypse version of Rudy who would probably even be worst at catch. 

I gave him a chance though, because I'm a decent type of person. Who knows? Maybe zombie apocalypse dogs are different than humans and really keep their good senses about them, so I tossed a stick towards him and said, "Go fetch the stick Rudy." And I should confess that Rudy, ever dutiful, started to lurch across the yard to get at the stick while I snuck up behind him and clipped him over the back of the head with my shovel a time or twenty. 

The sun overhead was bright and surreal. Nature didn't seem to care one wit that everyone had all turned into zombies. It was the sort of thing that you'd take time to reflect on, maybe help put things in perspective, "the earth keeps on spinning, eh bud," I said to Rudy, who wasn't really Rudy anymore, but a rude sort of collection of parts that had once been Rudy. I kind of missed him jumping all over me already. 

I'd been asking myself for the past two decades almost on a daily basis, "What does it mean? What does it mean? Why are we here? What am I supposed to be doing?" And I saw now, in the strangeness of this new world that I'd found my calling. I was supposed to go around shoveling things that looked or acted like zombies in the head. Who'd have thought this is where I'd end up?