Why Wet Kids Reflect The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse

Tuesdays and Thursdays are swimming days at Brian’s camp.   They cart all the kids to a high school ten minutes from camp.  Now, Brian, being my son, has his own diving mask and snorkel.  (I HAD a snorkel until I…somebody stepped on it.)  So, Tuesdays I always go and swim with the kids.  I bring MY mask.  At least once, every one of the kids over five asks me and Brian if they can use the mask, or tell us to give them the mask, or whine that they want the mask, or whine they don’t have a mask or a cool daddy who comes swimming.  (That’s happened twice.)

Brian’s like me–occasionally generous to a fault.  He lets his pseudogirlfriends Sally and Olivia use his mask, his snorkel, his towel, get rides on my back–up to a point.  He lets his few guy friends, since there really aren’t that many guys, use his stuff–up to a point.  Then, here’s where he shows more spine than I give him credit for,  he starts taking stuff back.  Nicely if people are nice, just taking the stuff if they’re not.  If there were zombies in the water, he’d do the same thing more than likely–help those who’re not nasty and leaving the ones destined to become zombies themselves.

Then there are those who are just bad news.  Whiny, demanding, pushy, whiny–and that’s just the people that WORK there!  No, I jest.  No, those kids, Brian has no patience for.  He’ll let them get away with it once, then anything they ask, NO, GET LOST, YOU’RE NOT GETTING IT!  So, when the escape transports are getting full, I’d trust my kid to let the good ones on and leave before it got too bad.

So, when the Z’s show up, look to your kids.  Especially if there’s a pool nearby.

Stuff that makes it worthwhile

Officially today was Brian’s last day of first grade, they cleaned out their offices, (THEY’RE DESKS, PEOPLE!!  NOT OFFICES!!)  and tomorrow most of the school’s going to Dorney Park.  Brian’s not going since we’re going later in the summer.  So, he tells Stace after I’m on my way to work tonight he doesn’t want to go tomorrow so that he and I can have a special day together.

A Return To My Acting Background

I’ve done a bunch of acting.  One might say that I’ve been doing it since my parents bought Luke Skywalker and a landspeeder in ‘77.  One might, but one would get looked at funny and the subject would be changed to the weather as the group quickly moved away from one whilst security was called.

Anyway, for a couple years in elementary school, I went to New York twice a week for auditions.  Then, when I got into high school, I got into an acting class, met the girl of my dreams, and then–oh, wait, went through that in another post.  Did the college acting thing.  Helped produce that abomination of the boards, A Knight of British Comedy.   I’m still surprised Chapman’s ghost didn’t come and hit all of us with Mr. Gumby’s bricks after that one. 

Now, Saturday night, I once more tread the boards with my son.  I play a crow that gets phasered to death in Brian’s end of school play.  It was going to be squirt guns, but my squirt guns are quite big and wet, the ones I could find anyway, so we’re going to use phasers.

Most kids have college funds.  I’m starting Brian a therapy fund.

Self Importance and Self Impotents

First off, let me preface this by saying that, unlike a certain well-known Trek fan film forum, I don’t care if you stick with this or any other topic when responding.  I like the organic flow of a conversation rather than being forced into narrow constraints of whatever original post may have been written months or years ago by people unknown.  The first one to post TOPIC here in orange letters will be flogged with cold spaghetti until they cry. 

Thst said, I have to laugh at people who repeatedly cause impacts to the epidermis of an expired equine(how’s THAT for a fifteen point alliteration?)  by repeating things that have already been said upthread.  This is what I feel and so on and so forth and even though this has been said by a hundred other people I have to have it attached to my name and demonstrate that either I have remarkable typing skills or really poor spelling skills by posting the fact that I agree or disagree in excruciating detail and it ends up just running on and on and getting repetitive and not actually advancing the interaction more than saying, “Me, too!” and running on and on and getting repetitive and blah blah blah….

Some of the people that post things like these impassioned overworded posts from heck occasionally react with astonishment that there could be any disagreement since their opinions were delivered to them directly from God’s Shipping Department on Gold Leaves(MUST get a hold of THAT tree, by the way) with postage due and any other opinion is the rankest heresy that’s not even worth month old used Kleenex.  There is so much passion in these posts, and yet, in the cases of conversations about actual problems, there are so many loud people with opinions and yet nothing gets done.  If your ideas are so marvy, get OFF the darn computer and go DO something about the problem!!!

Horror

Watching the first Alien VS Predator right now.  I’m the first to admit, when I saw the second Predator with the alien skull hanging on the wall, I thought THAT would be a fight.   This movie, that I just turned off, doesn’t come close to be as scary as the trailers for the other movies.  That’s right, I said the trailers.  One of the things that worked in both of the original movies, you didn’t know anything.  You couldn’t SEE anything.  Even in Giger’s Necronomicon IV, there’s more in shadow than shown, your fear fills in the blanks.  Some things are never meant to be shown playing in all their glory except as a hey, look what I can do in After Effects! sequences.  Some ideas that sound cool around the coffee table at a party, like my assembled zombie idea, need to much visualization to really be frightening.  Also, once it’s seen, it’s known, oh look, it’s a xenomorph and it has two mouths and what’s on the other channel? 

Is horror really just a grown-up game of peek a boo?

Cosmic Thinking

The person with a closed soul will look out a window at the world and wonder if there’s something higher, why isn’t there any evidence?   The person with the open soul will look out a window at the world and see the evidence in the same view.

Home Improvement

Imagination time!! 

Most people know I really don’t like where we’re living.  The reasons are many, varied, and my ranting about them is only moderately entertaining in the same way that watching someone else’s four year old have a tantrum is moderately entertaning.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about what our next place has to have to make me happy.  FIRST, it has to be a house.  Not a condo, not an apartment, but a house.  But what else?  What else would make it really cool?  That started me thinking–what would my loyal readers(all four of you) do to their places?  My sister’s place needs a new heating system.  It can be as mundane as that, or it could be something really outrageous, like Jerry’s oft-wished for Count Gore Projection Room and Vomitorium.   Or Bill’s AntiAwsumKat Safe Room. 

And I want three things–a yard, a fireplace, and a room to myself to put my editing stuff, my weapons, my ships, more weapons, more ships, my posters and a dartboard.  That’s right, I want Rat’s Nest back.

A Long Drawn Out Farragut

Just in case anybody that comes by here doesn’t know, the animated Starship Farragut episodes are getting ready to come out and I hear they’re actually doing a comic book from a pretty good writer.  Here’s the site:

http://www.farragut-animated.com/

No WONDER They Stay Hidden!!

Recently I was watching MonsterQuest.  It was an episode about Sasquatch/Bigfoot.  A girl in Minnesota HITS ONE WITH HER CAR, runs into her boyfriend’s house where Boyfriend and Boyfriend’s Brother promptly pull rifles, go outside and start shooting at this thing.  Now, beyond the chance that they were shooting at an innocent creature, what if it was a guy in a fur coat?

The Latest Adventure

Remember the car I had to put twelve hundred into for inspection?  Yeah, the big grey one.  Well, the radiator went.  Crap.  Really big crap.

So, we haul it over to A-Team so they can fix it.  Yay.  Meantime, back at the ranch, Stace’s stomach is rebelling against her as though she swallowed books by Marx (Groucho, of course) and it wants to start it’s own country/body in another zip code.  Thursday afternoon, they call and say the car’s ready.  I go to work, and sometime in the midst of all my encoding and monitoring, I come up with the idea that it’d be great if I could get the car without Stace having to haul herself all over the countryside.  Also, this way we’re not using the gas in two cars or driving one that’s out of inspection.  I decide right then to walk it.  Now, from our front door to Langhorne where the car was, according to Yahoo!, is just under 15 miles.  Now, that’s DRIVING.  I’d be going in a straight(ish) line, so that HAS to be less. 

Six AM comes, I leave work, drive home in her car, take Brian to school.  His teacher and one of the other’d kids mother ask how the car is, I tell them my plan.  They look at me like I’ve suddenly grown extra limbs out of every orifice while singing Material Girl in a kilt.  Brian’s teacher tells me that I’m crazy and she’ll drive me at lunch, the mother tells me she’d drive me if she didn’t have so many meetings.  So, I go out to the car, pretend I talk to Stace and she has stuff for me to do with her car during the day, so none of the plans will work.  I tell them I’m going to go home, sleep for a while, and then Stace and I will figure it out. 

Do I NEED to tell you that’s not what I did? 

I came home, ate an apple, changed into jeans and sneakers, and started walking.   Up County Line Road, behind the shopping center, past the pretzel place.  I get across Street Road by the police station while several phone company workers look at me as though to say, “Where is this tall pale hunk of a man walking?”   Right next to the police station, I see a sign, “Bridge Out Ahead.”  No problem, I’ll just go across the stream on the rocks or walk along the side of the bridge.  I walk, looking at the houses, wishing I had the money to get us one. 

There’s a problem with my stream idea.  The stream is actually fairly deep, and there’s Bob the Builder and his crew working on the bridge with it all blocked off.  Undaunted, I turn on the residential block next to the bridge.  Someone was getting carpet delivered.  This street also has a sign, “NO OUTLET.”  Must be hard to plug things in, I think.  At then end is a small bridge to get across the stream, which turned out to be part of someone’s driveway.  I cross their lawn, and through another house’s backyard onto yet ANOTHER street that has a bunch of houses I’d love to live in.  It was getting fairly warm, so I took my leather jacket off.    Don’t really know how to get out of this neighborhood, so I just follow the sidewalk.  About ten minutes later, I’m out back on one of the main roads.  Unfortunately, this one has no sidewalks and a lot of mud on the side.  Well, nuts.  Not every journey is comfortable, I guess.

I keep walking, up the hill.  Wish I had some music at this point.  There’s a pretty large lake that the road goes across.  Signs all over saying it’s a private lake no fishing swimming bathing cooking skating washing your hair.  I asked for music, so now the Signs song is going through my head.  (Incidentally, it hasn’t STOPPED–but I digress.)  Then I see more signs that it’s private property, it belongs to the water company, no trespassing, well, whatever.  Right next to it is a park that I think I’ll have to bring the kid back to.

About now, an hour into the walk, I realize that I should’ve maybe eaten something more than an apple.  Still, I press on like a Lee nail.  I come to a crossroad, go right and just keep going.  Eventually, I reach Buck Road–and more importantly, a Wawa.  I go in, buy a 1.5 liter bottle of water and yet another apple.  Now, right at this point, I had several paths I could’ve taken.  The flatter road was, well, flatter but kinda out of the way of where I wanted to go.  The most direct had several miles of hill to go up, no sidewalk, didn’t think I wanted to do that.  There was a third path, kinda combining both of the first two.  That’s the way I chose.  I climbed the rather steep hill next to the Wawa, ready to stick to the road.  That’s when I saw it–the railroad tracks.  The railroad tracks that ran right by the mall where I was heading. 

Unfortunately, to get down there meant I’d have to go down a rather steep hill.  I’d shortsightedly not brought my black mask nor did I have Stace in a long red dress with Humperdinck following on horseback.  Still, though, this way no one would see if I fell on my butt during my descent.  I didn’t, and I started walking along the railroad tracks.  Thought about when Dad brought me home a railroad spike from work when I was in first grade.  The fresh air was glorious.  I kept trudging along, and it was about now that I started thinking about Benu and the Hulk. 

See, on the Hulk and Phoenix, Our Heroes wander around on foot.  They never really showed much of the actual, you know, wandering, because it’s not terribly evenful.  Also, at this point, I realize that I’ve walked on 1)sidewalk, 2)blacktop, 3)mud, 4)snow, 5)ice, 6)stone, 7)dirt, 8)wood, and 9)metal since this epic began.  I saw some boulders with ice frozen flowing down that looked REALLY cool, wish I’d had my camera for that.

After about an hour, the service road next to the track splits off away from the track, so, never one desirous of being hit by the train that Momma’s about to be thrown from, I stick to the road.  Saw a fox.  (No, you sick perverts, not a blonde sunbathing, a REAL fox.)  Stepped in a mud puddle.  Well, crap.  Keep walking, not REALLY sure where I am.  Still, every road leads somewhere, and I amuse myself by thinking of Stace coming out of her office and seeing me there with the car.  Also think about the movies I’m writing, wishing I had paper or a working laptop to write down some of the ideas I’m getting.  That’s when I start to see the houses down the hill with no curtains facing the service road.  Mom would’ve been driven nuts by that.  

At this point in my journey of many steps, I came across something truly bizarre-a disassembled Mazda minus the engine.  At first, I’d thought it a Toyota, and I was hopeful since Stace’s Toyota is in need of a new door handle.  Also, a gold sneaker was on a stick coming out of the ground as though it were hung there to dry.  Alas, it was a green Mazda left there to, well, surprise schmucks that are walking to get their own cars.

All this time, even though I knew I was heading in the right direction, sort of, I wasn’t exactly sure where I was.  Still, I figured I had to be getting close, I’d been at this for three hours now without a stop.  Then I saw the park, and realized that I really wasn’t all that close.  Poopy.  Still, I was comitted by this point (or NEEDED to be) so I kept on, occasionally hearing the power lines over my head buzzing and seeing tracks from ATV’s in the mud.  Saw another abandoned car, this one way older and in one piece, rusting away.  I heard a lot of traffic coming up.  Eventually, I saw that I was going over 413, at the exact spot where Stace got hit but got blamed for it, thus leading to our living in Huntingdon Valley.  An ambulance went underneath me, irony of ironies.

I kept going.  The train tracks rejoined me.  Walked over another overpass, and realized that I could take a bit of a shortcut if I got down from there.  The other side of the tracks was pretty overgrown, and I wasn’t sure how to get down.  I found a way, but stepped in another puddle.  There were a collection of tires there, some with the wheels in them, and many empty beer cases.  It was like old racers went there to mourn blown tires.

The phone rang.  It was Stace, wondering if I’d gotten any sleep.  I told her, of course, no.  When she asked why, I told her because I was three quarters of the way to the car, and that I was going to take the money out of the bank to pay for it.  She’d had the same idea, but instead of the hundred fifty, she’d accidentally taken out FOUR hundred fifty.  She also couldn’t believe I was walking.  Thought about making a crack about strolling and dancing, but she was at work so she had to get off the phone.

I got down the hill, and realized that I was actually much closer than I’d thought.  Perspective from a railroad service road looking down is a bit odd, so I didn’t realize where I was.  Being so close, I decided to sit on the grass and take a break.  This was a mistake, because it was really hard to get up.  My feet conspired with my legs to remind me I hadn’t been to sleep since 10:30 the previous morning. 

“Come on, guys, we’re close!” I said to my feet.

“Nuh uh,” my feet replied. 

“But if we go NOW, we can get to the car and SIT, and you won’t have to walk anymore!”  I realized that my negotiating was pretty lame, especially since I was trying to make a deal with parts of my own body.  I started moving again, but I’d swear my feet were mumbling about how I never take them dancing anymore.  I tell them to be quiet, and keep going.  Cross over two more sets of railroad tracks.  After the second, some brain donor in a blue SUV buzzes me, honking his horn and yelling.  I wish him nothing but angels, peace, and explosive diarrhea.

Finally, I see the mall, and the corner that I have to go around to get to the car.  There’s a body shop for one of the dealerships right next to where I’m going.  I hope that I can cut through the parking lot, but the big chainlink fence that I’m in no mood to climb is in my way.  I walk on, feeling like my feet are magnetized to the ground.  I round the corner and see it–there it is–MY GOD THAT IS A PIECE OF BEAUTY CARVED BY GOD AND THE CHRYSLER ENGINEERS!!!!!! 

I go inside, my friend Al’s not there, so I talk to Mark, the new mechanic they got, tell him we’ll bring the money back.  Well, at least Stace won’t have to drive back.  I get in the car, call Stace, and head to get Brian.  After a while, I get to school.  They’re all running around on the playground while my legs feel about the consistency of cold spaghetti that’s been left in the sun.  Brian wants me to pick him up, run around with him, do all my normal things. 

Ain’t happening, kid. 

We get Stace, go pay for the car, (so much for not using the gas)  and then go to Friendly’s.  I’m famished, and I realize that a banana split will give me the potassium I need to keep from cramping up later.  We get home, Stace puts me in Brian’s room, and that’s all I remembered until morning.