Romance is Dead

The following are carefully selected excerpts from my latest entry into the teen romance genre, Romance is Dead, to be found at the discount bin or garage sale nearest you.

With a foreword by Stephanie Meyer's cease and desist letter.

From Chapter One: A Rose is Still a Rose Unless It's Dead

Jane sat in her desk in third period English, but couldn't concentrate on the teacher going on and on about Romeo and Juliet. All her attention, every ounce of focus her ADD-riddled mind could muster, was channeled onto the boy sitting next to her. His scraggly hair; his soft, dark skin; his piercing eyes that stared with an intensity Jane had never seen before. They never dared to blink. Never dared to waste a fraction of a second not taking in the world around him. “There's something different about him,” Jane thought. “Something my need for affection and juvenile, misguided love can't quite put a finger on.”

“Clearly, he is a zombie,” Mr. Teach said. “The 'something different' is that he has been dead for months and is rotting. You should probably stay away from him.”

Jane broke her longing gaze and looked up at her teacher. “You...you can read my thoughts!?”

“No,” Mr. Teach replied. “You've been talking out loud for the past minute. And, frankly, I don't see how you haven't noticed that he is a zombie. Just look at him!”

Jane returned her gaze to the boy sitting next to her. It all made sense. She could see now that his scraggly hair was because most of his scalp was missing. His soft, dark skin actually looked like it was composed of month-old bananas, and his intense eyes were just the product of having no eyelids. Also, it explained why he had been drooling and making rude gurgling noises.

“What do you know!?” Jane burst. “You just don't understand him like I do! So, what if he is a zombie?” She lowered her voice and squinted her eyes for effect. “Why don't you just go on teaching about Romeo and Juliet, or whatever, and stay out of my personal life!”

“Perhaps that is a good idea,” Mr. Teach sighed. “Maybe you could learn something from this cautionary tale.”

“What could I possibly have to learn from some stupid Shakespeare story?” Jane questioned.

Mr. Teach looked perplexed. “You mean you don't see the parallels here? Dramatic and ridiculous young girl. Forbidden love. Ends in death....” He trailed off as he saw Jane was too busy doodling hearts with “Jane + Zombie 4 Eva” written inside to pay attention.

“Well,” Mr. Teach said as he walked to the chalkboard. “Now we are going to study foreshadowing. Say it with me, class. Foooreshaaadooowing.”

From Chapter Three: Denial

“Eeew, gross. If it isn't Zombie and his stupid girlfriend, Jane.” Sherry, the snarky head cheerleader, leaned against Jane's locker. “Don't you know that the only reason Zombie is dating you is because he wants to eat you?” Jane grabbed Zombie's hand tighter and spoke up.

“That's not true, Sherry! Zombie loves me for me. Honey, tell Sherry why you love me.” Jane turned her doe eyes at her love. His jaw was mostly detached, and his lips had eroded, but he tried to gargle a response. “Come on, spit it out, Baby,” Jane encouraged as she dusted off a couple of maggots from his shoulder.

“B..bb...brains.” He spoke quietly, but the stench of his breath was like a barrel of dead skunks.

“See!” Jane exclaimed. “He loves me for my intellect. Zombie doesn't care if I'm the head cheerleader or not. He wants a woman who can have a deep conversation.”

Sherry twirled her hair through her fingers and smacked her gum loudly. “No, you idiot. He wants to eat your brains. He wants to crack your head open with a spoon and gobble it like bread pudding.”

Jane was noticeably shaken. “Tell me it's not true, Baby!”

Zombie replied with the only word he knew. “BRRRRAAAAAIIINSSSS!!!!!”

From Chapter Nineteen: Acceptance (Kind of)

“I see things clearly now, Zombie.” Jane was running her hands through Zombie's remaining hair as he jerked and chomped at her fingers. “Haha, stop playing, Silly! Your love for me is only rivaled by your insatiable desire to eat my flesh. But that's what makes our love so intense! Every time you don't bash my head on a rock and slurp up my brains like soup, I know that's your way of expressing your love for me.”

Zombie looked at her with his cold, dead eyes and stretched his arms straight out from his body. He moaned and sputtered as he wrapped his putrid hands around her throat.

“Oh, Zombie,” Jane cooed as she playfully slapped his hands away. “You don't have to measure me for a necklace. All I want is you. Let's go spend time alone deep in the woods.”

From Chapter Twenty-Seven: Not in Kansas Anymore

“Welcome back from Christmas break, class,” Mr. Teach said cheerfully. “This semester we are going to study convenient endings in literature, but first, a pop quiz on your vacation reading assignment. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, what is the Scarecrow missing?”

The class was silent. Students looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders.

“No one?” Mr. Teach paced the floor as he spoke. “No one knows what the Scarecrow was traveling to the Wizard to receive?”

Then, from somewhere in the back row, a familiar, raspy voice echoed through the class room. “BRRRAAAAIIINSSSS!!!!”

Mr. Teach was amazed. “Yes, Zombie, you finally got one right!”

“But Mr. Teach!” Sherry interrupted. “That wasn't Zombie!” She pointed to the girl sitting next to Zombie in the back row.

Every student in the class turned around and stared in horror at Jane, her skin now a dark, sickly green and her eyes lifeless and unflinching. She gurgled something unintelligible as she reached across the aisle and grabbed Zombie's hand. They were two star-crossed lovers who defied the odds...and the grave.

THE END

From the back cover

“I haven't read something so riveting since the back of my Froot Loops box this morning at breakfast.” Amy Harper, The New York Times

“This is the worst zombie book I've ever read. It is also the worst romance book I've ever read. However, it is only the second worst pop-up book I've ever read.” Jonathan Gillman, Newsweek

“I've scheduled an operation to graft several hands onto my body, so that when the film version comes out I can officially give it nine thumbs down.” -Roger Ebert

Don't miss the next volume – Romance is Dead: 2 Deaths Don't Make a Life

Dear Taylor, Nothing Gold Can Stay

Dear Taylor,

I am writing you this open letter, posted on my blog, to discuss something that will be difficult for you to digest. I didn’t want to make this a public matter, but according to the legally binding directives issued on your behalf from a federal court, I am not allowed to contact you through “phone calls, text messages, the U.S. Postal Service, the Canadian Postal Service, email, smoke signals, standing under your window with Peter Gabriel playing out of a boombox, American Sign Language, Canadian Sign Language, relaying messages through your hair stylist’s roommate’s cousin, arranging your AlphaBits cereal, or shaving love notes into the side of your dog.”

A dog this size takes lots of tranquilizers.

You see, Taylor, you have left me with no choice but to tack these hurtful words onto the internet and hope you somehow see it. You might want to take a seat, preferably in a sturdy, comfortable chair with hand rests in case you slump over from the shock. No, not that one. Sturdier…ok, now we’re ready.

Taylor, I am leaving you.

Now, I know you must be inconsolable at this point, so I hope you have a guitar nearby to absorb your tears. I never understood why you didn’t simply wipe your face with tissue like everyone else, but we all have our little quirks, and that is not why I’m leaving.

And it’s not because you’re more famous than I am, you being an international music sensation that has sold 20 million albums worldwide and me being best known for my gripping portrayal of Johnnycakes in Emma Sansom High School’s production of The Outsiders. Because I know that if smartphones and YouTube had existed in 2004 that I would have been the first actor to ever win an Oscar for an internet video, and that I would now be starring in highly acclaimed blockbusters with Hugh Jackman, instead of what I’m currently doing in my free time, which is starring in an off-Broadway Pig Latin musical called “Les Iserablesmay”.

And it’s not because of the disparity in our income. Sure, you made $30 million dollars last year, which, if you include assets from birthday and Christmas gifts, is $29,998,273 more than me. But, I quite enjoyed basking in the riches of your chateau before you kept changing the security code and forgetting to tell me, or before your security guards grabbed the butter knife out of my hand and yelled at me for being an “obsessed lunatic” and told me to “get out of here before we call the police.” They must have been new, and did not recognize me from the macaroni art I made of myself and hung above your fireplace. I was just in the kitchen making you a sandwich, Taylor. Because that’s what kind of guy I am. (This may not be the right time, but as a side note, you are all out of peanut butter.)

Seriously, how did they not recognize me?

  

Heck, it’s not even because your hair shines more majestically than mine or that you are a foot taller than me when you wear heels. No, none of these things mattered, and, in fact, I found them endearing, at least when they weren’t igniting crippling waves of jealousy.

What it all boils down to is that, well…you’ve changed. And I’m not saying it’s for the worse, although if it were for the better one would have to assume I wouldn’t be leaving. It’s just that in the beginning you were so full of real-worldedness and down-to-earthitude. We used to stay up all night talking about Romeo and Juliet and how hard it was being fifteen years old. I mean, they might not have been actual conversations so much as they were me falling asleep by myself while hugging my iPod, but I know those songs were meant for me. But now…now our conversations have grown tiresome, and I feel our connection waning. It’s just hard to relate to you now. Crashing Kennedy family yacht parties? Hanging out with One Direction? Forgiving Kanye West!? I’m just a simple marketing professional with a revolving grasp on reality, Taylor. And I’m afraid that the simple Tennessee girl whose heart I was guaranteed from a surprisingly expensive back alley voodoo priest is gone forever – lost to the glitz and glam of Hollywood. Well today I am deeding you back your heart, Taylor, and you can give it to the Justin Bieber of your choosing.

I would like to arrange a meeting with you to exchange our belongings. I’ll take back the aforementioned macaroni portrait of myself, along with the scarf I gave you last Valentine’s that I knitted out of my beard trimmings. And you can have the collection of your used q-tips that you probably didn’t know I had and the book of letters you wrote me titled “Taylor’s Diary: Do Not Read!”.

I am sorry things didn’t work out, but I should really not be surprised. Innocence and optimism are often qualities of youth, and age tends to kill those charms. And although our lives have taken us in different directions, it doesn’t mean that our paths won’t converge again. I’ll think of you every time I turn on the radio, if you promise to think of me every time you hear bushes rustling outside of your window.

To paraphrase myself quoting Johnnycakes referencing Robert Frost – “Stay Gold, Taylor”.

Sincerely,

Nathan

The End of Days - Yours, Mayan, and Ours

As you may already know, tomorrow is the last day of life on Earth as foretold by the Mayans. This is not to say that our spirits won’t continue to exist on some ethereal plane, or that our mortal frames won’t continue to exist as space debris after our planet explodes, but life as we know it – with our souls firmly rooted in our breasts and our appendages all attached and uncharred - is about to end. Let us all take a moment and flip the freak out.

 AAAAAHHHHHOLYCRAPWEASELS!!!

Now, pull yourself together. We’ve only got a day to live, and daggumit, we’re not going to spend it rocking in the corner and sucking our thumbs. It’s time to grab Life by the stretchy part of the elbows and headbutt its teeth! Let’s all spend this last day doing everything we always wanted to do, like breaking windows and setting things on fire! Who’s with me?!

Wow, you guys really didn’t need that much convincing. I was just kidding.

Although it would no doubt be fun to hurl an office chair through a giant pane of glass Die Hard style, all the real things most of us want to accomplish can’t be done in a day. Or a week. Or a month, even. One could argue that we are still young, and it’s normal to not have accomplished everything we’d like to by this point in our lives, but I would like to argue that if we’re looking at percentages, the Mayan statisticians say our lives are 99.9999% over. And although we’ve known about the world’s impending doom for several years now, we are still unprepared. Sure, we meant to do all those things on our bucket lists, but the television was on, and what were we suppose to do, not watch it? Oh, if only our encyclopedic knowledge of Jersey Shore could save us from certain destruction instead of help usher in our untimely demise!

I am, of course, calling myself out first and foremost. If there’s one thing I’ve learned too late, and I’m not quite certain there is, it’s that I can’t sit idly back and expect great things to happen. I can’t reasonably expect anything to happen unless I set something in motion. For example, if I want a new job, I have to apply for it and then physically wrestle into submission every candidate in the waiting room before the interview. Also, shouting “I want to be an astronaut!” doesn’t have any weight while I’m watching Apollo 13, but people would be inclined to take me seriously if I was shouting it out of a rocket window.

“Mission control to Nathan. Do not open that rocket window.

You’re going to kill everybody. Over.”

I have to be proactive, and I have to think long-term. I have realized this in retrospect several times, and if history is as tenacious as everyone says it is, I will keep realizing it. Well, until a race of angry lizard humanoids eradicate us from the Earth tomorrow (Did the Mayans say how the world’s ending? I’m just throwing out some guesses here).

So how did I get where I’m currently at, reassessing my decisions while holding an umbrella in a futile attempt to protect myself from tomorrow’s forecast of ‘cloudy with a high chance of torrential buffalos’? I remember one of my teachers in the youth program at church explaining this concept on the blackboard by drawing life as a horizontal line. The line would abruptly slant upward and downward, and the crook of each angle represented a decision made. It was to demonstrate the impact of righteous and unrighteous decisions, but its application spreads to all aspects of life. Practiced violin for an hour? Line slants up. Used that hour to chase squirrels instead? Line slants down. Every decision sets you on a certain trajectory, and you can follow that decision tree backwards to find out how you became a concert violinist or a lunatic with a dead squirrel collection.

I’m going to love you and squeeze you and call you George.

…George, get back here! Why won’t you love me?! George?!

Sometimes it is easier to see life as a daily vignette instead of a seamless movie with a beginning, middle, and end. And choosing to look at it the easy way is, well…easy. And that’s how I find myself apprehensive on the eve of the day gravity dramatically increases and all our organs get crushed under the weight of our own bones (Possibly. Again, the Mayans were pretty vague).

So, I’ve chased a few squirrels. But should the Mayans be wrong – they have never lied to me before – and I wake up on the morning of December 22 still clinging to existence, maybe I’ll try a little harder. Maybe I’ll do something productive that could have bearing on my future. Or maybe I’ll just take a breather, because realizing I need to be better is half the battle, and I just escaped the Mayan rapture, and hey look the television’s on!

So I guess what I’m trying to say is, “Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die!”

Or, one day soon we’ll wake up fat, hungover, and disappointed. Whichever.

An Idiot's Guide to Moving for Dummies and Idiots

When I was little I always wanted to move. I was born in the house my parents still live in (I mean, not literally - Alabama has hospitals, you know), and I was jealous of my brothers who switched houses several times before I arrived. But now that I am older, I am thankful for that stability in my younger years. I made up for it by moving a gajillion times after high school as if I was I on the run from the law and my real name is Beezow Doo-Doo ZopittyBop-Bop-Bop.

Ha-ha! What a silly thought!

I have found, however, that moving is terrible. It requires a lot of hassle and manual labor, two of my least favorite things outside of Lenny Kravitz and the thought of starving kittens. Each time I moved to a new apartment I would loudly declare, “I am never leaving! This is where I am going to die!” But, as the saying goes ‘nothing mold can stay’ (I have lived in a couple of crappy apartments), and six months later I would find myself moving into a new apartment and shouting empty promises about being buried under the floorboards. But I mean it this time, despite the fact that my rent is about to considerably increase and that my upstairs neighbor snores like Godzilla and has trained her two dogs in the lost art of canine tapdance.

I felt like I should do something with all this acquired moving wisdom, so I decided to write another informative guide for the uninformed, gullible masses. But don't feel pressured to buy anything now. Enjoy these free excerpts*!

*Reading these excerpts legally constitutes a sale.

If you are reading this, you have already been billed.

from Chapter 1: Looking for a New Apartment

Searching for a new place to live can be daunting. Luckily there are many fantastic resources online to aid in your search, but none of them are Craigslist. All housing on Craigslist is riddled with peepholes and old syringes. If you don’t believe me, I suggest purchasing my first guide here and then returning to this chapter.

.........

Welcome back. Congratulations on narrowly escaping what was described as a “One bedroom basement apartment. Very quiet. In fact, no one can hear you scream." Now you can move on to more reputable search sites to find your new Shangri-la. These other sites are not bereft of misgivings, however. You have to be careful of the ads’ wording. I’ve never seen ad copy that hasn’t stated it was “nestled in a picturesque forest” or “nestled in a pristine valley”. It doesn’t matter where the apartment complex is located, it is nestled there. In reality the only thing you will be nestled in is the greedy tendrils of a 12 month unbreakable lease.

The apartment complexes’ names are also designed to mislead you. They all have flowery, scenic names that can’t reasonably be backed up. Can you see an air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror of your neighbors ’77 Skylark? You must live in “Pine View”. Is there a hole in the parking lot that fills up on rainy days that the neighbor kids play in? Welcome to “Lakeside Crest”. Do the cracks in your bathtub sprout mushrooms? That’s “Fun Gus’s Gardens”, and you really should have figured that one out.

Nestled in a magical grove of oaks, make your new home at beautiful Riverfront Terrace!

from Chapter 4: Packing up Your Apartment

The first thing you’re going to want to do is buy lots of packing boxes and neatly organize your belongings. Resist that urge. That would take time and effort, and I’m going to show you an easier way.

Step 1: Haphazardly throw all your belongings into a pile on your apartment floor, excluding pets. If you have any experience ransacking or pillaging, this will come in handy.

Step 2: Douse that pile with your favorite liquid, just as long as your favorite liquid is highly flammable and does not require a special license to purchase.

Step 3: Light a match.

Step 4: Collect your $17 in insurance money. Although you owned a lot of stuff, let’s face it, most of it was worthless, and you could really use that 17 bucks to care for all the burn wounds you just sustained.

from Chapter 8: Moving to a New State

If you have been following this guide closely, you are now wanted for arson, insurance fraud, and something called first degree pre-meditated animal larceny, so you’ll probably want to move to a new state where people won’t recognize you. Georgia, for example.  This has its own set of obstacles, because you will now have to get a new driver’s license. Depending on what state you’re in, you may want to allow plenty of time for your field trip to the DMV. If you want to be first in line, I suggest camping overnight in the parking lot and ambushing the tents of anyone who has a similar idea. Again, this is where your experience in ransacking and pillaging will come in handy.

Please remember that to qualify for a new license you will have to bring an original copy of your birth certificate, a utility bill addressed to your new residence, your social security card, a vial of your blood, a receipt from the last time you ate at Applebee's, and an in-state church attendance record notarized by the Pope, regardless of your religious affiliation. The state doesn’t actually want to give you a driver’s license, but should you succeed in accumulating these items, they are regretfully required to issue you one.

The people who work at the DMV are notoriously surly, so I like to butter them up with compliments as soon as I step up to their counter. Admittedly, this has never worked because all my compliments are, “Yo girl! You smell like biscuits!” It is my hope that one day my assigned worker will 1) be a female, and 2) accept that compliment in the spirit in which it was intended.

When it comes time to take a picture for your new ID, you will want to mentally prepare yourself, because this photo will haunt you for a minimum of 5 years, and perhaps much longer should you be wanted for a crime (which you are) and the news people splatter it all over the television (which they will). I like to practice this mantra over and over in my head as I’m waiting for the camera’s snap: “Don’t look like a felon. Don’t look high. Don’t look like a felon. Don’t look high.”

 Crap.

from Chapter 15: Dieing There

So now you're all settled into your new apartment. I am happy that you have benefited from the knowledge gleaned during my many painstaking experiences. Now all that is left is to hunker down and wait for death. And should our paths ever cross, say, during a monster truck rally or federal court, I will happily clasp your hand, dear reader, and thank you for purchasing my book, and then remind you that moving is awful and you swore you would never do it again.

Also, no refunds.