Zombies. You can’t swing a dead cat nowadays without hitting someone who either honestly believes they can happen, entertains the notion or has read every survival guide out there. The advice in these books ranges from the convoluted to the practical to the idiotic, and all of them have the same underlying message: “here are some hobbies you can do to while away the time before you’re chew-fucked by an infected garbage man.” From weapons to hideouts, from strategies to self-sustenance, nothing gets by the ridiculously large number of the authors of these guides–and each has an approach more ludicrous than the last. For example, I know what the definition of each word in the phrase “U.S. Army Zombie Combat Skills” means, but when put in this order, all meaning escapes me. (By the way, that guide is an actual, I-swear-I’m-not-making-this-up publication of our own Department of the Army.) Even the Center for Disease Control has issued survival guidelines.

You can’t blame humans for believing in zombies. We’ve always known that eventually, we all collapse into a heap of inconvenient meat. Sometimes we plant the meat under an important rock, sometimes we are rad enough to set it on fire, sometimes we throw it in a river to make a snake god happy. Lazarus, likely in a sea of justified confusion, woke up smelling like hell after a wizard named Jesus yelled at him. Jesus himself got his zombie on, and Western and Southern Africa, Haiti and New Orleans all have rich traditions of making drowsy corpses do chores for them.

Zombies as we understand them now are always the result of the biological, chemical or viral tomfoolery of God’s cruel hand.We’ve left the mystical element behind, which is gratifying. (Because what kind of fucking idiot would believe the dead could be revived through magic? Revivification is obviously something intravenously injected, or possibly freebased) The general consensus, based on the above-mentioned and completely serious medical and military investigations, is that viruses are the way it’ll go down. It’ll slither into your brain like the Vietcong. Then, it seems that it’ll destroy higher brain functions like self-awareness, consciousness, heuristic faculties and knowledge of the closest Tim Horton’s. This leaves us crocodile-brained, medulla-powered, intellect-sapped husks of our former selves, prone to violent actions and an incapacity to communicate, living on carnal ferocity and enjoying The Big Bang Theory.

(“Bazinga!” is neither funny nor a catchphrase. Bazinga! is the safe word you use to let your partner know beforehand that this is break-up sex.)

But it just doesn’t add up for me. There are so many variables that people either barely or just plain don’t consider, and when you pool these things together, it makes the zombie apocalypse so unlikely that it’s not even worth the bother to think about it. (Sorry, nerds and paranoids.)

For the sake of this list, I am not referring to the slow-moving zombies of the early zombie movies. If you need help dodging the grapples of something moving the speed of a sloth on heroine, your brain deserves to be the gray mayonnaise on a zombie’s moron sandwich. No, I’m referring to the fast ones–those capable of inflicting actual harm. So even if they appear, here are 5 pretty obvious reasons that zombies wouldn’t be anything more than a temporary in convenience, let alone an apocalyptic phenomenon.

1.) The tasty uninfected aren’t the only fish in the sea

So the argument runs, supposedly, that zombies are reduced to a state of absolute, vapid hostility, with only one sole and unmistakeable goal: to use your hamstrings as dental floss after eating your butt meat. But even in the most simple-minded of animals, those functionally incapable of what we would consider thought, there is still a sensory apparatus, an ability to detect both threats and prey, and competition. From mammals to fish to insects to viruses, almost every step of the evolutionary ladder is littered with dumb things that attack each other so they can eliminate competition and increase their own chances for survival. There is no reason that zombies–reduced to these aggressive, basic abilities, would be any different. Remember the look of disappointment on your little  sister’s face when you were 8 and you told her she was adopted just so she’d cry long enough for you to steal the last piece of pizza? Which you didn’t even like, because it had green peppers and mushrooms on it, and you had to pick them off? And it’s like, why can’t you just get a pizza we all like? And your mom was like, “Tombstone pizzas were 5 for $10. You think we can afford to have DiGiorno whenever we want?”

My point is, you didn’t do it for any other reason than to eliminate competition for the sake of doing it. As the number of free lunches diminishes, there’s every reason to believe the zombies would turn on each other as well.

2.) We still have an army and scientists, you know

Immediately upon outbreak, there wouldn’t be just one or two military bases holding out, nor would humanity in general roll over and say “fuck it, let’s play Scrabble until we all turn into putrid, hungry meat goblins.” Even in the event a cure can’t be found, there many ways in which live subjects could be captured for the purposes of experimentation. And bar none, all roads in the scientific advancement of humankind eventually lead to weapon research and development. Be it a chemical, neurological or physical weapon, there is no doubt humans would evolve their understanding of the plague alongside the spread of the virus–and active observation of viruses and bacteria has led to approximately all cures for diseases in the history of everything ever.

3.) Impractical dietary habits

So we have a world increasingly full of excitable former friends and relatives try to gnaw your face off. See all that spastic, frantic nonstop movement they keep doing, all the time, everywhere? That requires protein, carbohydrates and basic vitamins to maintain. With no capacity for cost/benefit analysis rattling around in their brains, they will continue acting exactly like this, all the time. I don’t care how undead you are, and I don’t care if the viruses are leaking rainbows into your yesterguts–without consuming the high volume of food necessary to maintain that level of caloric expenditure, you would metabolize yourself into nonexistence pretty quickly.  This is, of course, assuming that zombies don’t start urban gardens, co-ops, or learn about fast food.

4.) Water, water, everywhere, but they can’t work a sink

Even more crucial than food intake–you can survive a fair amount of time, even if you’re a groaning flesh golem that dines on the delicious innards of the living, without eating–is water. From muscle use to organ function to the circulatory system, it is more or less impossible to survive longer than a week or so without drinking water, and that’s if you’re taking it really easy. Remember, zombies are not great thinkers. And this may be a generalization, but when your main problem solving skill is bashing frantically into everything until food happens, I’m guessing Gatorade isn’t at the top of your to-do list. If you’ve ever watched the Discovery Channel and watched an antelope totally eat shit when a leopard trips it before crushing its wind pipe, you probably noticed the leopard isn’t exactly stopping in the middle for a scotch and soda. By all given descriptions,the modern understanding of zombies puts them squarely in the frame of an adrenaline-pumping chainsaw of permanent fight-or-flight murder rage. They are not going to wander into a house, refill the Brita pitcher, then down a few glasses while chewing on your asshole boss’s femur and watching Family Feud reruns. And even if they do–and they won’t– the matter will be settled when water runs dry after electricity stops working.

5.) No social skills

Finally, and most importantly, I’d think every successful military general from any era in history will tell you that you don’t win wars by giving weapons to a bunch of people, then crossing your fingers while you nurse a Bloody Mary at an Applebee’s after you send them on their way. Victory requires strategy, planning, communication and organization. One of the reasons no enormous population has ever held a country together with everyone running around like a lunatic libertarian is because it can’t happen. The incapacity to think abstractly makes the sum population of zombies into… well, zombies. It’s hard to detect the battle plans of a fractured horde of sprinting corpses, but when you have an enemy that travels in packs of one and whose only weapon is a desire for dinner, guerrilla tactics become an effective, low-risk way to systematically pick off your opposition. Sentient humans can work pretty well together when they aren’t arguing about whether or not the Yankees will cover the over/under, and when your enemy is as smart as a bunch of feral cats walking upright who took 3 weeks of junior high track and field, there is no reason to believe they would ever pose a serious threat to humanity.

Hell, you’ll probably even be home in time to catch that marathon of Press Your Luck on the Game Show Network.

No whammy, no apocalypse, no worries.

Ah, the presidential election. The mere mention of it calls to mind the full expression of the greatest traits of the best nation in the world: hating birthdays, making bad mix tapes,  even fights about vaginas. Election Day is growing closer, always with the same dilemma: your vote doesn’t matter.

Don’t get me wrong. Voting matters. It’s what allows us to keep our favorite rich narcissists in front of microphones enough to say Jesus a bunch of times, or at least tell us why Special Olympians are shitty bowlers. 12% of you or whatever will go stand in line behind elderly bigots and whiny, lazy pussies, enjoying your half day off of work in order to pull a lever before getting hammered on Listerine from your roommate’s bathroom. But let’s be honest–it doesn’t. No popular election has ever been decided by a few votes. (Yes, Bush in 2000 won by 5 votes and Hayes in 1876 by only one, but unless you were in the electoral college, then don’t chat yourself up too much.)

But it’s a good conceit, and one that deserves the fat whore of yellow journalism we drag into our bedroom for one day of raucous regret. Now, I’ve said it before about a million times, but I’m not very political. I get most of my daily news from a bee farmer I know, and that’s just mostly bee news. So while even not caring about rich people using strangers’ money to punch each other in the birth certificate is a waste of my time, I’ll tell you what I do know a little about: shitty 1930s monster movies.

This may be a bit before everyone’s time–it’s a bit before mine, certainly. But I also had a VCR, basic cable and a lot of free time as a kid, which means the occasional evening was spent watching Godzilla tell jokes with his fists to a cardboard set of Tokyo, or watching Boris Karloff lukewarmly kidnap spastic female stereotypes. Perhaps the pinnacle of Karloff’s career was Frankenstein. Unlike Mary Shelley’s novel, which was (among many other things) a thought-provoking contemporary look at the potential abuses of the rapidly advancing sciences, the movie goes a little something like this: when you power rancid meat with a simpleton’s brain, angry people will try to cook S’mores over it during a thunderstorm.

But the story got me thinking. America loves Frankensteins. After all, JFK was just the combination of Camelot, charisma and crab cakes. And  Avril Lavigne and the music version of a war crime are trying to scrape together enough chromosomes to avoid spitting out a tone-deaf plot point from the X-Files. What I’m saying is, there’s precedent. And  particularly because I have been unmitigatedly brainwashed by “The Dark Night Lights Up.” I couldn’t help but think of all the amazing supervillains Batman has had to fight. And if you take even a cursory glance, you can see that Mitt Romney’s greatest attributes–that which qualifies him to become the leader of the Free World (i.e. all the Chick-fil-A’s and Toby Keith t-shirts)–are actually drawn from some of the comic world’s most thoughtful, brilliant and innovative characters.

And let’s not clutter things up by picking nits on the term “villain.” After all, the common assessment of Batman himself is that he’s a vigilante motivated to operate outside the law to pursue his vendettas at any cost–just like some fellah called the Joker. So we’ll leave off the social construction of villainy (which I have in no way charged your reading with by titling it based on fictional sociopaths).

Once more into the pettifog, dear friends! For the sake of thoroughness, the Dark Night saga will not be the only source for these points. I present to you, FrankenMitt.

1.)  Bane

Ha. Just kidding. Mitt Romney’s idea of a fair fight is strapping a dog to the top of his car.

2.) The Penguin

This one seems like a no-brainer, and that’s because it is. Cobblepot was the heir to a vast fortune, which he used to run a nightclub, orchestrate elaborate schemes, and in some plot lines, sneaky-deal to win political office. He was a master of political intrigue with a singular goal to defeat his enemies at all costs, and not above fear tactics to control public sentiment. He ruthlessly expanded his interests to consume and manipulate the businesses of others around him. The Penguin was the mutant offspring of fabulously wealthy and hyperprotective parents, and was ostracized aggressively to the point of psychosis. I’m glad Romney was able to overcome this parallel, as he was the one knocking on the door of crippling psychological abuse as a bully to others, because if he actually was a bird-loving psychotic mutant with a kick-ass nightclub, I’d be compelled by all that is awesome to vote for him. I should also point out I’ve never seen Romney murder someone with an umbrella. Again, I’ve never seen it. Overall, the Penguin showed singular purpose, obsessive drive,  and a sense of self-importance rivaled by few. He has an appearance that makes him look like an extraterrestrial messed up a human Shrinky-Dink, and they both dress like a Men’s Wearhouse going out of business performed the Folger’s switch on their closets. If Mitt Romney were any more like the Penguin, he’d be giving clumsy, flippered high-fives to sycophants, brainwashed firemen and peoples’ dads.

3.) Two-Face

Come on, a tragically selfish rising politician whose attempts to represent all that is good and just in society end up maiming his sense of self to the point of complete psychological breakdown and perversion after he is defeated?

Wait. Shit. This one might be more of a warning. Vote Romney/Ryan!

4.) The Scarecrow

This is an intriguing one. Professor Jonathan Crane is easily my favorite nemesis of Batman. (As a point, nemesis doesn’t imply villain.) A psychologist specializing in the psychology of fear, he dons a false persona in order to manipulate the expectations, fears and insecurities of those he targets. I’m not going to launch into all the ways in which Romney has somehow convinced so many that paying taxes to maintain public services is for shitbags (untrue), that the Tragedy of the Commons is a myth promulgated by Whole Foods customers (crazy untrue), and that privatizing basic services and social security will not make Americans a captive audience to a ubiquity bordering on corporate quasi-fascism (form your own opinion, this one’s just food for thought). As the good doctor, Crane is charismatic and comforting in a way that always intimates a hidden agenda, and is safely assumed, in any manner of dress, to be constantly probing for exploitable weaknesses. And if Mitt Romney isn’t part Scarecrow… ugh. I was going to make some joke about seeing straw all over the back of his wife’s pantsuit, but if a Scarecrow and the vampire gastric bypass lady from Wilson Phillips can actually copulate, I’d worry less about the election and more about rubbing lamb’s blood on the frame of your doorways.

5.) The Riddler

Romney has left us with a riddle that any of us have yet to answer. Who let the dogs out? Who, who, who?

Who indeed.

Because I feel relatively safe saying we all know African-Americans like to liberate canines from places. And if you can’t relate with current youth with a song written for Trinidad and Tobago’s Carnival season in 1998, what else is there?

Ever since I was old enough to be awesome, I’ve been fascinated by outer space. Outer space is where the universe keeps pretty much all of its best stuff: rocket parts, explosions, violent death, astronaut poop, etc. I spent my entire childhood dreaming about being out there, I spent most of high school letting hormones fuel my dunderheaded dream of seeing boobs in zero gravity, and basically every day as an adult thinking of ways we can get to space and stay there. My constant foils have been, largely, technical in nature: I have no access to a spacecraft, combustion is an expensive way for a vehicle to move around, I have a cripplingly small amount of astrophysical knowledge, I bore easily, I’m afraid of heights, baseball, and space is actually pretty far away. These are not insignificant hurdles. There’s no reason for me to continue feeding this conceit because I can’t do anything about it, right?

Luckily, I don’t have to.

America is going to casually invite you to a Halloween after-party this year where you get to tell a piece of paper, or a computer screen, why you think one particular person should get to make like 10% of us happy for four years, while the other 90% gets to be a mixture of jealousy, despair, suspicion and, hopefully, hot wings. Known human Newt Gingrich wants to make my wildest dream come true. To be honest, I’m sort of flummoxed. Going to outer space would make me happy for several reasons. The first one is ants. The other one is fixing what we did wrong on “Star Trek.” Radio waves from Earth have been traveling into space for a very long time. And for every Robocop we’re sending to an alien’s face, we’re also sending them episode after episode of transparent 1960s social commentary and well-intentioned liberalism. Basically every episode featured the same problem-solving heuristic:

1.) Short speech about how we cannot ever violate the Prime Directive.

2.) Violate the Prime Directive.

3a.) Does this create a problem? If so, identify the problem, then have Captain Kirk fuck it.

3b.) If for some reason sex does not work, try love.

4.) It’s possible that your problem cannot be solved with either genitalia or oxytocin. Not often, apparently, but it does happen. If this is the case, reassess the problem by yelling at Bones,  then use a Spock on it.

5.) Nonsequitur speech about heavy-handed moral relativism to wrap things up.

Let me explain something to you. William Shatner is humanity’s ‘C’ student. Leonard Nimoy’s face is narrow, like a Shetland pony, and his main contribution to space, besides “Star Trek,” is the un-take-backable lie that humans like to write songs about tiny, invisible adventurers. We need new ambassadors, and we need a President who knows this.

I’m not political. I think I’ve proven that several times in the last 500 words alone. To make things worse, Newt Gingrich is likely already a space alien, and Mitt Romney is clearly a ghost robot in a people suit. But one of these men has a plan, and the other just has money and the charisma of gravel:

But we must not let Romney fight for the right to after-party. We need to be in space and we need to be there now, and here are five very good reasons why:

1.) The moon is for everybody, as long as they’re American

Gingrich’s plan is to found a permanent base on the moon by the end of eight years. A bit presumptive, yes. But part of the plan is also to make that moon base the 51st United State. Right now, the rest of Earth is catching up to us in a lot of ways, and not all of them involve salmon. There may be no salmon on the moon, but there are bragging rights. Whenever a professional sports team wins a title in America, we don’t call them “champions.” We call them “World Champions.” It’s the perfect way to constantly remind the world that they suck at doing things no one even asked them to. We’re a proud people. I can think of no greater unifying fuck-yeah for a nation that sorely needs a win right now than “You’re from the UK? That’s so interesting. I’m from America. Which part? Moon. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”

2.) Cowtipping

One of the proudest American traditions that nobody tries to do is cowtipping. It’s a stupid idea. Listen: cows are terrifying animals. They’re 400 lbs. of living steak with a sack of boob hanging off the bottom. Centuries of breeding have made them stegosaurus-dumb, they bite, they’re faster than they look, and they have giant bodies and tiny feet. It’s the perfect combination of things you should not try to sneak up on and surprise. Now imagine being locked in combat with a cow not in the disadvantageous confines of an Earth pasture, but in the devil-may-care generosity of reduced gravity. I know, right?

3.) I’m serious about this alien thing

Look, they’re real, and at least one of them is already here. He’s actively trying to get us to be their friends by essentially inviting us over to his place for a barbeque. I don’t know about you, but I’m not about to tell him no, and it’s not just because I want to know what space ribs taste like. The important thing to remember here is that, while we have the vague ability to eventually come together and put a tree fort on the moon, these guys can travel through outer fucking space. Do not make them angry, or cow violence will be the least of your worries.

4.) “Moonimal Farm”

Space Camp was a prize frequently given away for free when I was a kid, on shows like “Double Dare.” Mostly, though, it was a way for rich little assholes to throw up all over themselves after having their gray matter melted into soup by that gyroscope thing. On the moon, though, even the poor would be allowed to go to space camp. They wouldn’t even have to let a cholera-filled chemical accident with green food coloring slowly chew through their skin to do it. Which, now that I’ve actually written that out, doesn’t actually sound like a very convincing counterargument. The point? We’ll all have the necessary training to abuse gravity for the forces of evil. And let’s not kid ourselves, here. A moon colony would start out as a well-governed, equality-based democratic state, but you have to remember that it’ll be people who live there. American people. It’s a proven fact that the chance for totalitarianism, oppression, elitism, mob rule and space madness increase in direct proportion to your relative population and isolation. It would be awesomely easy for one sewage backup to turn into a colony-wide bloodbath. Sure, we’d have only one recourse: to start over, make sure everyone has equal power, and use a talking horse to build us a windmill. And that, my friend, is when the real fun begins.

5.) There are no werewolves or vampires on the moon. But there ARE minotaurs

History is filled with the various and many spiritual catalogs of how humankind has tried to learn about the world around them. Gods, devils and beasts of all kinds have been the center of myth and magic for thousands of years. Their explanatory power, and the sense of shared culture by those who believe, sate the existential and deeply upsetting inability to describe those things which we can’t fully understand. Unfortunately, history is also filled with fake people who had very real sex with many, many animals. Luckily, the moon base would always face the sun at some point, evaporating every vampire with ease. Further, you can’t have a full moon when you’re on the moon. The only problem is, remember, that we’re already engaging in constant mortal combat with cows on the moon. Where there are cows, there are bulls. As we just mentioned in 4.) there’s no telling how far some people might go in a grab for power. Someone up there could be  willing to folly in God’s domain in order to create an army of talking, people-bodied meat monsters to do their bidding. And if you think “stopping a Communist madman’s legion of minotaurs on the moon” isn’t a good enough reason to leave Earth, then it’s nice to meet you, Joseph Stalin!

Let’s be honest, it’s happened to all of us at one time or another: you’re sitting at home, watching television or reading a book while enjoying a glass of wine/scotch/milk/more scotch, and suddenly, you hear a rattle. You swear a chair just moved. You hear a creak, a squeak, a groan or a flutter. You get the unshakeable and profoundly upsetting feeling that you are being watched. You check the windows nervously. It could be Timmy Simmons, the kid with rickets from three houses over that carries a riding crop, taps people with it and calls them “my little piglets.” Timmy, who only talks about binoculars and cheese. Timmy fucking Simmons, who once ate ants in front of you unsolicited until you paid him $12 and a 8-pack of Ball Park Franks to quit it.

Timmy has been at your window before.

Timmy is not there now.

There’s no other solution. It can’t be the wind, your stressful day or your cat being a dick somewhere. No. You, my friend, have contracted a rare medical condition known as “ghosts.”

We’re coming up on the Christmas season, which means we’re all going to be subjected to A Christmas Carol. A Christmas Carol  is a movie where a slow talker is assaulted by homicidal time-traveling phantoms until he gives money and poultry to a pauper with a failing marriage. The Holiday season brings even more examples of ghosts. It’s a Wonderful Life is the joyful story of a ghost making a mockery of many-worlds quantum physics by forcing a middling idiot to feel happy about his mediocrity. And let’s not forget Frosty the Snowman, the enchanting tale of a naked, haunted snowman that feeds on the thoughts of the innocent:

This is the time of year when the sad, empty nature of a life devoted to an emotionless drive for work and the sacrifice of friends and family takes its toll. Shit gets real in a hurry, and as we’ve just shown, America is obsessed with the power of spirits to somehow indicate to us the terrifying reality of our own anonymity. Christmas already does that enough, but God love us, ghosts do it even more.

The problem with ghosts, mainly, is that they haunt you. This is unnecessary and inconvenient, both astrally and practically speaking, but it happens nonetheless. Ghosts will do all sorts of violent things to you, your furniture, your foodstuffs and your loved ones. These include, but are not limited to, psychological duress, loss of sleep, loss of pet, aggressive redecorating and spastic colon. There are very few good ghosts, for some reason, and the bad ghosts range from spirits (bad dead people) to demons (bad dead Jesus people) to poltergeists (dead assholes) to Randy Quaid (Randy Quaid). And don’t count on getting any help from the good ghosts when beating back a good haunting. When there’s a bunch of creepy, moody drifters hanging out at the corner gas station of your soul, you can’t trust anything made out of spectral vapor and expired smiles to pull out a switchblade and go into a blood frenzy on your behalf.

So being haunted sucks. I’m not here to tell you how to get rid of ghosts. That sounds like a lot of work. But after some painstaking research, I’ve constructed a list of five crucial things you need to know about ghosts in order to escape a haunting. Make sure you avoid these, and you’ll be well on your way to making ghosts look like a smacked-out pug with an eye patch and a ballerina outfit. I’m not sure how, but I think it would end with the ghost losing.

1.) Never let a priest bless your house

Some of your more scientific television shows about ghosts will show you plenty of empirical evidence that many people, when sufficiently haunted, will ask a priest to bless particular rooms, or the entire house. This is the perfect way to tell the undead that you want your house to go from zero to ghost in no seconds flat. From what I gather, ghosts probably hate priests. Maybe they just hate robes. There’s no way to be sure, but when a priest starts shrieking putdowns at your lamps and walls, it agitates the situation. If I were a ghost, I would honestly be less angry in the situation if you started reading Supertramp lyrics instead. At least I know they existed. Really all you’re doing, here, is a variation on Jehovah’s Witnessing, and you can’t blame them for getting angry.

2.) Psychics are liars

Sometimes, a haunting will influence the right kind of person to call a psychic to find out what the fucking deal is with the ghosts. Psychics function, roughly, on what I call “The Nickelback Principle,” meaning that a sliver of people think psychics are awesome, and the rest of us cannot fathom their utility unless forced to by a ghost. The job of a psychic is to walk around your house and pretend the spirits of Civil War soldiers are incapable of leaving your property, so they celebrate the sacrifice of their own lives by opening your doors every once in a while. The psychic detects these chiefly by feeling whooshing sensations, oppressive feelings of hatred and self-loathing, and the room rapidly becoming cold and uninviting. I know what you’re thinking: “Are you sure the psychic isn’t just having a Lutheran orgasm?” The only evidence that psychics are telling the truth is that the same shit that was happening before happens again, only this time we’ve narrowed the cause down to a bored murderer, Indian burial ground or the untimely death of a dog nobody liked. These are all claims you could have invented on your own, and you wouldn’t have had to suffer the stifling odor of house cats and Liz Taylor perfume to do it.

3.) Your god is not a ghost’s god

Let’s be honest: if ghosts were afraid of perpetual hellfire, they wouldn’t be spitting in God’s eye by throwing your books all over the place and making your cousin talk like the Terminator. So while Christmas may make it seem like ghosts are all up in your crime scene because they hate Jesus/Santa Claus/wrapping paper, there’s no reason to believe ghosts even have a god. If I were a ghost, I would believe in Zool. He’s not real, but what if he is? I’d be covering my bases.

4.) Ghosts hate pajamas but can’t fly very high

One of the worst things you can do around a ghost is wear pajamas, nighties or underbritches of any kind. It may feel like you’re somehow protected from the mincing affections of a ghost, sure. But remember when you were a kid, and you constantly slipped and cracked your head on the side of the bathtub over and over again while those idiotic little traction butterflies your mom bought at Home Depot, and their false promise of traction, laughed silently at your ever-expanding chances at getting Alzheimer’s? What I’m saying is, ghosts don’t play by your rules, and you can expect any assumed protection you may get from your environment, especially pajamas, to be a unforgiving letdown. One thing you can do, though, is build a new house on stilts directly above the current one. The rationale here is that at no point has someone proven that it is the literal property itself that is haunted. And besides, let’s take a look at the phenomenology of ghostness here. Everyone thinks they can fly, but that’s not really true. They seem to float, but not in any way that suggests they have unlimited aerial capabilities. It’s possible that they would be so frustrated by not being able to fly up to your new house that they’d just leave, but it’s more likely that they would just haunt your old house so hard. Like you’ll care. You’ll be in your floating bordello with a jet pack having dinner with Pac-Man, Wonder Woman and the number 12! Your move, ghost.

5.) Ghost-hunting equipment is a bunch of bullshit

Everyone just assumes they can call Bill Murray and the black guy whose name no one remembers  and the pile of talking marshmallows in their kitchen will explode. Pardon me for saying so, but that’s idiotic. Ghostbusting technology from the 1980s is wildly outdated, and will do nothing to help you against succubi, kelpies, Randy Quaid and many more of today’s “superghosts.” Because you’re an American, you’ll probably want to take the destruction of the undead into your own hands. There are several things you’re going to need. First of all, you’ll need a Ghost Meter. With this you can measure how much ghost you’re dealing with–ranging from “not much of a ghost” to “all the way a ghost,” and everywhere in between. Ghosts are chatty little monsters but no one ever complains about ghosts talking in Latin or Russian or some dead language. Ghosts were invented by Jesus as a big “fuck you” to the hookers that rode golden cows all over the place. (Yes, it’s in the Bible. Somewhere towards the back, I think?) Now that Jesus is American, so are all the ghosts. To understand your English-speaking ghosts, you should probably get yourself an EVP Device. This will allow you to tap into all the hot gossip of the ghost world, including where our country’s sense of shame is floating around (Real Talk). You will probably end up spending about $289. But that’s only if you’re a massive pussy. If you really want to wiretap the afterlife, you’ll need the $500 version. So far, so good–you can tell the severity of ghost you’re up against, and listen to it talk shit to your oven. Much like Soviet Communism, though, a ghost’s movements are both wide-ranging and hard to investigate with the naked eye. What you need now are lasers. These will let you track ghosts all over your house. Much like you, you’ll probably find them sitting in one or two rooms silently obsessing over something it can’t help. And once you can know, hear and detect your ghosts, you’ll want to look at it, right? Right? Well, I present to you the RZ PRO Thermal Cam with video capabilities. This will let you take detailed heat signature thermal images of the squirrels in your walls so you can pretend those hotspots are a ghost hive or a door to the netherworld. It’s only $4000, so you should probably get two, just in case you use one to stare at the fuzzy red silhouettes of your next door neighbors fighting over what to do about Timmy Simmons and the Christmas basket of fresh pig ears he left on their porch.

The only problem with buying all of these things and using them is they will make ghosts laugh at you, and you’ll know they are. They are made by people whose conscience never berated them when they were psychics, or made them feel guilty about collecting $200/hr for telling elderly strangers that axe rapists still live in their basement. Besides, these things will never work for you.

You amateur.

That’s why you belong in the Ghost Hunters Academy, so you can learn the ways of the shyster.

Godspeed, paduan, and have a Merry Christmas!

Ever since our ancestors stopped hanging out with Mark Wahlberg for long enough to hoot at fruit and snakes, human beings have tried to reach a common understanding about what things, and people, should be called. Some of these names are totally sweet (turtle, explosion, Donkey Kong), some of them suck (shriek, leech, moist) and some of them have no business being around at all (Steely Dan). Language can be a confusing and frustrating thing, particularly once we generally agree what a particular arbitrary string of letters actually means. I can’t go to the deli counter at a grocery store, point at the roast beef, and say, “bite the wax tadpole, bladder slice. Wax it for dollars, two times. Wax it hard.” This mess of words, I think we would all agree, is way too awesome to have anything to do with roast beef, or anything else. The basic meaning of words causes enough disagreement already.

The main problem, though, is irony. Only 0% of Americans, give or take, know the actual definition and use of irony, particular when trying to be funny or poignant. A lot of us are Po-Mo enough to realize when some people are saying something offensive, it is specifically because they are being ironic: expressing a thought or hyperbole that deliberately offends, intending to convey the exact opposite sentiment. The problem with irony is two-fold:

1.) There are plenty of people who don’t have the good sense to be jaded by their shitty lives and/or experiences. They inflict this pedestrian, sheltered hopefulness on others around them, chiefly through the acts of smiling too much and showing you pictures of their children. Irony doesn’t work on them because, to paraphrase Freud, humor is anger turned sideways, and irony isn’t funny if your idea of tragedy is somebody peeling one into the skull of a four-legged dinner wearing horns in Bambi. If this is tragic to you, then congratulations, Somebody’s Milquetoast Grandmother! I’ll let you get back to that editorial letter you’re sending to the paper explaining why “prime-time television is no place for sarcasm!”

2.) Some people are just stupid. And I’m not talking listening to Nickelback, loving Applebee’s or having every season of “Two and a Half Men” on a functionally infinite cycle in your Netflix queue. All of those things suck, and if you do them then you suck too. But sucking is different than being a moron. Let me explain the 3 sub-groups of 2.). It’s important to note that stupidity is not paralleled with being unintelligent here:

2a.) The Twitt-iots: Unfortunately, there is a fairly substantial audience out there that needs to know when it’s time for something to be funny. We’ve manufactured an entire network of triggers and cues for the criminally stupid, from commercial radio, Twitter and Tim Allen to laugh tracks, catch phrases and tabloids. These things give permission, to those who need it, that it’s okay to laugh, or love, or know, or chide. If you take away television, Dilbert, Internet memes and magazines making fun of rich peoples’ bad fashion choices… well, I’m not saying civilization would crumble. But seriously, civilization would totally crumble.

2b.) The Deliber-idiots: It’s not as though being slightly more intelligent in a situation makes you superior. Not at all. But sometimes, those in that position do have to deliberately limit their vocabulary and delivery in order to land jokes and points. If you’re offended by the idea that smart people sometimes slow themselves down to participate socially sometimes, bullshit. It’s happened to you, and you’ve done it to other people in turn–just like everyone else.

 2.c) The Social Activ-idiots: Are you hypersensitive to the plights of minorities, immigrants, disabilities, mental illness, old people, sex in general, or any combination of the above? Do you stop laughing because it’s “too soon”?  White people, in particular, love Actividiocy, because there is such an overwhelming Puritan guilt about all the fucked up things we were responsible for that the best we can do is feel good about having non-white friends. Irony only makes them feel worse because they know the only reason they won’t laugh is because they want to laugh, which means that at some level, they agree that terrible things are funny. Thanks, Old Testament Jesus! As Seanbaby points out, offending a Native American waiter because we didn’t know which “Indian” this food was supposed to be, and finishing with the punchline, “calm down, kemosabe, it’s not like I stole your bag of foreheads,” you may think it’s funny, or not. I think it is. But if I didn’t think it was funny–and there’s plenty of things that miss the mark for me–I’m at least open-minded enough to try understanding why someone else might laugh.

I admit my sense of humor is a pastiche of cynicism and coping mechanisms. But even I wasn’t prepared for how funny I thought this was. A couple from New Jersey just had their fourth child, and it was immediately taken away by the state. Their other three children were taken by child protective services in January of 2009 because the parents were suspected of abuse and neglect. I’m still an asshole for laughing if we stop here. But let’s keep going. These are the names of their first three children:

*Honzlynn Himler Jeannie Campbell

*Joycelynn Aryan Nation Campbell

*Adolf Hitler Campbell

If you can’t see the humor in this, you’re an idiot. If you believe this sort of thing just doesn’t happen, if it makes you uncomfortable because it can’t be wrapped around nerd verbs on “The Big Bang Theory,” if you feel like you couldn’t attack the humor in this without dumbing it down to vague analogies and platitudes about how racism is wrong, if you feel like it’s just too offensive to carry any humor value, you’re so wrong. This is awesome. It’s so bizarre that I can’t think of anything to do but laugh. To be fair to these parents and their mathematically unquantifiable racism, you can name your children whatever you want. For example, devout Christians name their children things like Peter, Paul, Joseph and Malachi. (We have your woman, Outlander.) People name their children after gods, book and movie characters they like, and sometimes they name them after fruit. Hell, these guys named their kid after a video game character, just so they could get free video games for life from the company that makes it.

I mean, I have so many questions. The names above are in the order they were born. That means that, when naming their children after Nazi Germany and the White Power movement, it took them three children before they realized maybe Hitler somehow fit in there. Aryan Nation came to them before Hitler. I mean, isn’t Hitler the logical #1 here? Why can’t ignorance this brutal at least have some sense of internally consistent logic? But practicality in one’s hatred aside, there are far more pressing problems with people hearing about you naming your children after the bellwethers of a nation full of facile, racist, genocidal fascists.

It’s hard to explain the difference, sometimes, between dealing with ignorance, and passively justifying it. To treat it with levity is to understand it without investing oneself too deeply; to pull too far away, though, risks a dangerous, comic dissociation from the sickness this sort of thing that turns, long term, into a simple incapacity to empathize with the suffering of others–the creation of an us/them dynamic that makes victims into types, into things. To overreact to something like this, to treat it exclusively as the sickening reminder of one of the darkest manifestations of the human psychology, is certainly doing it justice, but it’s also the easiest and most effective way to keep the darkness alive. The hyper-focus on the deadliness of such mindsets separates the victims out into the constant targets, the things fired upon, a perpetual, distinct group of apart-froms and other-thans. No matter what, it’s impossible for the reaction to avoid imitating the mindset that created it–if not tacitly on the victims, then actively on those who started the whole damn mess. Hatred breeding reaction, reaction breeding dichotomy, dichotomy breeding hatred.

To laugh is to search, sometimes blindly and desperately, for a middle ground. There are times when the search becomes so blind that any foothold is foothold enough. It’s the only way to manage, sometimes, without being swallowed whole. Where the line is–where the threshold between dissociation and coping, and then coping and hatred, actually exists, seems fluid and difficult to me.  What to say, how to say it, what’s too much, what’s not enough, what helps to heal, what help to destroy. When it’s just blind and dark enough, the problem isn’t finding ground to stand on, but how close you are to the lines.

And that’s the most frightening thing about being in the dark: others can still see where you are, even when you can’t see yourself.

I love Thanksgiving. Unlike Christmas, Valentine’s Day, your birthday and National Hobo Week (9-12 August), Thanksgiving wasn’t invented by soulless fatcat corporate monsters to trick you into believing an indolent commodity exchange is a satisfactory replacement for human affection. No, Thanksgiving is a celebration. It’s the apogee of sensory overload and vicious irony, which is quite a position to hold in a country that has been historically dedicated to the exclusive production of both of these things. But the Puritans weren’t just good at culture rape, farm theft and musket backfires. They were also experts at sharing with other people what was theirs to begin with. So while you can argue that there were some “marginal” abuses of the goodwill of the indigenous peoples, what you can’t say is that there was no such thing as turkey or corn, and that they didn’t eat the hot hell out of both.

What we give thanks for has definitely changed over time. For example, the Puritans were happy that they didn’t have to spend the winter eating their shoes or dead people faces anymore. The Founding Fathers were thankful that France was willing to bankrupt itself into democratic revolution in order to help us shoot British people. The Titans of Industry were really thankful for our comically absent sense of regulation, and razor companies were thankful once hippies stopped happening. Even today, we continue to be thankful for casinos, jobs, liquor, croutons, even more liquor, family (lame) and whatever a Snookie and Pikachu are. That’s why I have trouble believing we haven’t changed what we eat on Thanksgiving for so long. You’d think a country so dedicated to the twin principles of self-entitlement and gratuitous gluttony could do a little better this; hell, half of our treasured vittles look like things our bodies refuse to keep. So whether it’s cranberry sauce (blood clots), mashed sweet potatoes (meconium), pumpkin pies (anger frisbees), stuffing (don’t make me say it) or peas (I don’t know,  tumors?), Thanksgiving is about as predictable as a first grade play making Squanto look like an Uncle Tom.

This holiday represents everything we, as a nation, know about cramming dead plants and animal pieces down our gullet. It’s time we started acting like it. It’s time. The time is now. Let’s slick this bitch up with some culinary shake-ups guaranteed to make children cry gravy and make your grandmother question her sexuality.

(The menu below serves 4 people. Adjust portion size and quality control according to your drunken passive-aggression towards specific relatives.)

HDaPK proudly offers the 1st Annual:

T-Give Xtreme! 1.0

Presented by KY spermicidal lubricant and Hardee’s

Appetizer

Snackagawea: Forget sexy Indian wilderness guides. Let this modern take on Pemmican blaze a trail straight from your mouth hole to your lower thorax!

Microwave four Snicker’s bars until they just begin to melt. Form into clumsy patties, and jam some asparagus tips into them. Like, deep into them. Cover in flour tortillas. Submerge patties completely in bourbon for 15 minutes. Remove from bourbon and place them in the freezer for however many minutes it takes to freeze. (I don’t know how long that is. I’ve never really done this before.) Remove from freezer. Eat, somehow.

Side Dishes

Potato Surprise: So many people like surprises! Don’t ask me why.

Skin 3 lbs. of Russet potatoes, and cut them into small pieces. Place them in boiling water until they are soft, but not falling apart. Mix in 1/4 C. whole milk, 2 C. heavy whipping cream, 1 stick of unsalted butter, and stir until fully incorporated. Add salt and pepper to taste. Garnish with “danger balls.”**

**Recipe for “danger balls”: wad up live wasps with three layers of fila dough. Place dough in toaster until wasps are angry. Glaze danger balls with danger sauce (4 parts maple syrup to 1 part Hawaiian Punch). Serve.

Whiskey: Open a 1/5 gallon bottle of Jack Daniel’s No. 7 sour mash Tennessee whiskey. Find old Nintendo and cartridge for “Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!”. Insert cartridge and controller, and turn on system. Serve. (Don’t forget to save those passwords!)

Capered Goose Fist with Jaegermeister Glaze: The goose fists (sometimes called “Carl Hanson’s wing-knee”) are considered a delicacy nowhere, and should be prepared with absolute hostility. Make sure the goose is dead first. They hate this otherwise.

Pluck one adult-sized goose. Save feathers. Cut off the goose wings, and trim wings down to two inches on both sides of the final wing joint. Cover wings in A-1 steak sauce. Place on a cookie sheet in the oven at 350 degrees for 25 minutes. While it is cooking, combine 8 shots of Jaegermeister with one jar of marshmallow fluff, and whip into a frenzy. Pull out wings just long enough to dump the glaze potion over them liberally, then sprinkle capers over everything (yourself included). Put back in oven, cook until brown. Remove from oven, and let sit. Cover with feathers. Serve. Try to make it look like an accident.

M&M’s 8 Mile Wrap Battle: You better lose yourself in the moment.

Inside of a standard crepe, lay down a thin bed of lentil puree. Sprinkle cilantro, cloves, garlic and the leftover beak muscles and knuckle meat from the goose. Scream. Sprinkle with powdered sugar. Add three tears, 1/3 C. M&M’s. Roll up tightly into a nice little wrap. Garnish with shredded hot dog. Make sure you make enough to get all the way through the championship. These are meant to be eaten quickly, in contest against another. Construct a tournament bracket. Give first-round byes to pets and the elderly. The winner gets first cut of the main course.

Main Course

Montessori Turducken: this is sure to please everyone, and definitely isn’t a tacit contract with the unholy beyond!**

Have a duck get a chicken pregnant. Make sure the birth takes place no more than two weeks before T-Give Xtreme! It’ll look stillborn, but trust me, it’s not. (The timing is pure logistics–the lifespan of the hybrids are… somewhat compromised). You must kill both the father and the mother of the chicken-duck (chuck?). That part’s important. Pluck them. Burn the feathers. Kill the chuck, and shave its hair off. Hell, kill a turkey while you’re at it. You’re in too deep now. Hollow out all three. Shove the duck corpse into the turkey. Put the chuck corpse inside the chicken, and manage its way inside the duck shell. Insert 1 beer. Next, take a thin chisel and construct a complex network of tunnels inside the raw birds. This is the “chuck dungeon,” and the ghost will naturally learn which areas of the bird it likes the best, and just go there. Don’t worry; its ethereal wanderings will leave a thin layer of ghost juice throughout the birds that will taste amazing, though its favorite area (the juice hive) will have a higher concentration of flavor. Make sure you eat plenty of thyme; its aroma confuses communication across the nexus, and will help stop the chuck’s ghost from summoning the Black Wind out of vengeance.

**Don’t serve to old people. It… renews them.

Dessert

Haha, what? Are you kidding me? Really? Fine. Here.

Dancing Mungo with Portabella-Skittle-Snapple Syrup: The Dancing Mungo is a British (?) tradition that goes back to the days of yore, and probably further.

To start, soak 1 pack of regular Skittles in a bottle of Mango Madness Cocktail-flavored Snapple. While this mockery of nature is dissolving, melt 2 packs of Starburst in a 2-inch saucepan. Once melted, add 1/4 C. powdered flax seed, milk, and 1 C. of anything with a rooster on the front. Bring to a boil. Mix in 1 quart of yore (if there’s no yore, mix equal parts dark chocolate and regret). Add fire, and don’t forget to check for ticks! Reduce to a simmer. Mash up one back of Funyuns, mix with melted butter, and line a pie tin with it; this will serve as your “pie” crust. Pour in Starbursts. Puree 1 portabella mushroom cap; place in a microwave safe dish, and incorporate Skittle-Snapple base. Microwave until ready. Pour syrup over “pie,” then cook it. Look at it while it’s cooking. Think about what you’ve done today… really think about it. When you can live with yourself, remove from oven. Serve.