Rok is really into the idea that we can shape the world into a new, good place. I think it’s taking a lot on. I mean, I think we should work on making our lives better, and anyone else we find, but I don’t, I don’t want to be mothering apocalypse babies. ALSO if we do, God forbid, have to, um, restart the human race, I’ll be studying up in artificial insemination. Fuck you, Rok.
Today in the apocalypse, I did absolutely nothing of importance. Again. We’ve spent a lot of time with the farm, we’ve spent a lot of time on apocalypse fantasies (everyone has them), and we’ve spent a lot of time working out the anxious energy that comes from being two of the few, if not the last, remaining human beings. Not a lot of downtime in there. Today, I did none of that. We broke into a department store yesterday and got a ton of Christmas lights. We then strung them all around the plants to keep them warm. We decided to leave them alone today.
I woke up late. Sleep has been scarce, but we certainly need it. For some reason, under two or three blankets in a stranger’s bed, I actually managed to get a full night’s sleep. I ate breakfast around noonish, then I sat on the couch. The previous owners had one of those nice, really big flat screen TV’s, and Zoic hooked it up with wireless closed circuit cameras we picked up from an electronics store. We put them up around the house and down the street. She calls it ZV. I watched four hours of ZV. Just when you think it’s going to be boring, or that an infected can’t possibly do anything you haven’t already seen, something awesome happens. Something about an undead scratching his ass will never stop being funny. And waiting for the inevitable collision between two slow, mostly gone infected walking toward each other never gets old. When we decided that we’d had enough ZV, we played the undead celebrities game, which has basically no rules, but amounts to which celebrities would make the most interesting infected, and which celebrities are most likely to have survived the apocalypse. On one hand, you know that they’re all pampered little bitches, and probably don’t have the survival skills necessary. On the other hand, they are selfish enough to make the tough decisions. Makes for interesting debate.
I don’t have too much else to talk about. I had to try really hard to motivate myself to post today. Who would have thought a blog post-apocalypse would be met with the same apathy of blogs before? Perhaps everyone.
It’s difficult to come home, scrape the dripping eyeball off of your shoes and head into the kitchen to make dinner. For the first couple weeks in the apocalypse, I completely lost my appetite. I lost a lot of weight, and I had cereal for almost every meal. It was a safe food along with fruit and vegetables. Meat seemed really distasteful. As time went on, all of the fresh food was gone, and I couldn’t be as picky. I didn’t think I’d ever eat so much Chef Boyardee in my life. One of the best rules Rok and I have come up with is don’t eat anywhere that you’re likely to see human brains. Which basically means we eat inside our house away from the laundry room and the windows. Also we use a lot of soap to wash our hands before cooking. Rok has made a few “Get back in the kitchen” jokes. So he’s had some practice cooking for himself. I had honestly never cooked very much before the apocalypse. I ate a lot of precooked things and microwave food. More cereal. I miss cereal. Eating it dry just isn’t the same. I have a lot of the soy milk that doesn’t expire, but I miss having cereal with Cow’s milk like three times a day. Anyway, Rok and I cook lots of canned stuff, and we have actually found ways to get creative with it. Those instant mashed potatoes have been a Godsend. We’ve put pretty much every type of Campbell’s chunky soup over them like in the commercials. Some of them were better than others. We eat a lot of frozen stuff, and we’ve made a lot of apocalypse bread too. The other day though we had a really great discovery. We were going through a house, and they had a victory garden in their backyard. Most everything was gone, but there was enough left for the victory chickens living in his yard. There’s nine of them, and they’re all really skinny. Rok emptied out the cooler we keep in the van and put a couple of them in. I found some large storage boxes in the house we were salvaging in. It was a hellish ride home, and there’s chicken poop in the back of the van, but we have nine relatively healthy chickens. I’m crossing my fingers for eggs. Rok and I let the chickens run around outside. We put up boards around the fence outside to make sure nobody gets over. We’re starting to build a chicken coop which means a trip to home depot. I really don’t like home depot. The last time I was there I saw a zombie that someone had taken a nail gun to; he had a line of screws up one side of his face. But the thought of fresh eggs is too delicious to be ignored. I keep thinking of all the different things we could make with them. Eggs over easy, scrambled, poached. The quality of the food we make could go up. I’ve never missed eggs so much before. I could kiss all those chickens in the back yard on their scrawny little beaks.
Today Rok and I went to the movies. It’s more complicated than it used to be, but I still enjoy it. I used to go to the movies all the time back then. It still feels pretty good to hide in a dark movie theater for a couple hours, but the things I’m hiding from have changed. I cleaned out the movie theater myself a week into the apocalypse. There were a few zombies eating some dead bodies in the bathroom. It wasn’t hard to clean the whole place. There was a zombie behind one of the curtains in the cine Capri though that scared me pretty bad. I didn’t notice him till the movie I was watching was half way over. He must’ve gotten fed up hiding there, the movie was pretty awful. It was a risky move to clean the place out on my own, but I was desperate for something to do besides worry. All the communications were down at that point. I I had basically lost my whole life. So that obviously called for a terrible romantic comedy. I dated a boy once who ran a projector booth, and I ended up being more interested in his work than him. It’s not hard to work out how to put on and switch films. I watched the movie in the exact center of the theater frost time. I went to put another on, but I realized that these might be the last twenty one films left that I could ever watch in the theaters. I watched three of them, all that day. I took all the candy and the unpopped pop corn home with me. Some of the films made me depressed that they were among the last artistic expressions to be shared by man. I took Rok today as a surprise. I locked it up when i left the first time so nothing else could wander inside. We ate candy and watched movies all night. It’s lonely knowing that nobody else is in a big building, but it’s also a relief to know you’re blocked off from the outside world, whatever it’s up to. I’d like to see if I can get copies of more films. Despite being the only people here, our world has gotten really small. There are some groceries, some stores that don’t have infected milling around, a couple houses to live in, and a movie theatre. I don’t know what we would do if the Internet disappears.
Every time I do something involving technology, Rok looks at me like I’m a wizard. I actually have little talent for it. It’s just something I found interesting in college, and I read tutorials on how to do things as I worked on them. I still do. If the internet turned off, I would be braving the creepy librarian zombies to get manuals. I still like the “you’re doing science” look Rok gives me when I get something to turn on.
The farming experiment has not been completely fruitless. Some meager vegetables have been harvested, and others are still promising possibilities. The weather in Arizona allows for longer growing seasons (and subsequently, year-round allergies), and we’re a month or so away from the first freeze.
Zoic and I have worked out most of our problems by now. When you spend so much time with another person, it’s hard not to identify with them completely, let alone stay mad at them. Call it Stockholm Syndrome. There might be a more specific term for people who aren’t exactly captives, but I don’t know it, and there probably isn’t anyone out there left to care. Who knows. Once a stickler always a stickler. In fact, it pleases me to think that there might be someone out there surviving, living day to day just to correct this grammatical mistake or that spelling error, or to suggest new word choice. Being a stickler may be so ingrained in a person, that the infection/zombification can’t actually kill it. It makes me happy to think that the walking corpse of Lynn Truss might be out there devouring the living and taking pause at a sign that reads “Come inside for CD’s, VIDEO’S, DVD’S, and BOOK’S” as the ghost of a once quite common thought struggles to present itself.
My relationship with Zoic has changed. Improved, maybe. This sedentary lifestyle has really thrown us a bit. After more than a month of constant movement, we’ve finally gotten good at navigating these infection filled streets, and collecting food. Zoic has softened. While she’s still the tougher of the two of us, I wonder if I’m not seeing a side of her that no one before ever did. It’s certainly not a side I ever saw in school. I wonder if spending less time on the computer has helped her brain to switch gears. I don’t know.
A lot of our free time has been spent discussing the possible origins of the virus or whatever has created so many undead. One thing we’ve noticed about the zombie movies is that none of them ever seem aware of other zombie movies. They all take place in a world identical to ours, but with the exception of no zombie movies. Well, we have them. And we’ve watched them. I’m not particularly proud of that. It seems like a waste of time, or like feeding hamburger to a cow, but it’s oddly cathartic. They were wrong in many places, but right in many others. I’m not really sure what that means for our situation. I find it hard to believe that something like this could have sprung from nowhere, independent of the culture that has surrounded the genre for decades. It just doesn’t make sense. So part of me wants to think that some nerd at MIT came up with a virus that would do this because his girlfriend broke up with him or something. At least that was the only way I thought it was possible before any of this happened.
Well, I don’t want to say too much. I’d like to be able to prove to you that we’re still alive in the future, so I should save some of the updates. Not that there are many. You know what they say: sedentary agrarian societies are the best story tellers.