The zombies were almost into the living room and it was only a matter of time before they would break through our shoddy barricade at the kitchen doorway.

“Matt, I just want you to know…” The fingers on my left hand trembled as I loaded the explosive rounds into my shotgun. “…That I value our friendship, and you were a great roommate.” I snapped it shut. The moaning grew louder behind our paper-thin walls.

“They’re in the living room now,” Matt said as he wiped away sweat from his brow. “And thanks, man. I feel the same.” He picked up our two largest kitchen knives and began sharpening them against one another.

“There are more of them now.”

“I can hear them pouring in through the garage. We’re dead.”

“So are they.”

Matt stopped sharpening his knives and looked over at me. We stared at each other in silence for a few seconds. And then long, hard, exhausting, nervous laughter.

“I’m gonna miss you man,” I said, catching my breath.

“You too, bro. You too.”
(more…)

I fidget a bit with my tie. Even after two weeks it feels awkward.

“Excuse me, are you in line?” someone asks.

“What? Oh, yes, sorry. I’m in line.” I say, stepping to my left and aligning myself with the gentleman in front of me. I look over the notes I’d been given by my new coworkers. Beth’s order makes me squint. ‘Decaf tall four pump Valencia percent no whip latte’?

I look up and am suddenly face to face with a rather portly, smiling Starbucks cashier, her hair a wild, unkempt hedge of blue spikes.

“Hello sir, what can I get for you today?”

“Hi… yes, I’ll have a regular coffee, please.”

“Grande drip? Would you like our bold selection, or our milder breakfast blend?”

“I would just like a coffee, thanks. With a little room for cream.”

“Ok sir, one grande with-room drip. I’m sure you’ll enjoy our Sumatra.”

“Who?”

She smiles like I’m five.

“It’s a type of coffee.”

“Oh. Well, um… I would also like… let’s see…” I laugh nervously. “I apologize, my coworker’s handwriting is horrible.” An awkward smile spreads across my face.

The room feels warm. Somewhere behind me a woman coughs. The woman making drinks asks the next customer if he can get a drink started.

“Will that be all, sir?” asks Spiky Hair.

“No, like I said… I’ve got this list, so. One large –” Her blank expression hasn’t changed so I make a sweeping motion with my arms. “- mocha with vanilla, please, and a - ”

“Whip?”

“What?”

“Would you like whipped cream on that, sir?”

“I suppose not.”

She scribbles on a cup - “One venti vanilla no-whip mocha,” - and places it to the side. “Anything else?”

“Yes, can I have… ” I carefully recite Beth’s order.

She repeats it back in a cheery rapid-fire. “One decaf tall four pump Valencia percent no-whip latte! Would you like to try one of our raspberry scones?”

“No, thank you.”

“Perhaps a chocolate cream cheese muffin?”

“That’s fine.”
(more…)

Ah, the gym.

A place where I can escape to feel even uglier, fatter and more unappealing than I might feel at any particular moment on any given day anywhere in perpetually shallow Los Angeles.

It’s a marvelous getaway stuffed to the breaking point with people far more beautiful than I, whose immaculate physiques only serve to put my comparatively flabby build in far greater relief.

So why go? What drives me to subject myself to such subtle, sustained humiliation, day after day sporadic day?

A desire to get in shape?

No.

The allure of a healthy, active lifestyle?

Not particularly.

The distant promise of a longer, happier existence filled with greater energy, stamina and vitality?

Meh.

I’ll tell you what it is.

It’s the awesome early-nineties rock, the omnipresent smell of perspiration and CNN on every. single. television.

Nothing motivates me to “get my sweat on” like Anderson Cooper’s perfectly peppered silver coif bobbing along to Deep Blue Something while I’m basking in the scent of an unfortunately hairy dude manhandling the neighboring elliptical machine.

I hate people who drive 65 in the left lane of a two-lane highway. I mean I really, truly hate them with every fibrous strand of my very being. I hate them so much I want to burst out my front windshield and leap - gremlin style - onto the roof of their car and smash my hand through the metal, pull them up and out by their screaming hair and toss them onto the parched pavement.

It so would be worth the littering fine.

Also: there’s something I fancy doing while taking long road trips that makes the time just whiz on by. Sometimes while I’ll be driving in the fast lane at the speed of traffic I will witness the driver behind me leave our lane, proceed to speed up and then slide in front of me. I was already moving at the speed of traffic a few lengths back from the preceeding car, so this impatient instigator is not going even a tiny bit faster than he was while behind me. He has saved absolutely, positively no time whatsoever. But he has made a new mortal enemy for life.

It’s one thing to pass a person doing 60 in the fast lane a mile behind the next car. It is an entirely different pillowcase of marbles to haphazardly swerve in front of someone who is cruising along with the 85 mile-per-hour traffic.

So this filthy, no-good cutter becomes my new pet project.

It is now my singlular purpose in life - while completely disregarding all weather, fuel and bladder conditions - to get my automobile back in front of this Satan spawn. Using every opportunity at my disposal I will recklessly wedge my way into a position of silverback alpha male dominance, making sure that this person notices me do this so hopefully they’ll learn not to be such a terrifically huge Douche! in the future.

Is this practice of mine dangerous? Quite.

Reckless? Extremely.

Insanely, unbelievably rewarding? Oh, hell yes.

“So, any big plans this weekend?” I asked the pretty brunette sitting across from me at a small West Hollywood restaurant.

“Nah, not really. Probably going out with the girls on Saturday night. Not sure where yet. I have some errands that I haven’t been able to get around to, so I need to do those. And then maybe I’ll try and squeeze in some Pilates.” She rested her chin on her hand.

“That seems to be the big craze these days,” I said, fiddling a bit with my dessert spoon. A light breeze blew in from the outside patio.

“Running errands? Yeah, it’s a pretty popular pastime.” She smiled at me and winked. A few of her curly brown locks fell beside her face. They almost glimmered in the early evening light.

I grinned back, trying desperately to think of something, anything. She was gorgeous and it was taking everything I had to force words out of my mouth. I covertly wiped my wet palms on my jeans.

“So… do you only do Pilates or do you do a traditional workout as well?”

Her eyes lit up. “Actually, yeah! I meet up with a trainer three times a week. His name’s Tony and he’s this ex-marine guy. Six-foot four and just huge.” She extended her arms out to emphasize Tony’s ‘hugeness’.

“He must be really good!” I said, taking a sip of my latte.

“Oh, he is! He totally punishes me.”

I set my cup back on the table. “Punishes you?”

“Oh, you know - screaming into my ear, calling me names, putting me down. All that stuff. He really goes to town and it just motivates me.” She smiled with perfect teeth as she lifted a small scoop of ice cream from her plate into her mouth.

“So…” I wanted to find a good way to word what I was going to say next.

No luck.

“You’re motivated by verbal abuse?”

“It just pushes me to do that little bit extra. You know what I mean?”

No. But I nodded and returned to sipping my coffee.

“I’ll be lying on the floor completely exhausted, absolutely sure I can’t do anymore, when he gets down right next to my face and yells,

‘Give me five more crunches you lazy whore!’”

The coffee went down my windpipe. I could feel the eyes of nearby diners glaring. I began coughing violently, struggling to breathe.

A sheepish grin crept across my date’s face. “Sorry, Mike. I get a little riled up when I start thinking about Tony’s routines.”

She scooped another dose of ice cream past her perfect teeth.

I was driving through Venice - windows down, Hey Jude blaring through my car speakers - and I got to thinking about how I was so very, very single. Gazing at the passing storefronts I began to wonder if there was a person out there somewhere just for me. My perfect match, my better half, my soul mate.

An aching pang of hunger struck me deep inside. I briefly misinterpreted this as a yearning for true love and lifelong companionship.

But then I thought,

“Is there such a thing as a Mexican restaurant soul mate?”

Is there a perfect hole-in-the-wall joint with rock bottom prices and high quality eats somewhere in Los Angeles just waiting to be found?

One that offers burritos the size of my arm that drip with cheese and enchilada sauce, burst with hearty slabs of chicken and come slathered in chunky guacamole and sour cream that is velvety smooth yet not watered down?

A place that sells horchata that cascades over my tongue with just the right amount of consistency and sweetness, providing the ideal amount of refreshment and hydration as I savor my arm-sized burrito?

That features salsa that is neither too thin nor chunky, allowing my free, perfectly salted appetizer chips to easily scoop generous amounts of it into my mouth?

A restaurant with the right combination of authenticity and cleanliness, but never too little of the former in service of the latter?

Is there such a place? Is it out there for me to discover?

If such a place does exist, I pledge the following:

Dear Perfect Mexican Restaurant,

Though we have yet to meet, I promise my unequivocal love and loyalty until the day I die, move away or you are closed under suspicious circumstances after a surprise raid by the INS. I will be with you through the good times and the bad, when I have too little money to buy one of your Super Burritos or when your sour cream tastes just a little too so.

I will visit you regularly, braving great distance, traffic and any guilt stemming from the abandoning of obligations I had that got in the way of us being together. I will nod even when I cannot understand your cashier, and I will forgive you if I receive the wrong dish because he misunderstood my frantic finger pointing and complete and total slaughtering of his native language. I will not be a jealous partner. Rather, I will share you with my friends, so that they may grow to appreciate and adore you in the way I know I will.

Through it all I will love you, I will cherish you and I will share with you my money, my time and my ever-deteriorating health. The only sin I shall commit is gluttony, but I believe this particular transgression is forgivable because, after all, you are a restaurant.

Always and forever yours,

Michael

There was a woman at the gym today with inkblot sweat patterns. When she first got onto the elliptical machine in the row ahead of me there were two fairly large circles of sweat on her shoulder blades and one (and I don’t know how this works) donut-shaped sweat mark on the middle of her back. All together it looked like a surprised emoticon.

I zoned out for a little as I crosstrained, and when I looked back ten or fifteen minutes later the donut-shaped mark had filled in and expanded to a very large circle covering the entire middle portion of her back. The two circles on her shoulder blades had expanded upward and downward, transforming into ovals which now connected to the large circle below. A giant bunny rabbit’s head was now dominating the back of her shirt.

While that woman’s sweat was metamorphizing into different Rorschach patterns, the woman directly to my left was busy performing her own little personal Broadway dance routine. You know how you can kind of tell when someone near you is moving even if you can’t actually see them? Well I could feel her doing something on the machine next to me, so I glanced over to scope out the situation. Sure enough, she was striding along at a brisk! pace to what I can only imagine was a 1999 Jock Jams CD she had ripped onto her iPod nano.

You have two sets of handles to choose from when using the elliptical machine - an unmoving horizontal set directly in front of you that comes up about waist-high, and a set of vertical bars on the sides of the machine that move with the rhythm of your movement. This woman was taking advantage of neither option, opting instead to pump her arms at her sides. This works just fine on a treadmill. On the elliptical, because there is no impact, you appear as though you are running atop a field of clouds. Or cotton candy. Or fiber glass. I wish in this case it were fiber glass.

But wait! Lest we forget the jazz hands.

Some people choose to run with their hands balled up into fists. Others prefer the open-palmed method. You could say this woman was utilizing a “modified” version of the open-palm. Her hands were indeed open, but she was shaking them and twisting her wrists as if at any moment she might just jump off the machine, triumphantly throw her iPod to the ground and burst into a solo rendition of “And All That Jazz!”

I wanted to either

a.) Politely tap her on the shoulder and ask her to ” kindly stop because you are distracting me from my simulated no-impact crosstraining routine”

b.) Punch her on the shoulder and yell loudly over my iPod, her iPod, everyone else’s iPod, The Price is Right playing on five of the twenty nearby televisions, and The View playing on the remaining fifteen, “STOP WITH THE DAMN JAZZ HANDS! YOU’RE A HUNDRED YARDS PAST THE HILL YOU CLIMBED OVER TEN YEARS AGO, YOU’LL NEVER BREAK INTO SHOW BUSINESS WITH EPILEPTIC EXTREMITIES OH AND BY THE WAY YOUR CELLULITE IS SCARING THE CHILDREN.”

c.) Kill her and stash the body behind the vitamin display because no one ever buys vitamins at a gym because last time I checked thirty vitamins don’t cost sixty goddamn dollars.

By the time I had entertained option C to the satisfaction of my sadistic imagination, the sweat stains on the woman ahead of me had morphed into an animated GIF that was moving along jerkily to the awkward syncopations of Bob Barker’s bombastic barritone.