Excerption To The Rule About Not Posting NaNoWriMo Excerpts

The easiest blog posts are the ones already written. Sure, this bit (haha - BIT!) from my 2010 NaNoWriMo project about undead people eaters needs a little more spit and polish, but whatever. I like it. And yes, Doug is a dog...

He held the cricket bat with his right hand and one of the 9mms in his left, told Doug to stay, then crouched down and crept, cat-burglar-style, across the asphalt to what was left of the body he'd just passed. Please have the keys, please have the keys, please have the keys, he thought. There they were - about five feet beyond the space in which she had fallen and died and been mostly devoured by monsters that until recently had been regular people. Bill tiptoed past her and wrapped his fingers around the keys, scanned his surroundings again and turned back toward the Jeep. As he passed her remains again, he couldn't help but take a closer look at her. That was when he saw it. Beneath her broken, bloody, half-eaten torso - clutched with a mangled skeletal dead hand between her mostly-intact and bloody-sweater-clad breasts - was a baby. Bill glanced around him again, then bent down low and looked more closely. It was wearing a little pink dress and appeared to be in one piece, and it was dead, staring vacantly into the parking lot with dry eyes devoid of life. "Look at that and tell me there's a god," Bill whispered, his voice shaking with a mixture of heartbreak and rage.

After learning that the Jeep had only a quarter-tank of gasoline - since it had become one of his central challenges over the past couple of weeks, Bill had taken to repeatedly saying "gasoline" with an Australian accent, like Mad Max - Bill had siphoned ten gallons from the car directly behind the Jeep. He had brought the small, battery-operated pump from the boat, but still it only had a six-foot tube, so he transferred the gay-zoh-line to the Jeep five gallons at a time, using the big empty paint bucket that had been in the back, behind the baby seat. Actually, it had been full when he found it - just not of paint. It had been full of baby toys.

While the second bucketful of gas was being pumped into the Jeep, Bill took as many of the toys as he could carry over to the bodies of mother and child. He knelt next to them and scattered the toys around. When he reached in to put a ring of oversized plastic, pastel-colored keys under the mother's half-body, close to the baby, it screamed and hissed and wriggled and bit at the keys with ghastly, toothless bites. "Shit! Zombie baby!!" Bill squealed as he jumped back, covering his mouth to prevent any other loud noises from flying out of it. The undead infant was still gurgling and growling as Bill backed away. "Okay, look at that and tell me there's a god!" He ran back to the Jeep, where the pump was sputtering, having already sucked the last of the gasoline from the bucket into the tank. He shut off the motor, tossed the pump and its hose into the bucket and threw put them in the back. The handful of zombies who had been aimlessly stumbling around in front of the convention center was now a fistful of zombies who had heard the baby and/or Bill's screams and now staggered rather less aimlessly in the direction of the Jeep.

Sorry I Got All Bloggy On You - It Probably Won't Happen Again Until Next Time

I don't wanna get all bloggy on you guys, but well, here we go...

Most of the time, [Maris] and I feel like the only sane people in a lunatic asylum filled with 7 billion patients and no doctors. In recent years, we've come to understand that in reality, it's the other way around. It is we who are apparently defective, in so many ways. Either way, we are now fully aware that we do not belong here. You know, like, on Earth, with you nice people.

Exhibit A: We don't like coffee. At all. I know! Somehow, with both made it through college and retail jobs and decades of being complete night-owls and beyond our thirties without developing a taste for - let alone addiction to - coffee. Caffeine - yes! Mountain Dew for [Maris] and Coke/Lime Diet Coke for me. But not coffee. Just to add some weird sprinkles to the weird frosting that is our coffee-free existence, [Maris] absolutely adores the smell of coffee beans. Walks down the coffee aisle at the grocery store, just snorting the aroma. Brew it up and place it before her, and it's hemlock. "It tastes like burnt dirt in water."

Exhibit B: We don't watch "reality" TV in any form, including the "talent" competitions. We used to watch "The Soup," because Joel McHale and his writers are brilliant, but a couple of years ago, it reached the point where sitting through the clips from the actual shows became so unbearable that we couldn't even get to the funny stuff. What's new with The Bachelor? How's that new kid who can more or less carry a tune doing on A.I.? What happened in that cliffhanger on The Kardashians? Don't know. Don't care. If we had known that all it took to get rich and C-list famous was to do a sex tape or whore ourselves out in a scripted show with a bunch of narcissistic 15-minutes-of-fame-seekers, we could have done all of that and more. Well, maybe ten years ago. Not that we're bitter. Hey, if it's what you want and the machinery is in place for you to make it happen, who are we to stop you. Just please, go away. Soon. You're taking up valuable airtime that could be occupied by more interesting things. (watch for a future post about the downfall of western civilization, wherein "reality" TV will play a central role.)

Exhibit 3: We cringe at the sight (or sound) of bad grammar, made-up words and the abundance of other evidence of the death of the English language. Sadly, that somehow makes us the defective ones. Yeah - we're the weird ones. But just being grammar Nazis doesn't make us that odd. It's the fact that one minute, we'll be bitching at a commercial featuring subject-verb disagreement and the word "deliciocity," and the next thing out of our mouths will be some abomination of English, lifted from "Family Guy" or "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia." Wait. That just makes us hypocrites. That's not weird at all. That's the norm, today! Okay, never minds Exhibit's 3.

Exhibit D: We don't fight. I know, I know. Lots of couples think they don't fight. Seriously, we simply don't. It's not because we agree about literally everything, or have an unhealthy aversion to marital conflict; we just have neither the time, nor the energy for fights. We were already in our thirties when we married, so we have to use all our minutes being smug about our happiness together. Fighting is not on the schedule. It's not like we don't want to fight -- we do! But we can't think of anything to fight about. I'll just stop now. I can hear your skeptical harrumphs. It's true, though. Sorry.

Exhibit E: We love kids, but don't have or want any of our own. This is obviously big enough to be its own post. Hell, it could be its own blog. It's complicated, and don't even start with us because we've heard it all before. Our child-free existence is not a condemnation of almost every other couple on the planet. However, more often than you might expect in 2011, we're thought to be selfish, stupid or utterly insane for not wanting to procreate, and we're perceived as child-hating, anti-family assholes who stand in judgment of all parents - as if we are "right" and everyone else is "wrong." It's not really okay, but we understand. Anyone who deliberately does something differently is automatically seen as disapproving of your way, and by extension, of you. We're the ones going against the grain, here. I just marvel sometimes at the giant toes that surround us, just waiting to be stomped upon. We love kids, and we're not having any, and that's okay. And you're okay, too. We're all okay! Except you English ruiners. We hate you guys.