All Hail C-dog

For real this time.

Carl was asleep and then, in a unit of time heretofore unexplored by science, he was awake, and violently so. His head had been stuffed with barbed wire, cleverly hidden inside glasses of bourbon, and his stomach felt like it died last week and was now a rotten corpse. Falling out of bed, and also throwing up, he landed on the thick carpet of clothes and garbage that covered the actual carpet of his bedroom (the actual carpet of his bedroom was thickly matted with various fluids accumulated throughout the years and it's best not to think of it an hour before or after you've eaten).

He contorted himself into the fetal position and prayed that his roommate would suffer a psychotic break, come into his room, and chop his head off.

This did not happen.

Instead, Carl stayed motionless on the floor for several hours, until he felt like he could move without his eyes exploding or his guts falling out his ass. He sat up, and the room was a tornado or maybe those spinning teacups at Disney World. Or he was inside a dryer... no, one of those carnival rides that pins you to the wall with G-forces. He sat crosslegged, hands keeping his head from detaching from his body and splattering against his Evil Dead poster like a thrown watermelon. After a century or an election cycle or several Olympics had come and gone (or possibly five minutes), Carl made a move towards the vertical. Every bone in his body, now coated in lead or whatever that stuff is that makes Wolverine a badass, cracked and clattered and threatened to break apart. But they held true, as had they always. Good old bones, thought Carl (not really, mostly Carl thought about vomiting again). Thrust upward and standing, the room rotated a bit then settled. It rocked as if sitting in the lap of an old granny out on her porch, then it didn't. Though covered in his own vomit, and caught amid the funhouse gyrations of his usually very stable bedroom, Carl did not vomit again. This, he felt, was a major accomplishment. One worthy of at least a Golden Globe. Maybe a Nobel Peace Prize or something. Something that would look flashy on the mantle.

Carl's mind tended to wander.

He walked out into the apartment and was immediately punched square in the nose by a fist of stench. He doubled over and gagged, but brought up nothing of interest.

God, it reeked.

His eyes watered.

It felt as if a tiny, hateful gnome was spin-kicking his gag reflex.

He stumbled forward into the living room and immediately saw her... a beautiful her... asleep on the couch. She was so very naked. And pale... incredibly pale... her body seemed to give off light like a florescent bulb. Her hair, black, was even blacker by comparison. The encroachment of nighttime on a beautiful day. She had eyes of the bluest skies and if she thought of rain... well, it wasn't anytime recently. She was also not blinking. Or moving. Or breathing. It occurred to Carl that something was very, very wrong.

Carl literally had no concept of what would happen next, so he thought about movies. More specifically, he thought about what happened in movies when a person (such as himself, though played by someone much more handsome), found an unmoving, not-breathing, body of a girl with skin like light and eyes like hair metal lyrics.

He should check her pulse!

So he did.

There wasn't one.

He should see if she was breathing!

He already knew she wasn't, so he didn't bother with that step.

He should...

He... should...

He poured himself a stiff glass of bourbon from the bottle lodged between the couch cushions and sat himself down beside her, absentmindedly playing with her toes as he drank. This was probably it for him, he thought. He assumed he'd get blamed for her death. Hell, he thought, maybe he'd actually caused it. He couldn't, strictly speaking, remember anything that had happened the night before. Or the previous night. Clearly things had gotten out of hand.

He finished his drink and poured himself another.

He turned on the TV and watched an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, the one where Geoffery's son shows up and steals money from Will. Carl laughed too loudly at the jokes and tried his hardest to not look at the life sentence that lay to his left.

Carl poured himself a third drink. Halfway through said drink, his brain... not the clearest of horizons to begin with... began to fog over. Things got spectacularly calm. He felt as if his body were being lifted up towards the water-stained ceiling and that he would smoosh right through it, as if it were marshmallow fluff. He felt the cool air of outdoors on the parts of his body that weren't crusted with puke. He rose into the atmosphere and into the silence of space. He breathed in the stars and exhaled out planets and galaxies and alien civilizations.

The door being kicked in brought him back to Earth.

The room was filled with people, suddenly, like teleportation was real. There were uniforms that signified various things, and his roommate was in a corner crying and pointing. He raised his glass to toast the new arrivals and someone stuck a gun in his face.

The phrase "you did the right thing" floated across the room, and Carl was fairly certain it wasn't directed at him.

He was pulled up by his collar and spun quickly around. He dropped his glass as his hands were pulled behind him. His wrists were clamped and pinched and he couldn't move his arms. Not that he cared. The fog was creeping back into his head. It was like the hands of Andre the Giant gripping his skull, squeezing, but in a way that conveyed nothing but love. Everything was fine... fuck, so fucking fine. The fog, though, was just a temporary thing. Thought it had just arrived, already it was pulling back, perhaps due to the large man yelling about how he had the right to remain silent right in his ear (the irony was lost on Carl). The hangover was subsiding too. As the sick and the fog drew back, he felt what was left. His baseline emotion. He felt nothing. The biggest nothing ever to exist (or not). Down to his very core, there was a numbness usually associated with mountain climbers dying from hypothermia. The noise of the room collapsed in on itself. Carl's ears heard a fake silence, but it was a silence nonetheless. He looked at the poor girl on his couch. So pretty.

He wished he could remember her name.

For all your C-dog related needs and wants and desires, go here now:

Acceptable Amusements

Risen from the grave, motherfuckers.

Seeing as how I haven't published anything meaningful since the end of March, and seeing as how I can't even get my shit together long enough to operate a proper Twitter feed, I think it's about time we go ahead and call it a career.

Yes, as today... well, as of a few months ago when I stopped posting, but officially as of today... ZFS! is done. For real this time.

Seriously, kids, thanks for reading. It's been heaping handfuls of fun, especially back in the day, and getting to know you guys has truly made the fact that ZFS! never netted me a book deal a little easier to swallow. I wish you all happy lives, or at least lives filled with enough booze to make it feel tolerable, if only until the hangover kicks in.

As for me... hell, I've got no clue. School didn't work out, but other things in my life are suddenly going just gangbusters. So who knows? Maybe I'll finally write that novel... maybe I'll be found dead in a ditch, strangled by a circus clown who didn't like my attitude... maybe I'll just dance, dance, DANCE!!!

Whatever happens, I'm sure I'll be fine. Until we meet again... in another life, or on another website lurking moistly in a dark corner of the internet... so long, my friends.

This has been C-dog.

This has been Zombie Fights Shark!

********************************************

Oh, P.S. You can follow me on Facebook if you'd like. THAT, I do keep current, plus it's a good way to find out about any upcoming projects of mine (should you be interested) and also you'll be kept up to date on what sandwiches I'm eating AND how drunk I am at any given time. So feel free to "friend."

American Idol - Your Awful Top 10

Anyone who knows anything about how much of a gaywad I am knows that I love American Idol with a passion that's getting a little uncomfortable and may one day find me placed on some sort of list kept by the government. Because this is true, you have to understand how much it pains me to say this: American Idol has been god-awful this year.

I mean just terrible. Here we are at the Top 10 and there's literally ONE contestant... maybe two... that legitimately should be there. And it's not like they eliminated a bunch of awesome people or anything... these remaining contestants are sadly just the best of a bad crop. It's downright disheartening, but I guess not all that surprising, seeing as how this shows been chugging along for nearly ten years. The American talent well is getting pretty goddamned dry.

But anyway, since I did it last year, and because talking about American Idol still makes me both feel warm and fuzzy inside and hate myself, here's your Top 10. For better or worse. Mostly worse.

American Idol - Top 10

Aaron Kelly



Aaron is sixteen, and it's a young sixteen. Like he probably still thinks girls are gross and have cooties. He sings like a Sophomore that just got a supporting part in the high school's production of Anything Goes, yet the judges have decided he's "the next Justin Timberlake," which is only true in the sense that he'll at some point probably get deflowered by a Mouseketeer. There's all sorts of back story with him, too... adoptions and bad parents and once he hid in an attic and read "The Neverending Story"... but it's all too boring to really get worked up over. The only significant moment involving Aaron Kelly this season is when Ellen playfully accused him of copying her hairstyle. Congrats, kid... you just got told you have lesbian hair on national TV. How's fame taste?

Lee DeWyze



Here we have the Idol contestant most likely to sell you weed. He's the bro-iest bro that's ever bro-ed and he has the musical stylings of a Dave Matthews cover band that really wants to move away from Dave Matthews and start covering some REAL shit, like Daughtry or Kings of Leon. There's nothing interesting about him at all, even though he's been declared "a hunk" by several people that have apparently never seen men before. His parents love him, I guess, because there haven't been any heartbreaking montages of him carrying his guitar through an orphanage or whatever.

Oh, and one time he sang that Owl City song "Fireflies" just him and an acoustic guitar and it was so bland my TV had to go take a nap.

Tim Urban



Now HE'S a hunk. All young and floppy-haired and muscled... if I were a seventeen year old girl, I'd let him play with my boobs, all I'm saying. At the same time, there's a STRONG creepy religion vibe coming off of him; they showed his family one time and there's like fifteen brothers and sisters, all genes therein impeccable, and it made my skin crawl like I just discovered an ant infestation. Maybe it's just because I'm currently reading a book about icky Mormon cults, but this dude is TOTALLY (probably) the product of an icky Mormon cult.

Anyway, he sings terribly and he's only still on the show because girls and very, very disturbed older men want to touch his penis. True fact.

Katie Stevens



This is the other sixteen year old, but she's the kind that acts like they're 34 and have a very important job taking business meetings with clients in NoFunsville. She's kind of robotic and she suffers a little bit from an ailment I call "Man Voice," plus she's only marginally talented at singing. Odd, being as how this is a singing competition, but whatever.

Of all the contestants, she's the one that's going to freak out the worst when she gets voted off. You can just see it coming. When she gets critiqued, she appears to be listening intently to what the judges have to say, but you can tell she's just counting down the seconds until she can get back to her dressing room and dig deep cuts into her leg with a razor blade because SHE'S! NOT! GOOD! ENOUGH!

Seriously, when she goes, it's going to be epic. She might punch Ryan Seacrest, which would be like beating up all the world's happiness in the form of a manorexic pixie that can tell you to the SECOND when we're due back from commercial.

Andrew Garcia

Ugh. This guy, I can't even deal with. He has a neck tattoo. A NECK TATTOO. Seriously, he's just the worst and he should have been canned ages ago.

Oh, and I think he was in a gang once or something. I don't know. When he's on, I go to the fridge for a snack, or if I'm not hungry I just stand there out of earshot until I'm sure enough time has passed so that he's not on my TV anymore.

Casey James

Were you a big fan of Jonny Lang back in 1997? Then you'll LOOOOVE Casey James. Because he's basically that, but with longer hair and even less of a personality.

Look, he plays the guitar really well; there's no denying that. But he sings like every band that's ever played Friday nights at Sherlock's Pub here in Arlington, TX (which I realize is a very location-specific reference to make, but I think you catch my drift) and that's just not going to cut it, on this show or as a life choice.

He has also been declared "hunky," but personally I think he looks like he smells like dirty hair.

Didi Benami

Didi has sung so differently every time she's performed, I'm starting to think she's actually a set of identical triplets who are playing an elaborate prank on America. She's just... I mean, she's not BAD, per se. She actually has her moments where it's like, "I see what you did there, and I approve." Her version of Fleetwood Mac's "Rhiannon" was top shelf all the way. But then she does this weird, vibrato thing where it's like she's singing into a fan, and that's where I think Didi totally loses most of us at home.

I feel bad because she seems like a nice person, but she also seems like the sort that would greatly benefit from a strong drink and the admonition to settle the fuck down.

"Big" Mike Lynche

He's roughly nine feet tall and he just became a dad. These are important facts... I mean, they must be, because they've been mentioned every time he's on screen since the beginning of this fiasco. The man has literally been defined by the fact that he's fucking massive... and he is; Ryan looks like one of the more useless (though well-groomed) hobbits next to him... and the fact that he fucked his wife nine months ago.

It's the same thing as Danny Gokey last year being all about his dead wife, but with a happier, less morbid slant.

Anyway, he sings like you'd expect a huge black guy to sing. He uses too much falsetto for my taste (and he's not great at it), but otherwise he's okay.

Siobhan Magnus

I love her a little bit, but only because she's monkey-house crazy. And I mean that in the most positive way possible, I really do. Siobhan (that's pronounced "Shu-VON, btw) has this vibe that reminds me of an art student starting a band with her roommate because they're bored on a Saturday, but then discovering that they're actually the best thing to come out of New York City since Le Tigre. She had a mohawk once... seriously, they showed a picture. It made me want to smash beer bottles and use the pieces to spell out "marry me."

She has a great voice, but she also does this really high-note screechy thing that was impressive once, still okay twice, and now that she's done it three times in a row, we're all kind of worried that that's all she's got. To us, the fans, she was our one shot at Adam Lambert-level weirdness. If she doesn't pull some amazing shit out of the Phantom Zone (or wherever she gets her ideas) pretty damn quick, she's going to be dunzo. America does not tolerate the merely strange. We want fabulousness too.

Crystal Bowersox



This is your next American Idol. Seriously. She's going to win. No one really even has a chance at this point and... given what we've seen thus far... none of the other contestants are even capable of rising to the challenge. It's been said several times by the judges that she's quite simply on another level than her competition... one that's much higher and just flat-out BETTER... and that statement could not be more true.

Her whole deal is that folksy, Melissa Ethridge, Janis and Alanis, lady guitar soul... which frankly I'm kind of over as a concept... but when Bowersox lays it down, it feels all fresh and new, like when you heard "Fast Car" for the first time. She's SO good, it's kind of retarded that we have to have ten more weeks of this show.

The anti-establismentarian in me loves, too, that she's totally a gross hippie, which is so not the product Idol usually tries to sell us. She has dreads and weird teeth and she carries around a sack of "lucky charms;" it's all so Austin, TX that I was thunderstruck to hear that she's from Ohio or some godforsaken place (no offense, Ohio). All of it wraps up nicely into an amazing package that deserves all the fame and fortune she gets off this show. I hope it's tons, because she's really the only one on the big stage keeping things awesome.

No joke, if there's an erosion of common sense and she gets sent home, I'm fucking done with this show. Fucking DONE. Until next year, of course.

The Health Care Bill

Because I care deeply about the world around me (HAHA, this IS fiction!), I stayed up all night reading the entire Health Care Reform Bill that passed through Congress last night. It was a lot to get through, and I dozed off a few times, and at one point I got distracted by that infomercial where they make a salad in 30 seconds just to shut up an old lady (it's the best thing ever) but... yeah... the whole bill... READ IT. There's some interesting stuff in there, so I thought I'd share what I learned with all of you. You, being the people out there too lazy to read government documents in your spare time. You're so lucky to have me, you know that, right? You're welcome I'm in your life.

(send money)

Finally, a Cure For AIDS!!!: The New Health Care Reform Bill

-Doctors are now required by law to let you use their stethoscopes to listen to your butt.

-All the pills in a given hospital will be laid out in a big bowl by the admittance desk. Go ahead and take what you need. (the blue ones make everything awesome for a little while!)

-If you want cancer because all your friends have cancer and you feel left out, the government will totally give you cancer now.

-You know that one disease where you bleed out of everywhere? Ebola? Man, that's gross. Haha, also diarrhea is gross!!!

-This is really more of a side benefit, but the passing of the Health Care bill combined with the powers of Facebook really helps you figure out who exactly on your Friends List is a right-wing lunatic. Unfriending them means you're a Socialist, but it's the price you pay for not wanting to firebomb your high school every time you log on to check your squash growth on Farmville.

-Heart surgeries are now 2-for-1 with a coupon from the Penny Saver.

-All cast members of ER are now licensed to practice medicine. All cast members of Grey's Anatomy are gaywads.

-There's a part in here that says the Government gets to keep our babies. Hm... guys... we probably should have read all of this thing BEFORE we got it passed...

-Can't find where it's mentioned specifically, but I assume this means that weed is now legal.

-Free cotton swabs for everybody!!!