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Day 1

A pale, freckled, man emerges from his shadowy home and steps out into the blinding light.

So you’ve gotten bored. That’s okay, we all do sometimes. Okay, many times. Most of the time. All of the time? Maybe, but that’s what makes life interesting. Boredom is what brought you here after all, a place that you would have otherwise never been in a thousand interstellar lifetimes. Did that make sense? Probably not, but that’s what I’m rolling with!

WELCOME! Welcome to my little corner of the internet where I shall spill out all of the quirkiness and strangeness that I couldn’t release into my daily life. Who knows, maybe you’ll find something interesting, If not, then I’m afraid I can’t alleviate your boredom. Have you tried watching any new cat videos?

What follows this initial posting will be a myriad of stories related to relationships, personal trials, friendship, a few gaming related struggles, and a dash of randomness. I might tell you how a chance encounter on a dating app turned into signing a legal document to bind another human being’s life to my own until we go the way of most of the characters in Infinity war, or I may just start debating the pros and cons of riding a griffin vs a dragon. I honestly don’t know. Whatever fits the whimsy of the time I suppose.

For those of you who for whom the written word does not meet your entertainment requirements, then you can find my youtube channel where some of the posts on here come to life in the classical art form of verbal storytelling. I’m sure there’s a link around her somewhere. Up for a game of Where’s Waldo?

Anywho, I’m done for now. Peace.

Three Customers That Send Chills Down a Cashier’s Spine

Many of us have manned the money machine at one point in our lives. Whether it be a summer job for some extra cash in high school or the entry level position that led to a lifelong career, the position of cashier is a study in the human condition. Most people pass in a quick blur of soft beeping, endless bagging, and staring at the nearest time piece, but there are few types you should be aware of if you are thinking about entering the thunderdome.

Coupon Carrying Novice- Couponers are all the rage these days. I’m not above clipping a couple out here and there to save a buck, but there are those who take this to an extreme, attempting to make money off of shopping rather than saving it. Granted, most stores no longer allow a balance to go into the negative range, but it is not uncommon to see a nice woman come in with a four-inch binder from Costco filled with colorful slips of paper, and I’m not talking about a Pokémon card collection. The first time you meet this sort can be intimidating but 9 out of 10 are so good that they will hold your hand while you desperately try and make sure you’ve scanned and checked each and every clip-out. Of course, then there’s the one. The one who has no idea what they’re doing or the ins and out of this convoluted dance, and they never believe that they’re the ones stepping on toes. They’ll bring in coupons for a generic and ask for the name brand, they’ll bring in coupons that expired years before, hell, they’ll bring in coupons for other stores! Now, the decent person would simply move along and say something like “my bad.” These people though will demand to speak with management, call you a moron, and still try and force you to take their crappy coupons. Beware the novice.

He-Who-Speaks-With-Winds- Okay, I know I’ve given this guy a mysterious title, but there isn’t really anything to that mystique. Look back a few years and think. Did you ever see a guy talking to seemingly nobody, or have somebody appear to be carrying out a conversation with the air next to you in an elevator? Then you see the headphones. Yeah, that guy, and it has gotten worse now with the onset of the wireless era. This person will be checking out while talking on and on and on about their personal life, making random saying that you’ll have no idea how to respond to before you figure out that they’re on the phone. You’ll hear things like “look, you’ve got to stroke him nice and slow” and it will be about the cat, or “start in the front and finish in the back” and have no context to go on. Worse, you’ll finish ringing them up and be telling them the price, but then they’ll have the audacity to shush you! You’ll be stuck there like you’re a halfwit while the line piles up behind them and they must have their precious half hour phone call. You can be as nice or rude as you want, but they will always ignore you at best and verbally abuse you at worst if you try to interrupt their call.

Grand Theft Auto- Remember that scooter you saw in the store as a kid and your mom never let you ride? Some people must use them to get around the store more easily. It may be due to injury or health condition, or just plain laziness at times, but it is for the customer’s use so you can’t stop them. Normally, it isn’t a problem. They use it, they put it back, everything is good. The problem is when some self-entitled prick decides that they’re going to take a joy ride in the parking lot. If you’re one of those people, let me just say you can suck a lemon and sit on a pinecone. Maybe you didn’t know, but that thing must be charged! Constantly! It’s not like you paid to rent it out, and it’s not like you’re the only one out there who might need it. If it breaks down, if it isn’t charged, or if you bust one of its tires, then the next person won’t be able to use it, and they might really need it. In a big store like a certain big blue one we know there are employees who go out for the carts, but in small stores it is often the cashier who must make sure that the carts are picked and replaced. On a normal day, it’s annoying. On a busy day, like say, Black Friday? It’s Armageddon. However, you can get into the store, please use said method to get out again. Be courteous to the minimum wage employee who’s only trying to get through his shift.

There are others who you may need to look for, but these were the worst in my experience that come right down to the human capacity of being a douche. Keep an eye out and you’re sure to find them. Just breathe, keep your calm, be kind and courteous, and be swift and creative in your retribution.

Three Things I’ve Learned From Nursing School

Preface: Let me just say that I’m not the wisest, smartest, or most skilled student to pass through mystical realm involved in the training of qualified nurses, but I have struggled every inch of the way and made it through. So, let this grizzled sage impart his hard-won wisdom on to you, the newest inductee into the hall of the white scrub. Or whatever color your uniform is.

Uno: Don’t be too Selfless.

I get it, you think this is part of the job. Everybody else in the world from your neighbor’s grandmother to the orphan boy from halfway across the world is more important than you. I envy you for having that quality. I honestly miss it. I.E. I don’t have it anymore, and neither does anybody but the most gifted individuals to ever wear a pair of scrubs. If you’re like me, you want to be the very best nurse you can. You’ve spent hours and hours studying for each and every course that they made you take, pulled all-nighters before tests to make sure you’ve crammed every last speck of knowledge into your cerebrum even though you’ve been preparing for days, and volunteered those few precious free hours you were gifted with away to build a resume for your application or just because you like that sort of thing. This is all a testament to your determination, or so you say. Let me ask you this. Have you ever had to skip a shower to get to class on time? Have you ever had to pull multiple nights without sleep because you tell yourself there’s just not enough time? How often do you sleep a full eight hours? Do you sometimes forget to eat, or if you do eat, you eat garbage food just because it’s quick?

Determination to your cause of becoming a great nurse is admirable but tearing yourself apart to help others is the path of self-defeat. Your health, your body, your mind, these are the most important tools to being a worthy nurse. If you must cut out some volunteer hours to make sure you can study and sleep, do it. If you feel like you need to stay up all night before an exam, step away from the books for half an hour and breathe. Read a book, listen to some music, whatever you do to relax. Think for a while about how often you’ve made a dumb mistake on a test or let your anxiety change your answer from the right one to the wrong one. After you do that, quiz yourself once, once! Then pack up your stuff and go to bed. Exercise have something healthy to eat once and a while. Risk running a few minutes late to get that shower. The person next to you will thank you.

In essence, be selfish enough to take care of yourself and be a human being. There will be time to learn more as you go through school and then your career.

Dos: Become a Recording Artist:

No, don’t break out that guitar you haven’t played in years and begin crooning. Make recordings for your lessons, and not of your teachers. Go in and make an outline from your lecture notes and fill in the blanks from your textbook. This is a critical part of studying you are probably aware of and have done many times. However, there’s another step that will further immerse yourself in the material, all while going through some other aspects of your day.

I know you may not like speaking or hearing your own voice but break out a tape recorder or an app and start singing those notes out. You don’t really have to sing, but detail everything in your outline that we discussed earlier in your own words. Make comparisons that are personal to you, find similarities, link things together that come to mind while you speak, all of these cement the knowledge further in your mind. Not only does this help you study in the moment, it will help you study when you don’t feel like cracking open a book. Put a few of those recordings in your phone, plug in your headphones and listen while you exercise. Listen while you eat instead of watching Family Guy for the umpteenth time. Listen on your drive or walk to class in the morning. Everything will fit better since you’ve put everything into words you are familiar with and understand rather than listening to your professor drone on and on. If you don’t believe me, try if for one exam. I guarantee it will help.

Tres: Form a Party

Gaming term, sorry. In a competitive program, it is easy to think of class like a race. You wind up comparing test scores and clinical performance, automatically measuring yourself against your classmates rather than figuring out how you might be able to improve. It is a trap that is very easy to fall for, since most students that get in are likely the lone wolf type that got this far by relying on nobody but themselves.

Get this through your thick skull right now. That competitive drive is complete and utter bullshit. Get rid of it. You will struggle with something, and you won’t want to ask for help. Swallow that pride and find other people around you to talk the material out with. They will undoubtedly have a different perspective that you didn’t think about. That difference may be the key to understanding the difference between norepinephrine and epinephrine or how to remember the different antidotes for warfarin and heparin. The people around you are some of the smartest and most gifted people you will ever know, and they are in the same boat you are. Befriend them early and work together so that you will all one day run into each other in the halls of a hospital, both nurses.

Disjointed

I’ll get this started by saying that I am not a lucky guy in most things, but when it comes to injuries, I’ve been far more fortunate than I’d like to admit. I’ve played sports since I was a toddler, climbed numerous trees, fell from multitudes of playground apparatuses, been in two car accidents, and have played with numerous sharp objects over the years, I have yet to be seriously injured. Knock on wood. Still, nobody can go through life entirely unscathed, and so this story begins.

Junior High, or middle school if you like, a truly awful time in life. Nothing seems to fit, including yourself in the complex and mercurial society that surrounds you from the hours of 8am to 3:30pm. It’s like being a puzzle piece with one of the ends snipped off. Try as one might, it is next to impossible to truly fit in. At 13, I still cared about such things, but I was so woefully inept when it came to dealing with human beings. I had been home schooled just until the year previous and had managed to make a handful of friends, but I was still the oddball, too shy to ever really speak up beyond a whisper.

To pour on some other issues, I was an early bloomer. I guess my pituitary heard that whole schtick about how the early bird gets the worm just a few too many times not to give it a go. During the time of my 11^th summer to my 12^th, I grew over a foot in height, towering over my pre-pubescent peers like a giant who’d fallen from his beanstalk. By the time I was thirteen, I had reached what would be my full height of 5ft 11inches. I know, still a midget in the eyes of the average female due to the lacking of one inch, but when the average person in your class is barely cresting five-two, it can make you look like a god among men, or the local circus freak. Granted, there were a few others like me who had grown quickly, but they had the luxury of belonging to a particular group that accepted them. I did not. I had my tiny circle of trusted accomplices, but that was it. Add on the fact I was a pale, freckled, red head, then you have quite the mix for a very unpopular beverage.

How is all of this important? Am I just complaining about the hand that genetics had dealt me? Am I that kind of prick? No, I just want to help you get into my 13 year old head a little so you can understand the decisions that came later.

Junior High introduced the very beginning of school sponsored sports teams. Granted, they weren’t very important, but they served as the itty bitty budget scouting network for the high school team. Naturally, almost every guy wanted to play because that’s what guys did. At least, that’s what we’d all been told. I wasn’t the most athletic kid, but I wasn’t unathletic at that time. I’d played baseball and basketball, and was about as decently mediocre as any other 13 year old. I actually liked basketball, so when I heard there was a team, then I was going to go for it.

My school was weird. We worked on block scheduling. 8 classes divided between A and B days, with 4 classes per day that each lasted approximately 90 minutes. The second black on A days was set aside for boy’s athletics. We didn’t have to try out to make the team. We just had to sign up and boom there we were. This block lumped together both basketball and football. Football would be first since it was played in the fall. Basketball training would start after the season had ended. That was just how it worked. Maybe it was because of the lack of coaching staff, maybe because of budget, maybe because it was 7^th grade and nobody really gave a crap, but who is to really say?

If you didn’t want to play football, you were to sit in the bleachers in the gymnasium for the entire 90 minutes, doing nothing. You couldn’t go down on the court to shoot hoops, you couldn’t talk to anyone, and you couldn’t leave. Being thirteen, the last one should have been pretty obvious. This was torture in the highest degree. I would read a book if I remembered to bring one, that being my preferred pass time. Still, I could devour the average paper back in less than a day if I had the mind and time. Since I didn’t have much money outside of the odd birthday gift or Christmas present to buy said books, I didn’t exactly have an extensive library. This being the case, I rapidly exhausted my supply of reading material several times over in the first few weeks of school.

During this time, I had my best friend, Alec, chattering on about how football was so much fun. Football was great. I should play football. Why did I want to sit around more than play football? This happened quite a bit. This combined with sheer boredom, that devil, finally wore me down and I told the coach I wanted to play if it wasn’t too late. He didn’t mind, so that’s how my short football career started.

I’m not going to detail the awkwardness of attempting to learn to play football when you’d never seen a game before, let alone played the sport. The pads were confusing, the egg shaped ball was confusing, the fact it was called football when you used your hands for most of the game was confusing, everything was confusing. It was like trying to talk to girls, only with much more physical contact. Let’s just say I was not a natural, but I got by for the most part.

Thanks to my height and general size, I was placed on the defensive line, usually in the position of Right End. The description is literally in the title. I was on the right end of a line big guys who hit another line of big guys to get to the small guys who were holding the precious, brown, leather egg. Getting to them was the easy part for me. Long legs help with speed. I never got the hang of tackling. I was a gentle spirit. I didn’t have the killer instinct then to run into somebody at full speed and bring them to the ground. So, most of my tackling was getting to the guy, wrapping him in a bear hug, and using my weight to gradually bring him down. Not exactly the manly clash you wanted? Deal with it.

This technique worked many, many, many times. However, sometimes one of the little guys was faster than me, so they could get out of my bear hug before it happened. There was one guy on our team, a running back named Dave, not really but this is what we will call him, that could do this just about every time in practice. This was frustrating to say the least.

One day in practice, he was doing his thing. It was hot, I was getting a little delirious from dehydration, and I’d had more than enough of his crap. On the last play of the day, I was determined to bring him down. A little bit of a killer was being born in my brain through the fires of frustration on the forge of revenge. This would later be forged more and more into the true madness that rings within me to this day, but that would be years later.

The ball was snapped. I slammed into the Offensive Lineman and through him aside like a sack of potatoes. I rushed into the backfield, searching for Dave. He’d taken the ball from the quarterback and was running in my direction. Perfect. I got close to him and dived, sure I had him. Up until that time, Dave hadn’t seen me somehow, but he chose that moment to look to his right. I saw his eyes go wide and saw him miss a step, but he did the most natural thing he could have when he saw somebody nearly twice his size diving for him. He jumped back, just out of my reach, stopped for a second as if he couldn’t believe what had happened, and started running again, but he wasn’t alone. As he’d jumped back, I’d grabbed a handful of his trailing jersey and wrapped my fingers in it.

I don’t know why I did this. I was the first instinct that popped into my head. Looking back, it was not a smart thing to do. I belly flopped onto the ground like a dying fish, and then Dave proceeded to spin and twist, trying to wrench free from my grip. He then dragged me for a few yards through the dirt before somebody managed to catch up and bring him down. Not the way I’d planned for things to go.

It wasn’t until we got back to the locker room and began to change that I noticed something wrong. I couldn’t close my fingers on the hand I’d used to grab on to Dave. I looked at my hand and I’m pretty sure my eyes were wider than an eight lane highway. My middle, ring, and pinky fingers were all contorted in convoluted yoga poses, each one different in the last like they were trying to outdo one another. I remember falling on my butt on the bench, just staring at them. Alec, who’s locker was next to mine, looked over and saw what was going on.

I remember him saying something like “Woah” and maybe a “Cool”, but I’m not entirely sure. The pain had started to kick in so I wasn’t really focusing on his vocabulary. I didn’t focus in on what he was saying until he asked to see it closer.

As you’ve probably gathered from my previous stories, Alec has a way of making you suspicious. He was and is a great friend and there is nobody better to have in your corner when the chips are down, but he has a strange mind. So, naturally, I wondered why he was so interested in my newly noticed injury. He insisted, so I let him inspect my crooked fingers. Mistake. Big mistake.

He looked at my fingers for a moment, and then took the three of them in his hand and did a whip like motion with them! What came next was like hearing an entire bag of popcorn pop instantly. It was so fast and so loud that it was insane. The other boys around us looked around, not knowing what had happened. I did, and all I could do was gasp out a barely audible whine as the pain stabbed up my arm and then, miraculously, disappeared.

Alec let go of my fingers and I snapped my hand up to my face to see what further damage had been done. To my surprise, my fingers were once again standing at attention and responsive to orders. I opened and closed my fist a few times, just in awe of what had happened.

Alec had the biggest grin on his face before he said. “You’re welcome.” He walked off just like that, as if that had just been another day in his life. Me, I had to sit there a few minutes and stare at my hand. I was late for lunch and missed out on getting an ice cream cup, but such is life. You dislocate your fingers, your friend resets them, and you miss out on ice cream. Ah, good times.

That’s it for now. Hope you enjoyed the read. Peace!

Grave Mistake

Ever have friends that talk you into stuff? It almost never works out well. Some get talked into alcohol, some get talked into smoking, and others get talked into sneaking out on Halloween to egg the principal’s house. Me, I got talked into a midnight trip to a cemetery.

To begin, I must preface this story with the fact I was 16 at the time that these events took place. If you look back on yourself at 16, you may see yourself through rose tinted glasses. Me, I see a bumbling idiot who was so impressionable that he’d do whatever he could to hold onto the few friends he had. At the best of times, the number was at four. At the worst, it was one. Good ol’ Alec with a C.

So, unlike many at 16, I did not have access to a vehicle. I had my driver’s license, which is about as useful as a bag of manure in a perfume factory. I lived so far out of town that I couldn’t get a job to save up for one. It was about 20-30 minutes by car on the highway going 60 or over. So, my bicycle wasn’t going to cut it.

Of our group, only one of us could drive, and not very well. So we basically had to arrange our times together with those who had the ability to access an automotive contraption. It wasn’t often, but every now and then we could get together at one another’s houses to blast some zombies, which was definitely our favorite pass time in that era.

One night, we got together to play Black Ops zombies, the very first one, not its progressively worse successors. We played for hours, spreading such blood and gore that it would make Jason Vorhees blush. Eventually, though, you’ve got to step away. In our case, it was a combination of deliriousness brought on by the outstanding heat brought on by the combined body heat of three almost grown males and electronics as well as an inordinate amount of friendly fire. We stepped out on the deck to cool off.

Now, something you have to know about my good friend Alec with a C. He was obsessed with all things macabre and horror filled. He forced, sorry, insisted that I watch a full on marathon of horror movies when I’d never seen one in my entire life up until that point. It went on until I was forever after unaffected by even the most awful and gruesome scenes ever depicted, including Green Inferno. Don’t google it, its not worth it.

It was around midnight, and I lived out in the middle of the woods in rural Arkansas. On my street, cough dirt road cough cough, my family lived between my grandparents and great grandparents. Down the road was an old, one room church with an expansive graveyard beside it that now served as the final repository of the remains of several generations of my ancestors. I was mentioning this to my friends, when Alec’s head did an exorcist twist and a wicked grin spread across his face. This was the first clue that I’d goofed.

Alec then did his “insisting” which led to my impressionable and gullible 16 year old self agreeing to lead him and my other friend, Dillon, down that dirt road in the middle of the night, with only the light of the full moon to illuminate our way, in the middle of the woods to a graveyard. So, at this point you’re probably thinking we were begging to be the inspiration for a B horror movie. You’d be right, because to the present me, everything in said situation just screams all kinds of nope.

We walk down the long, gravel driveway to the road and prepare for the half mile trek by moonlight, when my younger brother comes running up, asking to tag along. At this moment, I have a revelation that it might be a decent idea to let my parents know where we’re going, I think silently hoping that they’d tell us not to go. Still, we’d all walked so far, and you know how it is when you’re young. Anyone younger than you is automatically a lower life form, so I told my brother he could come if he’d go tell our parents where we were going. He ran back to the house and came back 10 minutes later, telling us we were in the clear.

So, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the woods, by the light of the moon, without phones, we walked the half mile down to the church and the graveyard. I was expecting some kind of curse to be activated or some band of roaming cannibals to appear out of forest to take us away to become morsels within their adolescent casserole, but none of that happened. We got there just fine, just as a fog rolled on. My first thought was, “great, who brought the Ouija board?”

We explored for a while, but the most interesting and terrifying thing was the truck we discovered sitting behind the church. We thought it was just a truck that belonged to the church, or so we prayed. That’s when its horn blew.

I don’t know exactly how to describe the feeling that ran through me. I imagine its close to what it feels like the moment a bolt of lightning connects with your spine while an invisible alien decides to probe you. Combine the two at the same instant and I think you’ll have a close approximation of the fear that gripped my teenage heart. As if it couldn’t get any worse, the truck drove up to us, headlights blinding us so we couldn’t run away without tripping over somebody’s grandmother. The window rolled down and…

It was a man. A normal man. I’d expected something far more frightening.. Maybe Benny from Halloween Town, though that would have been far more awesome than scary. We couldn’t see him that well, but he didn’t waste any time in demanding an explanation of why we were there and if anybody knew we were out there. That second part through me off. Obviously we were young and probably had somebody still taking care of us in some capacity, but that’s just an odd question to ask. It immediately set of the creepy serial killer alarm that each of us had in the back of our brains so we sort of clammed up, not wanting to be the first to have to pull the lotion from the basket.

It turned out the man was the local game warden. In Arkansas, it is illegal to use a spotlight to hunt deer, and apparently some idiots had been doing just that. So, understandably, the game warden felt it was his duty to HIDE BEHIND A CHURCH, and scare the pants off a random group of teenagers. Because he was bored? I assume so. I don’t know how many deer hunters you’re going to see, hiding behind a church, but hey, I’m not a professional.

It was about the end of the conversation when I saw my Dad’s truck pull up by the church. Now, it was strange for me in that instant, to see my father. Why would he be there? Had the game warden called him? Was my Dad secretly in the order of game wardens? I mean, my brother had gone and told them that….it hit me then, and I turned on my brother like a wild tiger grabbed by the tail. His face was so guilty. He looked like a frightened animal, ready to bolt the first chance he got, ,but he was surrounded by angry and large predators. Still, I couldn’t beat the little shit up right there in front of my Dad, so I just had to glare at him while my Dad talked to the warden.

My Dad confirmed my suspicions about his other offspring when he said that we weren’t supposed to be out here. With that sentence, I knew we were boned and the fun times were over. So was my brother’s life the second we were out of sight of an adult;.

My Dad drove us back to the house and delivered a good chewing out session along with my Mom, primarily aimed at me, and I got grounded for the next two weeks. I never got to dish out the punishment my brother so rightly deserved, and thus he still lives to annoy all of us today.

And that, my friends, is how my trip to a graveyard at midnight, in the middle of the woods,during the fog, ended. Thanks for reading! I’m posting a video version of this story on youtube so you can check it out by following the link on the home page. Enjoy, and don’t forget to like and subscribe!

Peace!

A zombie logs into a chat room

So, who’s been single? If you didn’t raise your hand for this question then I don’t know what or who you are and nor can I understand your existence. Please explain when you get the chance because I’m sure there are many people out there who would read your story.

Single is an ugly word isn’t it? It makes you feel like a slice of cheese, all alone in its wrapping, watching as other singles get put in sandwiches and you’re left all by yourself. Maybe getting a touch moldy, a little crunchy around the edges, just being a sad slice all alone in the fridge. At least, that’s the story for some days. Other days, who gives a flying sack of potatoes? So what if you’re single? Single means freedom. Freedom to do what you want, when you want, and how you want without trying to impress or appease another person who is constantly around. True, there are some great things about being single and out there on your own, but when that ever hungry and demeaning goblin known as loneliness starts banging you with his club, you can’t help but feel like that slice of cheese.

Thankfully for those of us who walked out the door to birth without having social skills installed, the information era has gifted us with the tools needed to interact with the fearsome outside world without actually having to leave our warm and cozy inside world. You’ve heard of it, rather good or ill. Online Dating! Taking the “out” of the “going out” since the birth of the internet. I wonder if I could get paid for that slogan? Probably not. Nobody steal it! It’s mine!

So that’s where we find 21 year old me, fresh out in the world, getting by on energy drinks and microwave noodles, with about as much skill with social interaction as a plastic fish’s head at a Christmas party, desperately trying to be recognized by the opposite sex. Desperation may be a little strong, but wanting very badly is so wordy.

I’d tried the ol’ classic meet and greets and blind dates set up by friends who thought they knew me, but think about your friends for a minute. How many of them know you well enough to set you up with somebody that you might actually like? Now, how many of them might happen to have a distant cousin they might out at you just because? I bet there are a lot more in category number 2 than the first. Such was the case. So, online dating.

Like many a college student, I was broke, so the fancy land of eHarmony and Match were out of my price range. Tinder, I’m not going to get started with that. The mere word feels sticky in my mind. Which, if you’re with somebody off Tinder, don’t be offended. You might have been lucky. As someone who constantly hits all six red lights on the way into town, I can assure you I would have wound up with Gollum’s less attractive sister. So here we hit upon the realm of free online dating, which should be three words that don’t ever meet, but that’s where I was in my life.

I won’t tell you the site it was. They aren’t sponsoring me. All I can say is it shares a name with a certain holiday figure who’s fond of archery. You got it? Cause that’s the hint. I hopped on the site filled out every single category of the bio, and then listed everything I could think of that I found important. One doctoral thesis later, I uploaded three pictures and boom, I was ready to virtually mingle!

Or so I thought. Turns out, online dating still requires a good deal of effort other than swiping left or right. Sure, that’s a thing, but it’s not so simple, at least it wasn’t for me. I did the quizzes, answered additional questions, and even worked the herculean task of mustering the courage to fire off a few messages. Don’t worry, I didn’t do the generic “hi” or “wyd” or the never gets old “what’s your sign?” I read the profiles. Gasp! It’s true. If you’re out there on these things, read the dang thing! The person who wrote it gives you free clues on how to talk to them! That’s something you don’t get IRL. The bio is like the ultimate cheat sheet to a test you’re going to take over and over and over again. Use it!

So I read the profiles, and then agonized over every word of what I thought might be an original message. Sometimes I got responses, but was more often than not ignored. I had more than a few promising conversations grow cold and break down. Let me tell you, that sucks balls, because you never know what you did wrong. Best advice, assume they got a better offer and move on. Save the “fight for your love” for the romance novel protagonists. You’re more likely to win if you have the chiseled physique of a Greek god and the confidence of Jack Sparrow than you are if you lean toward the hefty side and get frightened by prolonged eye contact. Speaking from personal experience on the latter of course. Just move on.

I was on the site for a while. Even went on a date or two, but nothing worked out. I don’t know if my expectations were too high, if I just didn’t live up to expectations, or just didn’t try hard enough, but after almost a year of trying, I felt like it was time to abandon ship and resign myself to aging in the back of the fridge for a few more years before finding my sandwich.

Summer had finally come and finals had truly taken the will out of me. I had made up my mind to disable my account, but couldn’t gather the energy to do it until several days after the term had ended. When I logged on, I noticed a little red 1 by the messages tab. What the hell? Might as well see what was up. There was indeed a message, from a woman who I had never spoken to before on the site. It was a pretty generic message, but, like you before coming to this post, I was bored and had nothing better to do. I clicked the link to her profile and began to read.

Ever hear about those stories where something sounds too good to be true? I could have sworn I was now in the lead role of such a story. This woman went to the same university I did, enjoyed many of the same anime, played many of the same video games, read the same genre of books I enjoyed, and based on some rather intriguing photos with a mannequin, appeared to be as strange and weird as I was! Like I said, too good to be true.

I didn’t respond right away. I had some sleuthing to do. Using her username and picture, I searched the endless landscape of the web, looking for any sign that this person truly existed. I found another dating profile on another website, a tumblr account, and, finally, an aged instagram that hadn’t been posted on in quite a while, but that was enough for me to believe that it was indeed a real person that had reached out to me out of the unknown. Whether they were truly as incredible as they seemed was yet to be determined. There was only one thing left to do. After three days, I sent a reply.

A conversation was unlikely after such a delay, I knew that, but the burning inferno of my curiosity demanded everything in my power be done to find answers! To my surprise, she responded promptly. To say what ensued was awkward would be saying Mars is a just a hop, skip, and a jump away from the Earth. There was no real traction, no true connection to be found. Even after reading the profile, no strand of conversation jumped out as an appropriate place to begin. However, remember the mannequin I mentioned earlier? Well, I just had to know.

Turned out she hadn’t come into possession of said mannequin through any mysterious means, but it was part of her disaster coordination training for her degree. This was the foothold I needed, and I gladly took it. This somehow led us to a topic we mutually gushed over, zombies. I know you’re probably thinking. Really? This is it? This was how you bonded? The answer is an emphatic yes. Got a problem with it? Is bonding with somebody over modern art or through the mediation of a bottle of tequila more appropriate for your sensibilities, Sharon? You do you, and we’ll do us.

That one conversation led to many more, all because of zombies. Thanks for reading, and I will post more of the story later on. Be sure to follow for the most up to date info. Thanks again. Peace!