pretty dumb things

picture this

Let’s see.

I’m in a calendar. In fact, I’m the pin-up shot for December 2011, a festive position in which to be. The position is probably due to all the parti-colored feathers and the champagne bottle, from which I genuinely did swig. The picture-taking took place during one of those nights in an artists’ loft, and when in the artist loft, you do as the artists do. There were many women tromping around in various states of delicious undress, and all I can say is that I’m delighted to be in their company. Also, I took pictures.

You can buy the calendar over here on The Rumpus, and when you do, you can feel good about supporting The Rumpus (even if your primary motivation is to get pictorial evidence of my fake but spectacular bosoms. I mean, holy levitating boobs, Batman. My breasts look as if they’re going to float away. It's an optical illusion aided by the corset I’m wearing; my actual breasts do not defy gravity to any extent that strains either credulity or natural law). I built the wings in the photo myself, and those I’m very proud of, though were I to do it again, I would engineer them a bit differently. As it turns out, $220 worth of feathers weighs quite a bit.

In this calendar, I’m portraying one of my very favorite literary figures from one of my very favorite books by one of my very favorite writers: Fevvers of Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter. Carter’s prose humbles and inspires me; she has that rare ability to craft a sentence whose syntax evokes intrinsically while challenging absolutely. Her writing gives me that frisson of pleasure that comes only when the strings of the heart and the head are plucked simultaneously. Add to this precision Carter’s predilection for magical realism and her unabashed socialist-feminist political leanings, and I swoon.

The novel, sadly, is out of print in the US. That’s a deep down tragedy and no doubt about it.

I’m feeling fairly fond of the photo in the calendar. I have a vexed personal history with photographs. I didn’t take good photos, and then I did, and now I don’t so much. I think the calendar shot makes me look both hot and daft in equal measures, and I suppose I can live with that. Once upon a time, in what seems like a galaxy far, far away, every picture I took was good. My driver’s license shoots looked like Francesco Scavullo had taken them, full-on with beauty lighting and wind machine. It’s not the case anymore. My face has shifted, and where the transition from 3-D to 2-D used to play up the angelic angles of my cheekbones, now it highlights wrinkles.

That’s life, I suppose; it’s also death, but slowly. I don’t rue aging, but I do suddenly come to understand why actresses do fucked up things to their faces. Were I to blow my face up twelve feet wide and luminous, I’d probably scramble for the Botox, Juvederm, and Collagen too.

Lately, I’ve gotten drawn into photography, in part because I have friends who are models, in part because I have friends who are photographers, and in part because I got an iPhone, and every douchebag with an iPhone and a Hipstamatic app thinks she’s a photogrpher; I am that douchebag. Taking my own photographs and looking at the photographs of others is a lot like writing myself and reading Angela Carter. There is what I can do—and then there is what other people can do. I pray for the wisdom to know the difference, as well as the temerity to keep on going in the face of crushing self-doubt.

One of those photographers who makes me die a little bit is Symon Chow. I wrote about him for Filthy Gorgeous Things a couple of months ago. I came to his photos through seeing one of his nudes reblogged on one of the Tumblr sites I follow, but all of his pictures slay me. I love his full-frontal commitment to a vintage aesthetic, and I’m equally partial to his eldritch sensibility. Any man who has been given full rein to run amok in the Mütter Museum’s storerooms earns my eternal, bone-dusty respect. I’m just sad I’m no longer in the full flower of my photogenic self.

Time passes. You snooze; you lose. I snost; I lost.

So what, you ask, is the thrumming subtext in all this text? It’s this, dear reader, you may notice my face here is lots and lots. All kinds of my face. Even a gossamer shred of my first name. Which is because my “anonymity” has become more or less a charade. Everyone I know knows I have this blog. I used to have to keep it on the down-low because I taught at a Catholic college. Then I had to keep it on the down-low because I worked at a conservative community college. Today I work for a man who picked me because of the strength of my sexytime scribblings. I maintain this second name because this identity is more famous than I am.

Also, it’s fun to have doubles. Just ask any model, artist or photographer.

pinch drunk

Last Wednesday night, I did something that is such an unbelievable breach of Gotham etiquette, such a mark of extreme louche behavior, such a shame-making urban act that every time I have confessed it to another Gothamite—and confess it I have, as if the telling of it will scrub my soul clean—to a one, they have reacted the same way: A jerk of the head, a gasp, and an exclaimed, “Oh, no!”

“Oh, no!”: it’s the same words, but it’s not the same exclamation as when I had my iPhone jacked out of my bleeding hands on Fordham Road in the Bronx. It’s the same words, but not the same exclamation, as when I had a roommate move out taking as much stuff as he could carry (including, inexplicably, the light bulb from the ceiling). It’s the same words, but not the same exclamation, as when I went to work one night in the ‘90s and found my strip club door padlocked with a big Marshall sign on it proclaiming the property seized. It’s the same words but not the same exclamation because while the other situations occasioned compassioned and understanding, this one engendered only horror and the clear, unadorned relief that what happened to me had not happened to them.

And what had I done? I got so drunk that I puked in a cab. It was the full cliché glory of taxicab puking. An unanticipated need. A thin rivulet of bourbon stink. An irate taxi driver. An inability to find my wallet. A quick panic. A huge payment. An unsteady mile-long walk home in high heels. It was ugly. May it never happen to you.

Slender are the surface facts that brought me to puking in the back of a Gotham taxi. I’d been busy all day and I’d not eaten much. I think my grand total of food for the day amounted to five eggs, two corn tortillas, a pile of potatoes and a couple threads of green beans. I rushed off to a party, stopping only to grab a bottle of Buffalo Trace Kentucky whiskey from my local liquor store. At the party, we all dispensed with glasses and took slugs out of the bottle, in a circle, totemically, as if we were sharing a hookah.

I don’t, therefore, have a clear idea of how much I drank, but it probably wasn’t much more than a customary heavy pour. I’ve never held my liquor well under the best of circumstances, and these circumstances were not even in the same congressional code as the best.

But the surface facts really don’t tell the whole story and the whole story is that I went to that party with full intention to get drunk. Not as drunk as I got, nor as quickly, messily, shamefully or as pointlessly, but drunk. I wanted to get drunk because the day before I discovered that the doctor who performed my rotator cuff surgery is, and I quote my insurance company, “outside my network.” I owe him just under $13,000. It may be immature, and certainly for me very unusual behavior, but I wanted a night when I could forget the money and feel angry about it simultaneously and illogically.

I’m not good with money. I’ve written before about how bad with money I am. Money is hard to write about. I’d rather write about the seamier side of my sex life than my bank balance. I feel shame over being as deeply, profoundly and, let’s face it, inescapably in the red as I am. Again, the surface explanations for my extreme in-the-redness are fairly simple. I’m bad with math. In fact, I have dyscalculia, which makes negotiating numbers incredibly hazardous and anxiety provoking. My parents never taught me to manage money. They dropped the ball on that, as they did on many other things like table manners, social etiquette and playing well with others. And money has never been much of a driving force. It’s nice to have, but I’ve never really cared about a status of living that affords me much beyond the general basics adorned with an occasional furbelow.

But the three-D truth is naturally more complex, and the truth is that I never really considered myself worth much. Therefore, managing my money wasn’t a priority. I didn’t think I’d be here very long. I thought I’d be dead by my own hand or, more likely, by an “accident.” I didn’t pay attention to my student loan debt. I owe in the low six figures. I didn’t pay attention to my taxes. I owe in the low four figures. I didn’t pay attention to my credit cards. I owe in the mid-four figures. I have a lot of debt.

What I don’t have are assets. I own nothing. I don’t have a car, a house, an apartment, jewelry, stocks, bonds, or anything anyone would want to buy on E-Bay. I have over a hundred snow-domes and too much vintage Norma Kamali and ten pairs of Frye boots. I have second-hand furniture and a computer that’s going to celebrate its fifth birthday. I have many pairs of Wolford tights. And that’s about it.

Shockingly, I’d begun to make peace with it, my lack of ownership and debt, and I’d begun to take measures to make my debt more manageable. In fact, I have an appointment with an accountant tomorrow, an appointment I’m going to have to cancel because I can’t afford it. In the past couple of years, I had begun to take steps to fashion a life that allowed my ends to meet, that would help my hand reach my mouth and feed me, that would—perhaps—allow me to pay my debt while living. I, in short, got a job that I hated. And then I quit that one, and I got a job that I actually like.

At 46, in the worst economy since the Great Depression, I got the things that culture had been telling me I should get while I clapped my hands over my ears and sang “La la lala, academia lalala, freelance writing la la la.” I got a job. I got a pension. I got health insurance. At 47, I got another job. I got an IRA. I got different health insurance. I got doctor’s appointments. I got surgery. I got a great, big stinking debt that I wasn’t expecting, and I got it just when I was towing the cultural row, doing the work that I didn’t like and then work that I sort of like, but whatever. I was living the life I had never wanted. I was living the life of a schnook.

A few weeks ago, I was out at dinner with three others: a big-deal writer, a writer poised on the brink of being a big deal, and a writer whom we all believe will be a big deal. We were talking about the necessity of being successful and the big deal writer’s belief that to make a dream come true you need to say you’ll do it, out loud, to others. I told him about my six-figure student loan debt and then I devolved into my anxiety about a penniless future. He stared at me and said levelly: “You can’t worry about all that yet. You just need to get to broke.”

He is right, of course. Right now, my goal is to get to broke. Not to save. Not to buy. Not to pad the walls of my Spartan cage with downy softness. To fill in with dollars and cents the yawning cavern of debt. The debt that weighs on me, that makes my life unmanageable, that in my mind marks me and makes me unattractive, unmarriable, this yowling anti-dowery that not all the goats in the world could counterbalance. (Tell me now that your self-worth isn’t inextricably tied to your bank balance.) Right now my goal is to get even, and even is something I’ll never get working this $60,000 a year job.

In that dinner conversation, I agreed with the big deal writer. He looked at me again, the gears in his labyrinthine brain going full spin. “What sexually explicit and intimate memoirs have sold?” he asked. “I mean, have any?”  I was stumped. (I still am.) I was taken aback. (I still am.) I was crushed. (I still am.)

I’ll be over there in the corner, curled fetal, but without the bourbon. It’s bad enough to be plunged in an industrial sized vat of fiscal despair. I don’t need to puke in a taxi to remind me of my shame.

 

someone thinks my writing is elegant: younger men and tight prose

So I've a new piece up on Filthy Gorgeous Things. It's about why I like younger men, and it's called "Robbing the Playpen." Totter on over there, read it, and return. I'll wait. Here's an excerpt:

But my preference for a man is younger. He used to be a standard eight-to-ten years younger (and, indeed, this is the age bracket I like for a relationship), but now he’s a lot younger than that. He is, if you look at my last ten years of sex history, anywhere between a seemly ten years to a rather staggering twenty. I admit it: I quake when I could have gone to high school with my lover’s mom. It makes me feel weird and, well, really old. Age is not just a number. Size matters. And you’re not only as old as the person you’re fucking.

But fuck them I do. Most recently, it was this creamy dish of an Eastern European of uncertain descent. He possessed a mind of dark beauty and a cock as long, straight and narrow as a ruler...

The man described above is the man over whom I suffered tristesse and then wrote about it. He and I email one another from time to time. He feels flattered, which I think is sweet and which junction of flattery/sweetness probably sums up the relationship between muse and artist more than it does the relationship between younger man and older woman.

Though what the hell do I know? I've never been a younger man.

I have, however, been written about, and it is flattering and creepy in equal measure. That frisson probably goes a long way to explain my extreme singleness. 

For some cosmic crash of events, I've had sudden uptick of readers here on my pretty dumb things. Even when I haven't posted for months and months, I maintain a tidy 300 or so pages read a day, primarily because of this particular post on deep-throating. I am, apparently, a blow-job queen, an empress of fellatio, a doyenne of deep-throating, a consort of cock-sucking. I knew I enjoyed the activity, and I've always taken pride in it, but I never considered myself that much of an authority. Apparently, the Internets sees me as the Martha Stewart of knob-slobbing, and I suppose that's a good thing.  At any rate, it keeps my page-count consistent.

That chart to the left or above (depending on the size of your window) is empiric evidence in the form of search results that brought people to my pdt. You can embiggen the image and count it up, but I'm guessing about 3/4 of this list (it goes on beyond the scope of my screen) has to do with sucking cock. I'm not entirely sure about the person who searched for "SEXY MEN DEEP TROATING LADIES SUCKING COCK," but who am I to rain on another human's consensual fantasy? Likewise if you're the person asking "how often should i suck black boyfriends cock," I'd answer "as often as you want and he's willing." Not to presume, or anything. 

Regardless of what brought them, it's always really gratifying to take a quick look at my stats and see that someone is devouring my archives. This is my 801st post, give or take a few. If you consider that most of my posts average a bit shy of a thousand words, and then if you times the numbers and carry the one, you'll see that I've written quite a lot. I have a metric shit-tonne of archives. There is, in short, a lot to read. And it looks as if there will be yet more. (But you'll find the anal stuff here and the oral stuff here, you beloved smut-seekers.)

For a variety of reasons too excruciatingly boring to tell, I've recently fallen in love again with my blog. My blog also has undergone a subtle refurbishment at the hands of 3Design3; I'm quite fond of the work this company has done. I'm not sure which came first--my falling back in love or the refurbishment--but I do like the new look. Even if this confluence of events suggests that I am at heart a shallow, superficial, Oscar Wildean kind of girl. 

I ramble. Forgive me. I had some really bad news today, and it leaves me wanting a big tumbler of brown alcohol. Thanks for reading. Even you trolls. You love me, you really, really love me.

I could just swallow you whole.

PS. I forgot. A friend of mine also has a piece on FGT about her time working as a hostess at sex parties. You have to pay to read it, but it's worth it. This woman is no slouch as a writer. Watch her, seriously. She's all that and.

be your teenage dream tonight

I have, of late, become unnaturally obsessed with Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream.” It is—and while this statement may hip-check hyperbole, I nonetheless believe it—the perfect pop song. The chopsticks-like piano riff, the driving drum-and-bass duo, the cotton-candy-pink vocals, and the pleasantly vapid tinge of vocoder: each new line drops this delicious pop bon-bon. It’s a melting confection, and since I downloaded the song about 24 hours ago, I’ve listened to it no fewer than 15 times.

I already copped to the unnatural obsession. I am, after all, a woman who is neither the very button on prime’s cap nor on the soles of her shoes. I live about her waist, or in the middle of her favors. In the lower belly of my prime, I find there’s not a lot of it left, but what there is left is glorious.

I can rarely simply enjoy something without subjecting it to anatomist’s analysis; thus, I have created a hydra of my obsession. Not only must I listen to “Teenage Dream,” but also I must nail down its heuristic pleasure. Meaningless pop calls for epistemological analysis; that’s how I roll. And what I’m coming up with is pretty simple, but as most simple ideas tend to be, also fairly profound and that is this: “Teenage Dream” may have all the earmarks of prepackaged pop, yet it’s completely irony free. It is perhaps the most earnest expression of what it feels to be young, free, and falling in love since the Beatles’ “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.”

Again, hyperbolic, but I’m going to run with it.

When I was twelve, my grandmother had portraits taken of me because, she said, she wanted pictures of me before I “got that cynical look” on my face. Perry’s “Teenage Dreams” embodies that pre-cynicism look; it gives that look a fetching hook and a dance beat. The world is wide open; it’s beautiful; it’s sexy; and it’s replete with love.

It’s not exactly my experience as a teenager. I was large with “going all the way,” medium-sized with the “no regrets,” but decidedly small with the “just love.” And yet, while the “Teenage Dream” experience was not my own, the feeling was. The weird thing about growing up is that you don’t lose that feeling, at least I haven’t.

This past August, I went to my 30^th high school reunion. I wrote about the more salacious parts of experience here on Filthy Gorgeous Things; I forgot to link it back in September. I had a lot happening in my life, and promoting my own writing took a back seat with the laundry and the dusting. Rereading this piece, I like it even better than I did when I wrote it.

What I don’t mention in the FGT piece is that the day before the reunion, I’d suffered some seriously sublime food poisoning. The day I flew out, I had to change my flight twice; I could not stop puking. I think I vomited fourteen times in eight hours; you do the math; it’s not pretty. Thus, I was kind of a shell of myself at the reunion. It would have been a fairly surreal experience under the best circumstances, and being a whiter shade of hurling pale, I found it to be hallucinatory. Mostly, it felt like one of those dreams you have where everyone you know is there and they’re being really nice to each other, but they’re also all dead.

To heap yet more mirage on the hallucinatory sundae, the reunion took place at the gentleman farmer estate of one of my classmate’s—and it was a house where I’d spent significant time when I was a child because friends of my parents owned it. The palimpsest of experience was so over-written as to be nearly illegible. I reeled, but it might have been low blood sugar.

Going back to Vermont is for me always a fraught experience. You can never go home again, except that, of course, you can. You go home and you see things as you see them now, and you remember them as you thought they were, and the overlay of the two experiences can be vertiginous. It can also drive you to picture taking. Memory likes evidence of one kind or another. Sometimes Proust eats a Madeleine; other times, he takes out his iPhone and snaps a few Shakeitphotos. Memory lane, as it turns out, it quite pretty in August.

This is the road where I lost my virginity in a Ford truck. The night we went all the way, it was not this bucolic. It was January, and it was at least double-digits below. There was alcohol involved, and I kind of wished I had done things a bit differently. Perhaps if I hadn’t been sixteen in a town of 750 and a high school of 600, I might have.

As I wrote in my FGT piece, I saw the man who Was There First. He has not aged well, and that’s all that needs to be said about him.

This is the road where I first received the oral pleasure. (Click to embiggen the pictures, should you desire.) While I lost my virginity in the front of a Ford truck, I first got head in the back of a Subaru wagon, and, really, if you’re an American woman, the meta-metaphor of car and sex act probably feels so true as to be over-determined. While the man who first lapped my teenage pussy was not at the reunion, I did happen to run into him later. He seems to be a kind, thoughtful, gentle and interesting man who does not deserve the apparently humdrum and disappointing life he lives.

I feel bad for him, and I feel absolutely delighted that I got the hell out of Dodge when I did. It’s better to dodge a hell than to live a life of hell in Dodge.

This is the view from the house where I grew up in Nowhere, Vermont. It’s a lovely landscape, and it’s virtually unchanged from when I was little. It also gives you a glimpse into why I read a lot, why I have an imagination of Edward Gorey proportions and why practically every day of my adolescence was an exercise in drumming up reasons not to kill myself.

It sure is pretty, though.

Looking at these pictures, thinking about how it felt to drive through those green, green landscapes in my rented Buick Something, I recall the promise of the Teenage Dream. I remember it, and in remembering, I realize that for all the sepia tinge of melancholic nostalgia, I’ve really lost nothing. It’s there, accessible, in my head: a life rich with unimaginable sensual pleasures, unutterable prettiness, endless sweetness and skintight jeans. I recollect how driving those well-remembered roads, I felt the lifting of the veil of cynicism, the gift of age, experience and Gotham. I remember what it felt like to be young, to be young still, to be young now, to be young forever. 

Digressive post-script:

This is the road where, on graduation night, I found the guy passed out in the middle of the road. I couldn't find a way to fold that story into the narrative above, other than to say that if there was a night in my life more deeply steeped in the wide-open highway of teenage hopes, I can't remember it. I was wearing a slamming fuschia dress and matching heels. I wish I had still had them. I found this dude who was dead to the world. It was a moment worthy of David Lynch.

i was afraid i'd eat your brains: a meditation on The Walking Dead

They’re here, they’re dead. And they’re everywhere you want to escape. They’re zombies, and they’re on your television, and in your movies, your X-Box, your indie rock lyrics and your classic literature.

Zombies now occupy a privileged pop culture position that rivals the place of perhaps the most protean of mythological creatures, vampires. However, in the past couple of decades, it seems like we’ve hit the saturation point of vampires. A trend long in the making, vampires have gained traction since Anne Rice’s Interview—and in the process, they’ve lost their bite. Much of the vampire’s cultural trajectory has been built on making the vampire a good middle-class citizen. Gone is Dracula’s effete and perverse aristocratic lineage. Banished are Nosferatu’s lamprey mouth, bat ears and rodential hands. Squashed are Lamia’s unrepentantly deviant desires. Well, mostly. If you’re talking True Blood, vampires still got sex game, but not so much if you’re watching Buffy or Twilight.

In the past fifteen years, vampires have been made safe for public consumption. They’re good; they’ve become a “care-bear with fangs,” as Buffy’s Cordelia Chase sneers about Angel. They have souls. They have remorse. They hunt only animals. They drink artificial blood made by Japanese companies and heated in a microwave oven. They want the right to vote. What pop culture has done to vampires is, by and large, remove the danger and the perversity, and in the process, castrate them. Divested of their castles and their capes, vampires have slowly been folded into mall culture. They may wear vaguely vintage-inspired duds, but given their preoccupation with diets, morality and home remodeling, vampires have become just like us. That is, except for when they’re very, very bad, and then they need to be punished, naughty vampires. Punished, and possibly replaced.

The proliferation of zombies in every possible medium argues that zombies are the new vampire.  The king is undead, long live the king of the undead.

Perhaps the best, most explosive example of the cultural prominence of the zombie is the hit AMC series The Walking Dead, the entertainingly evil spawn of writer-producer Frank Darabont. Based on a best-selling graphic novel of the same name, The Walking Dead is AMC’s most popular television series ever—in fact, as the New York Times Brian Stelter notes, it has gained viewership over its short six-episode run. Which makes a kind of sense, because strange sorghum hillbilly accent aside, it’s astoundingly good.

The Walking Dead works on somewhat of the same premise as the film 28 Days Later. The protagonist, in The Walking Dead it’s police officer Rick Grimes, wakes from a coma to find everyone around him is a dead man—or woman, or child—walking. Grimes is a good guy adrift in a post-apocalyptic nightmare of staggering necrotic ex-humans. (Forgive me, but the sight of hordes of people with so much shredded flesh careening like so many ambulatory carnitas really does bring the Monty Python skit to mind: “This human is dead. This is an ex-human!”) Grimes is, as much as the desolate, hungry world around him, the walking dead.

What is truly remarkable about The Walking Dead is less the story line, the script, the production values or the acting—series like Mad Men and Breaking Bad have proven how good AMC is at picking talent and producing quality television—it’s the raw visuals of gory bodies. If you are a fan of cinematic decapitation, exploding skulls, misting blood and exacting evisceration (and I am), this show is a thirteen-course delight. I can’t remember a television series that has reveled in innards as much as The Walking Dead. One scene centers on a long, drawn-out, almost loving evisceration of a zombie whose entrails get festooned like garlands over Rick and his fellow survivor, Glenn. Good times.

I can only assume that such gory play is allowed because the zombies are no longer human. The light is literally out of their eyes—the sudden cataract-like filming of the eye is one somatic signifier of zombiehood. Living humans can’t be treated this cavalierly. Their innards are not playthings. But zombies’ are, and that strange, diaphanous distinction is what separates the Walking Dead from the walking dead, and it’s what allows us to enjoy the blood without guilt.

Except at the same time, it’s not. The humans in The Walking Dead are not all created equal. Some are more compassionate than others, and, indeed, it’s this mark of compassion that designates Grimes as the Very Good Guy. He looks at a zombie woman staggering toward him, hands outstretched, mouth open, and apologizes to it softly. “I’m sorry this happened to you,” he says, and then he shoots her in the head. Other survivors are less magnanimous. Daryl Dixon, half of a cracker brother duo, distinguishes himself as bad through his callous treatment of the zombies (alternately called “walkers” and “geeks”). It’s less man’s inhumanity man that makes the man bad; it’s man’s inhumanity to the ex-man.

And, really, what of the zombies themselves? The great mark of the zombie, other than its flayed flesh, dead eyes and flesh eating is its lack of individuality. The zombie is not a person, not merely because it’s, well, dead, but because it no longer has difference. The zombies in The Walking Dead have the same zombieness of zombies everywhere, and of all time. They walk, crawl, or chomp until they can walk, crawl or chomp no more. They hunger for tasty flesh, preferably human, preferably live, preferably yours.

Zombies are, theoretically, the ultimate consumer. The Walking Dead returns repeatedly to a department store in Atlanta; it serves as a major plot point and, of course, a visual metaphor. As the zombies clatter their decaying palms against the glass doors of the store, they look like a very focused and amoral scrum of Black Friday shoppers. Their mad rush at the humans locked inside looks like nothing as much as the running of the brides at the Filene’s Basement bridal sale. If only zombies carried credit cards, they’d resuscitate any flailing economy. But, sadly, they don’t. They consume, but they don’t buy.

The world of The Walking Dead is very small. It’s bands of people with tenuous bonds to one another, bonds that strain at the seams with every human impulse, emotion and foible. If what makes the zombie a zombie is its unutterable uniformity, then what makes the human a human is his or her keening difference. And, of course, it’s those differences that imperil the living. Racism, xenophobia, brutality: what the zombies can’t eat could kill the living.

And therein lies the drama and really answers what is so compelling about The Walking Dead. Unlike Shaun of the Dead, a brilliant movie, this television series will not answer affirmatively “Why can’t we all get along?” We can’t. We won’t. We’re human.

Bless our tasty, tasty brains.

(Also, bless Brian Stelter's tasty brains in specific. This piece owes a great big debt to a conversation we had while waiting for our dinner when we were out with other friends. He had salmon. I ate, yeah, carnitas.)