Zombie Book Club
Welcome to Zombie Book Club! We're a Podcast that's also a book club! We talk about Zombie / Apocalyptic horror novels, TV and movies.
Zombie Book Club
10 Luxuries We'd Yearn for in a Zombie Wasteland | Casual Dead | Zombie Book Club Podcast Ep 46
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Join Dan and Leah as they dive into a hilariously unplanned discussion about the top 10 luxuries they'd miss in a zombie apocalypse. From the irreplaceable comforts of the internet and cars to the nostalgic warmth of the Hartland Diner, this episode is a whimsical exploration of the simple pleasures that keep us sane. Leah also celebrates her newfound U.S. citizenship with a morning toast, leading to humorous reflections on life expectancy, IQ, and blood pressure changes. Dan updates us on his relentless quest to afford snacks and his latest writing adventures in a world where the dead crave more than just brains.
In this episode, we tackle everything from the necessity of dental care and the joy of chocolate and coffee to the oddity of imagining a post-apocalyptic podcast. They also revisit memorable moments from "The Walking Dead," offering fresh insights and laughs. With Leah's new hobby of drawing zombie portraits and Dan's musings on the community warmth of the Heartland Diner, this episode blends creative chaos with heartfelt humor. Tune in for a ride through life's trials and tribulations, where even in a zombie wasteland, our collective journey finds solace in shared laughter and absurdity. Subscribe now and join the fun every Sunday!
Thumbnail art by Leah
Zombie Book Club Links
- Join us on on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/ZombieBookClub
- Join the Brain Muncher’s Zombie Collective: https://discord.gg/rn3nPDa4CB
- ZBC Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zombiebookclubpodcast/
- ZBC Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/710957975263518/
- Zombie Book Club Voicemail: (614) 699-0006
- Zombie Book Club Email: ZombieBookClubPodcast@gmail.com
Welcome to Zombie Book Club, the only book club where the book is completely unplanned discussion of the top 10 things we desperately be craving in a world where the only thing scarier than the undead is running out of snacks Hmm, terrifying. I'm Dan, and when I'm not trading all of my waking hours so I can afford snacks, I'm writing a book about a snackless world where the dead come back to life to munch on our toes. So the zombies have snacks. Yeah, you know, you got to take your snacks where you can get them, and they decided that our feet are delicious.
Speaker 2I mean, they do have pedicures where little fish eat your dead skin. They love it. Yeah, it's a snack for somebody. Yeah, I'm Leah and I started drinking today at 10 am. This is, to be clear, my first time drinking in the morning ever. In fact, I don't actually really drink at all because it's not a thing that I love to do. Every once in a while, I do have a beverage, but I decided that this was my way to celebrate becoming a US citizen, because, now that I'm a US citizen, my life expectancy has been reduced by five years, my IQ has decreased by 25 points and my blood pressure has gone up by 10 points.
Speaker 1Yeah, so break even.
Speaker 2Yeah, and I'm just helping that along with my alcoholic beverage this morning. We're celebrating this weekend.
Speaker 1Yeah, we're recording this exactly right after recording the last casual episode, we did go pee. Yeah, we went pee two weeks past and now we're here yeah, two weeks past.
Speaker 2You're the lori calcaterra episode and now we're talking. It was awesome fastest interview I've ever done was.
Speaker 1It took 30 seconds oh yeah, while we were peeing, correct? Uh yeah, so today we're gonna be talking about 10 luxuries you would yearn for in a zombie wasteland, aka the United States of the Apocalypse that we discussed in our last Casual Dead episode, episode 44. Yeah, remember, we were going to stack some trailers and campers up like a skyscraper and then charge everybody like four grand a month to live there. Yep and they will not have access to running water so they can warm their toes around a burning trash pile you know it's just.
Speaker 2Every time we talk about these things, I always remember the fact that people are already living like this and they're living like that because we, as the consumers in the west, are complicit in that reality. For them, we're just trashing the world so we can live this, quote unquote good life while you're working 14 hours a day to be able to afford snacks. It's a mess, but you do have running water.
Speaker 1It's true. Yeah, the water is under our house. We have an unlimited supply for the most part, until it all dries up.
Speaker 2Yeah, I don't think that's going to be an issue. I think it'll be the opposite.
Speaker 1Yeah, I think we'll be good until until we die. You know, after that, who knows?
Speaker 2yeah, all the client predictions say that we're going to just see the the worst of it.
Speaker 1At the tail end of our lives we'll probably die from climate change honestly yeah, heat stroke yeah, yeah, yeah, but then it's over and we're dead so on that note, we release episodes every sunday, so subscribe till.
Speaker 2you die yeah.
Speaker 1Subscribe till you die. And then a little bit after that.
Eternal Podcast Fan Commitment
Speaker 2Yeah, just keep going. Have somebody put it in your will. Somebody has to press play. Yeah.
Speaker 1I require you to come back after you're dead. You know what To keep listening.
Speaker 2If you're a true fan, you will put in your will that part of your funeral involves a clip from Sony book club, your favorite clip. If you have a favorite clip, please let us know, because we have been woefully negligent in any kind of promotion and sharing clips. So if there's anything that you love, let us know, send us a clip.
Speaker 1Yeah, tell them to leave a phone in your casket. That's just auto playing the playlist of our podcast, yeah.
Speaker 2In perpetuity until the battery dies. Oh, playing the playlist of our podcast. Yeah, in perpetuity until the battery dies. Oh, actually you could have it hooked up to a solar panel. That's like a solar ground, put a solar panel on your gravestone yeah, then we'll be with you forever. Isn't that so romantic? Some people want to be buried beside their loved ones yeah, then we are their loved ones. Yeah, that's how this goes. We're so fucking creepy dan let's do life updates before we get how have you been terrible?
Speaker 1oh yeah, um, you know, I saw a clip from parks and rec where, uh, they ask what's his name in the show? Um, I forget his chris hemsworth, chris, something. It's not hemsworth, it's not. I'm bad with celebrity names, chris. Anyways, ch Chris's character. They're like how are you doing? And he's just like staring straight at a wall. He's like I'm fine, I'm not sleeping anymore. I'm tired all the time. None of my hobbies seem interesting anymore. I'm. You know I don't have't have it memorized, but anyways, I'm like I identify with that uh, that would be one of those checklists that my doctors are going to fill out.
Speaker 2That proves that you are at least moderately depressed, possibly severely. I think some of those things might be on the severe category, yeah, yeah um, so yeah, that's where I'm at.
Speaker 1It's probably because I have no autonomy in my life and all I do is work now.
Speaker 2All you do is work, make podcasts, edit the podcasts and, very shortly, mow our lawn, yeah.
Speaker 1The lawn needs mowed, yeah, and then several other things.
Speaker 2Do you have your phone on you for a?
Speaker 1chance? I don't. I mean, it's a year I.
Speaker 2I would like you to read to our audience what I said to you as I was going to sleep the other day, because I think it's really important to memorialize this. So I think I've said before I have extremely vivid dreams. Um, I actually really had a pretty wild one last night, but anyways, uh, I woke up a couple of mornings ago to this message from Dan All right, so.
Speaker 1Leah wakes me up and she says she asks me if I had a big yawn time. And I asked what she meant and she said a big yawn, sleepy face with my lawnmower. I said a lawnmower. And she said yeah, your mouth lawnmower. I said no, I don't have a lawnmower in my mouth, do you? And then, very indignantly, she said no and then rolled over immediately started snoring, yep.
Speaker 2She's like no, that's what it's like to be my spouse.
Speaker 1Also, I may wake you up in the middle of the night yelling help, yeah, because of my night terrors, or she might wake you up in the middle of the night and say, dad, I think there's a demon standing in the doorway. That's also a true story. And I'm like what? And you're like, over there, there's a dark figure in the door. And then I get over and I look at the door and I'm like the door's closed.
Speaker 2It's dark because there's no light coming through it because it's a door. Hey, I have seen a demon literally crawl out of a bathroom wall once. Was I on the early days of my antidepressants? Yes, do I still think it was real?
Creative Writing and Foot Problems
Speaker 1yes, um, I've, despite my crazy long working hours, I have been able to get some writing done. Um, it is chaos, though, because basically, what I have is, um, several files that are just to do lists, like, like, like, it's all of this like transcripted nonsense that I need to fix the errors in and, you know, add spaces and punctuation, and future. You is gonna fucking hate you. It's like, like, each each block is like three to four thousand words of one paragraph run on sentence. That sounds very painful. Um, so, yeah, that is, that is adding up.
Speaker 1Uh, on me, I change everything, everything that I haven't gone through yet. I make red, I change the font to red. In the last three weeks, I wrote 28,000 words. Damn, all of them without punctuation. There's some punctuation, but it's not the right punctuation and a lot of times, like, it'll get characters names wrong, like, like, if, if I say that, if I say two words too closely together, it'll just they, it'll just sometimes mash it together. So, like, one of my characters names is chase and sometimes, if I say chase and they'll be like jason. So now I gotta go through and find all the times that jason is in my book and change it and change it, which means that I can't just find, and replace, can't you?
Speaker 1I can't ever add a character named jason to my book, because if I do, then my editing experience will be a fucking nightmare just to find and replace.
Speaker 2Yeah, you know you can do find all, replace, all right.
Speaker 1Yeah, you don't want to do that um, that sounds risky, um, especially since it's very it's, it's, it's inconsistent, so like, who knows, it might be jason, it might be jay, um, but you know, that's that's what I get, because, like I'm transcribing while driving a truck, so like there's a lot of background noise it's dangerous, for sure yeah, but I'm getting a lot done.
Speaker 1Um, I've gotten to a point where, like I've kind of I've I've run out of stuff, like I've been thinking about this book for years and years and years and I guess I just never got past a certain point in the planning process, which is probably fine, because everything changed anyway. So now I'm on a completely different path. But now I'm kind of at a point where the amount that I can write in a day is limited by how much I have figured out in my head, because now I have nothing planned. So some days I don't write anything and I just think about what I want to happen.
Speaker 2It's going to be a tangled web you've woven for yourself, but at least you're getting to express yourself. Yeah.
Speaker 1It's going to be great.
Speaker 2Yeah, well, I mean, it's better than nothing. It does use your time while you're driving and hopefully this will be your last season and we'll just get to do the podcast full time.
Speaker 1I hope I don't even have to finish the season. Yeah cast full time. I hope I don't even have to finish the season.
Speaker 2Yeah, um, what have your life updates been, leah? Well, my experimental procedure. I thought might be working, but then I don't think it is yeah, for your feet, yeah. So I'm gonna go get an mri to find out if, uh, it is what people say it is, or if it's a cyst, or if it is a parasitic worm um, that's a joke.
Speaker 1I don't know what if it's the worm that was in RFK Jr's head. I will cut my foot off, and now it lives in your foot.
Speaker 2I will cut my foot off. That's it, yeah but you'll have to think it was an accident, so I can get my dismemberment insurance. You know that's true. Maybe I can become friends with the worm.
Speaker 1You could put your foot in a tesla cyber truck.
Speaker 2Oh my god that's true, and it would be an accident, and then I could sue tesla yeah, that's a solution to everything, yeah yeah, that's, um, that's been a little bit of a want.
Zombie Portraits, Hoof Trimming, Luxuries
Speaker 2Want because it's approaching summertime, here is mid-spring in beautiful vermont and every part of me wants to be outside and doing fun stuff, and then I'm like wait, but my foot will be fucked up if I spend more than 20 minutes on it. So, um, yeah, that's a little bit depressing. I woke up the some point this night after a random nightmare. That was not about lawnmower mouths, I don't know what that was about. The only thing is that maybe I wasn't talking to dan. I was talking to my horse, who died a few years ago, and I was talking in like sweet baby horse talk.
Speaker 1Yeah, because he was kind of a bit of a lawnmower well, literally, yeah, horses are lawnmowers.
Speaker 2That was my lawn mowing plan when I thought he was going to live with us was just let the horse eat it you know, that would have saved me so much time we could get goats.
Speaker 1We could a little baby goat yeah, I mean it's not too late it's not, that could be kind of great.
Speaker 2Okay, we'll discuss this offline. Should we get goats?
Speaker 1let's let the listeners let us know you decide whether or not we make a horrible financial decision and buy goats yeah, truly, I am already like, yeah, no more animals.
Speaker 2um, in other news, I am loving drawing zombie portraits and I really want to know if anybody would actually pay me for one, although I'm also feeling really conflicted about, um, selling my art, because I've really been enjoying just making it for people and giving it to them. Yeah, and I think that there's something to be said about not commodifying what you love and instead, like moving towards a gifting economy where, like, I give things to people and then, hopefully in the future, when it's the apocalypse, I will be able to draw you a cat or a zombie and you will feed me.
Speaker 1Part of me feels that way about my book Really. Yeah, there are times where I'm like I just want people to read it, I don't really care. I'm never going to make enough money on it to be like, ooh, this was worth doing it for the money that's never going to happen.
Speaker 2Recoup the hard costs of it would be, I think, a reasonable goal.
Speaker 1But there are times when I'm like what if I just give it away? But here's the thing that makes me not do that, which is that I found that the psychology of that is that people don't value something that's free.
Speaker 2Well, we need to decolonize our minds.
Speaker 1Then, if that's true because it's not free, it's a gift- and while I would probably have no problem giving away free copies to people who listen to this podcast, that would be a different thing.
Speaker 1That'd be me gifting it to somebody yeah, we've talked about making an email list, so when things like that come out, yeah, um, you can be the first to know yeah, but um, but in general, like I feel like the best, the best route is actually make it more expensive than it's supposed to be, so that people are like, oh, this is an expensive book it's a a $25 book Must be good. Must be the best book I've ever read. Yeah.
Speaker 2Hard cut because Leah said an asshole thing and, yes, I just talked to myself in the third person because I have drank three quarters of my alcoholic beverage at this point.
Speaker 1Oh, alcohol Leah's coming out. America Leah, it's happening, it's coming right around that corner.
Speaker 2I'm turning, I've been infected?
Speaker 1Why are you wearing an American flag shirt and a beer koozie hat?
Speaker 2Oh, like with the tubes that says you're not as think, as I drunk I am, I'll fit in better with your family at reunions now, and why are you holding a gun in each hand and shooting it wildly into the air?
Speaker 1I don't have a response to this and what is that? New truck in the in the driveway oh, the truck is mine.
Speaker 2Yes, the truck alone. Yeah, I want a truck.
Speaker 1Yeah, I love a truck. It's lifted, it's got some big chrome rims on it and underbody glow lights. No and uh and he's. It's playing really loud modern country music.
Speaker 2That's about dirt roads you know, I find really interesting. Since this is a casual dead episode, I'm gonna go there. So I think I've mentioned before that one of my current obsessions is watching uh cow hoof trimming videos, and there's this guy called the hoof gp uh, who I think is Scottish and he always has American country music playing in his videos and I find it sort of disturbing.
Speaker 1Well, is there Scottish country music.
Speaker 2I don't know, maybe it is Scottish country music and I don't know, because I don't listen to country music or listen to new country music.
Speaker 1I should say you know, do you think people should check out hoof trimming videos?
Speaker 2If you like pimple popping videos, you will fucking love hoof trimming videos. I don't like pimple popping videos. This came as a surprise to me because I think it's because my horse, who passed away atlas, used to have abscesses all the time in his feet. He had really shitty feet, so this has been an opportunity for me to really learn like what you do. Yeah, uh, from the point of view of the farrier, not from the point of view of like me, little old me who would have to like soak his feet in warm epsom salt baths when he would have temper tantrums because he didn't want to put his foot on the ground.
Speaker 2It's a good time, um, but yeah, I've really enjoyed it because it's farm stuff and I will always be a farm kid, uh, in my mind. But if you like pimple popping videos, I think you'll find this very satisfying. There's a lot of like before and afters, like here's this really sad limping cow. Here's this cow that's not limping anymore because they helped relieve some pain, so that's kind of cool. But it's also depressing because you see all the baby cows who aren't with their moms because their moms are being forcibly milked.
Speaker 2Yeah, Turned into meat yeah turned into meat and forcibly impregnated to make more milk every year.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah, I find those videos to be very fun. My favorites are whenever there's an abscess that just bursts when he's mid-trim.
Speaker 2Oh, it's so gross and so satisfying.
Speaker 1Because you know that they're probably in so much pain. And then, as soon as it goes, it's like oh, I bet that felt good.
Speaker 2I know. What I've learned is that a lot of the cows have to have all these issues are the result of, basically like, selective breeding over the years, because, uh, buffalo don't have these issues because their feet are much harder, oh um, but we have selectively bred cows to have shitty feet. Unsurprising, because my horse was also selectively bred. I was like you had. I, you were a200 pound animal on a little fucking teacup foot who thought this was a good idea to breed this as a trait of your breed. But this actually brings us, I think, to our topic du jour. Yeah.
Speaker 2The top 10 things we've yearned for Luxuries, yeah. In a zombie wasteland I would not be able to dissociate at 3 o'clock in the morning watching hoof trimming videos.
Speaker 1I don't think. Think it was a zombie wasteland, no, but maybe, maybe you would get into hoof trimming yourself because, like how many qualified?
Speaker 2people in the area but there's lots of animals around here that would need their hooves they put them in these like really crazy contraptions called crushes, so they're it's impossible for them to move and then, like the machine, puts their leg up. And if they didn't have that, people would get really badly hurt. So I don't want to do that, no, thanks.
Speaker 1Well, I mean, I feel like you might be the most qualified person in our media area because you've watched so many of them. How many other people, how many of our neighbors do you think have watched hoof trimming videos?
Speaker 2I don't know. I mean, I didn't like search this out.
Speaker 1It just was sent to me and then I became obsessed. We're just surrounded by by rich people who have animals that they, you know, pay the farrier to come. They pay other people to look after.
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah, I don't know they're gonna need us but that's something I'd miss, but I don't think it's a top 10. I think that's a warm-up I could live without those videos if I never saw one of those videos again, I'd be fine. It's just that I opened facebook and now the only reason I go on facebook is to see cow hoof trimming videos.
Speaker 1Or go to tom 10 farm and sanctuary that I donate to every month and see all the cute animals yeah, hanging out I mean, you know, I guess, I guess a broader one would just be that you wouldn't have the internet to uh, to disconnect from life I don't know.
Speaker 2I mean, like I think, in the immediate beginning of the apocalypse, when we lose the internet, I would be really sad, but I think long term, checking my phone every 10 minutes oh my god we'd be like, ah, how do, how do we get the water to start running again?
Speaker 2and I'd be like how long you check uh youtube, oh fuck this is why community is important, though, because somebody could know that around you, but we have learned to not rely on each other. That's true for knowledge, but I uh, yeah, I would definitely have a full panic attack, and I think it would probably take me six months to wean myself like a baby cow from internet, and then I think I'd be fine and I'd probably really enjoy it, because it's not really. We're not supposed to be doing that.
Life at the Heartland Diner
Speaker 1I've kind of I've weaned myself off during the work seasons because I don't really have time to do anything. So I found that in the warm, the summer months, as I call them from beginning of spring to the end of fall is summer for me. I find that during those times I I really need the internet less. Um, I'm making less posts on threads, um, I'm less I'm doing, I'm checking instagram a lot less. Um, I kind of just do that stuff on the weekend now. Uh, I don't like it, but it's my life and that's the life that I live is like I I can't look at my phone while I'm driving. No, but you, but you do?
Speaker 2You did look at your phone when we were driving to Burlington and I was like Dan yeah, what did I look up?
Speaker 2I don't remember, but you did look at it briefly and I was scared for my life. You know what I'm going to miss? What, uh? And actually I think this one's kind of imminent uh, cars I don't think I know that, like in the zombie apocalypse genre, a lot of the time we have vehicles and people are obsessed with like finding gasoline. I really think that's unrealistic. I think we're gonna be moving to bikes or walking or back to horse transportation.
Speaker 2Yeah, view of the apocalypse is like we have to mad max style fight for the gasoline so that we can drive our muscle cars that have armor on them yeah, it is really stereotypical american, but I think like cars again are sort of on that list of things I really find useful, especially where we live, but probably aren't good for the environment. Not, probably aren't good for the environment.
Speaker 1Yeah, we have too many we could share well, if everybody's zombies, the impact is much less so. Not as bad, true, um it's, it would be. It would be very useful for going on supply runs and I wouldn't really want to go into any place that I didn't know was a safe zone without a way to get out quickly yeah, I did like in the walking dead later seasons where they like took cars and retrofit them into horse carriages I thought that was really smart and felt kind of realistic, but you'd have to find.
Speaker 2What's funny is like uh, in today's day and age it's not common to have draft horses anymore that can really pull carriages or pull heavy things. So in some ways we are less prepared for the apocalypse. Because that, because horses have become kind of like, um, lawn ornaments yeah, I don't like saying that, because then they become objects but they're not, they're not working anymore. Yeah, in the same way, and draft horses is like if you have a draft horse, it's typically unless you're amish or mennonite, it's not to do work, it's like to do competitions.
Speaker 1Yeah and there'd be a lot of that where we live, because we're very close to a place where people go every week to do horse competitions. Yeah, so we might be able to find stuff like that, but it's true that, like these horses probably wouldn't be accustomed to like working every day in the field. They'd be like what, what the hell? I gotta compete every day? Yeah, and there's no, there's no ribbons, nobody's brushing me in between competitions yeah, this is bullshit.
Speaker 2Unless you're like a city horse, carriage horse which, by the way, is the worst life. Don't ride those things. I have don't definitely done it myself, so like if you have no judgment, but I'm just saying like if you read their lifestyle, it's pretty horrible. Also, we used horses in mines and stuff for a long time. They would never see the light of day their whole life.
Speaker 1Pretty much the horsepower was a way to calculate how much work a horse could do. It involved lifting a certain amount of weight up a mine shaft 33 feet Wow.
Speaker 2Really, that's the origin of the term.
Speaker 1Yeah, there'd be some stuff in a bucket that would be on a pulley system and the horse would pull the bucket on the pulley system and it would come up and the amount of time it took for the horse to do that was the calculation for one horsepower.
Speaker 2The species has done some heinous shit. Truly, yeah, wow, that's brutal. Let's go back to our list of top 10 things. This is a big one. This was actually where this idea was inspired. Yeah, there is this place. I'm going to name it because you should go. It's quite a ways from us, but we make the trip every week because it's the only thing like it within like an hour radius of our home. It's called the heartland diner and it has a full-blown regular menu, breakfast menu and a vegan breakfast menu. Yeah, and we go every week and we get the vegans, get her done too.
Speaker 1We don't have to order anymore, we just walk in and they're like the usual and like yes, two coffees regulars now with oat milk, and the vegans get her done too.
Speaker 2Which is like, yes, two coffees regulars now with oat milk, and vegans get her done too. Which is a gargantuan amount of hash browns, two vegan sausages, tofu scramble and four silver dollar pancakes oh my god, they're pancakes yeah, and I mean, this is also like you're.
Speaker 1You're not getting corn syrup with.
Speaker 2This is no vermont maple syrup oh, it's so good and, honestly, it's what gets me out of bed most days of the week, because I just think, okay, I'm gonna make it to saturday. We're gonna go to the diner also. The diner is like this beautiful political haven and bizarre place with, like, there's dinosaur toys all over it. Yeah, like I don't even know, they have hundreds of dinosaur toys. Uh, there are posters from broadway musicals, because the owner's dad was like a director or a producer of musicals and won a bunch of awards. And then there's things like um bernie sanders drawn as a mermaid, black lives matter signs everywhere, free palestine signs everywhere. Um, a life-size bust of bernie sanders, a life-size bust of, uh, dr fauci and a life-size bust of Bernie Sanders, a life-size bust of Dr Fauci and a life-size bust of Obama. It's just a fabulous, hilarious place.
Speaker 1Yeah, it's small though.
Speaker 2It's small.
Speaker 1Yeah, you got to get there early.
Speaker 2Yeah, it's the only reason I get up early in the morning too, is the diner, so we get up-.
Speaker 1We would not get out of bed no Before noon if it weren't for breakfast if, if it weren't for breakfast and every time I almost questioned, I'm like, nope, it's worth it, we're going. You know the the thing that brought me the most, the most dread when, when making the shift to eating vegan was like I really love breakfast, diner food yeah like I. I like it greasy and bad for me.
Speaker 1Agreed um, I want it to make me regret eating it, and this fulfills that when you eat it all, when this popped up, I was so happy because, like, I don't know where else we could get anything like that.
Speaker 2I mean, big cities have places that are vegan breakfast places. There's a place in Arizona that has like incredible breakfast wraps. I forget, forget what it's called.
Speaker 1So I'm really sorry. I can't give it a shout out, arizona um, but it is not common.
Speaker 2I mean like we are rural, rural middle of nowhere, so to have like a full two-page breakfast menu there isn't even really a pizza place we can go to. No, not really no, I mean it's okay, there's one that's okay. Yeah, um, yeah, I mean food. Our food options here are limited, and then they're extra limited because we choose to eat plant things because of climate change and because I like animals. Yeah, um, not for my head I like not being dead.
Speaker 1I you know it's for me, it's partially for my health yeah and I'm really glad that I did, because I feel like I might not have lived if. I continued eating the way that I was eating before.
Speaker 2That's true. I've had some side positive benefits. I didn't expect my eyesight got better shockingly when I went vegan and the optometrist confirmed that. That's why, because I have so much what's the word? Antioxidants from the amount of vegetables that I eat. But that's a sidebar for me. I think the point is I love heartland diner. It's where we go every week. I would be very sad, um, if it closed.
Speaker 1Yeah but something that I said when we were there and we thought about this is I think they'd still be open what do you picture as like a post-apocalypse heartland diner environment? Well, first of all, outside they would have a whole bunch of like spears and caltrops to keep the zombies out. What's?
Speaker 1a caltrop uh, caltrops are like um, they're big crisscrossy metal things that like they put on on beach heads to like keep tanks from rolling up and there's a smaller version that's like fist size that uh police can deploy from the back of their cars to pop tires. It's kind of like you know the game Jacks yes.
Speaker 2Yeah, I've seen them, I just didn't know the name.
Speaker 1Jacks are caltrops.
Speaker 2Okay, so you'd have caltrops and spears everywhere to keep the zombies out. Yeah, how would you pay for food.
Speaker 1Oh well, you know it'd be a, it'd be a barter system, because they need, they need supplies to keep it going. So you'd show up, um, and we, we would show up and we'd be like we have homemade tofu yes um, we'd be supplying tofu. Also, I'd be growing mushrooms and lentils. Yeah, we would provide the lentils for sure I'd show up with a bunch of Lion's Mane mushrooms and I'd be like here we go for some Nuggies.
Speaker 2They would make the Lion's Mane Nuggies for us, yeah.
Speaker 1And I think they would keep it going as long as they could as a service to the community.
Speaker 2Yeah, they are very community-oriented. I love the diner. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Do you think that we'd be able to keep eating how we choose to eat now in an apocalyptic?
Speaker 1scenario? I don't think so. I think we'd have to eat a lot of squirrels.
Speaker 2See, I would mourn my ability to have that choice, because it is a choice to be able to be vegan and it's also a privilege that we have access to. Some people don't have those options. It's true, and I really like not eating animals. I grew up eating a lot of animals and I grew up raising animals and then putting them on the slaughter truck.
Speaker 2So like I'm very familiar with the process you grew up in farm area I know how it goes I think I would feel a lot I grew up hunting yeah, I feel like I would feel better if it was hunted, yeah, uh than from a factory farm situation, which is pretty much all farms nowadays, except for there's a few cute farms in Vermont.
Speaker 1I think I mean Vermont would be a really great haven for a lot of reasons, but I think one thing that it lacks is good farmland land to sustain a large group of people, because there's so many mountains, there's so much trees and shade and uh and rocks, um it's it's difficult to grow a field of food I think there are ways I I really believe, like if you can have urban agriculture people are growing food on top of, like city buildings you could.
Speaker 2If everybody had a garden, I think it's really true, like if everyone has a garden, I think we'd be okay I think right away though, in the early stages of the apocalypse, uh, it could be tough, difficult, yeah, yeah yeah, I think one of the one of my zombie apocalypse goals is to have a sustainable food source that is plant-based yeah, from our own area yeah, mushrooms would be a great replacement for meat products and, if you can grow.
Speaker 2I figured out a long time ago that if we each had 13 lentil plants, so 26 lentil plants would provide all the protein we need in a year.
Speaker 1Really.
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah, we should grow lentils this year, but lentils are a lot of work to shell. Oh, so they from that way. I also want to try and grow chickpeas. Yeah, yeah, let's do it, okay? Well, again, uh see, uh, the first section of this thing where I talked about my feet being fucked up. These are the things that are made really difficult for me to do right now, and you're working all the time well, you know what that?
Speaker 1that'll be our job, and that's how we're going to get breakfast at the heartland diner yeah, okay, let's go to uh thing number four we would be so sad about dentists.
Speaker 2Mean there might still be dentists alive in the zombie apocalypse.
Speaker 1They'd probably travel around in a covered wagon that has a big tooth on top. Does the tooth spin? Step right up, get your teeth pulled out here.
Speaker 2Would they sell you snake oil or would they sell you good things? They would.
Speaker 1Some of them would sell snake oil for sure. They'd be like try this elixir, it'll cure all of your cavities and then it turns you into a zombie rebuilds your tooth enamel.
Speaker 2I kind of feel like I got sold snake oil at the dentist this week because they sold me prescription toothpaste. Yeah, yeah, they're like use this every night and you'll never get cavities.
Speaker 1Basically but isn't that true with all toothpaste?
Speaker 2no, it's like a special prescription. Toothpaste cost me five bucks a month. So I was like fuck it, I don't want cavities. But then the that was the cleaning person I forget what their name is dental hygienist yeah, convinced me. But then the dentist guy came in. He was like you have never had a cavity. You have like incredible teeth, you're so lucky. And I was like, well, I have had one. Actually it's interesting that you don't know that. But cool, yeah, apparently that's pretty good for me.
Speaker 1They don't know anything about me every time I go there yeah, well, I should have looked at my x-rays.
Speaker 2Maybe you just didn't notice the one thing. But I will say again, speaking of privilege, I had dental care my entire life. Yeah, I did not.
Speaker 1There was a brief stint, maybe like five years in the us, where I didn't have dental care so I I didn't have dental care for the longest time and I had impacted wisdom teeth and my option was to ignore it for 10 years until it was unbearable so you've lived a world without dentists yeah, and it sucks.
Speaker 1um, I can't imagine a worse fate than having an impacted wisdom tooth or needing to have a tooth pulled and not have anyone trained around. You know people might judge me for this and you know I have a little bit of shame around it, but I've pulled my own teeth before.
Speaker 2If they judge you, that means that they're in the camp of people who judge poor people for being poor. Yeah, if they judge you.
Speaker 1That means that they're in the camp of people who judge poor people for being poor. Yeah, and you know, what's hilarious about that is that I've not just one tooth but a few teeth, and it's because I didn't have health insurance or dental insurance when I went to get my wisdom teeth removed. They're like, oh yeah, you kind of fucked up these teeth. And I'm like, yeah, I pulled them, so they had to extract the roots of them and also some other ones that got damaged because of my impacted wisdom teeth. Oh my God. And they're like, yeah, we're going to have to pull these ones. I'm like, oh great, how much is that going to cost? They're like, well, it's going to be about $125. I'm like what Per tooth? And they're like, yeah, I'm like all this time it's been like $100.
Speaker 2I think that is a very American thing, though, if you're poor in the United States, and because most people are not not most, but many people are not insured, especially dental insurance Most people don't have dental insurance in the United States, I shouldn't say most. A lot of people don't have dental insurance in the united, I shouldn't say most a lot of people don't have dental insurance in the united states.
Speaker 1It's the same thing like when I broke my ankle you just believe you can't afford it, yeah, and so you don't go, and that's why we have a shorter life expectancy yeah, and, to be fair, like all the other dental work that I needed was thousands and thousands of dollars that I I would still be paying for if we didn't have insurance yeah, I.
Speaker 2When I got the job I have now, which is excellent benefits, I got the top tier dental insurance because I knew dan had a lot of catch-up to do so I'm over here laying on the floor being like you're in my misery.
Speaker 1Yeah, you're in so much pain.
Speaker 2It was terrible. I'm glad that's done.
Speaker 1But then you couldn't drive for three weeks because you had um vertigo yeah, things they don't tell you is that there's a possibility that if you have your wisdom teeth removed, that you might just be dizzy for three weeks.
Speaker 1That's very not talked about, and I think there's so many things about me in my life that I don't think anybody has to deal with, so they don't talk about it. Me being dizzy is bad because it means I literally couldn't drive. Driving is my job and it's probably the only reason that this got triggered, because I went back to work after my wisdom teeth were removed and it wasn't until I was going down the side of a mountain in a dump truck that all of a sudden, everything just started to spin and I was like whoa, I'm going to die, and it was a wild situation where I thought I was passing out. And it was a wild situation where I thought I was passing out. I was doing breathing techniques like a World War II fighter pilot to try to keep blood moving into my head before I realized that I was just dizzy.
Speaker 1Being alive is dangerous. And then I had to drive like a mile down this mountain before I could pull over and once I did I just pulled in and pulled the emergency brake and just rolled out of the truck and I'm just like I can't stand.
Speaker 2Oh my God. And then I got a call from you. You're like, I'm in the hospital and I was in the middle of some kind of work meeting because that old job that I had was like never ending meetings. That was the job. That was like the 60, 80 hour work weeks and you know you've been indoctrinated. When I was like should I go to the hospital, my-worker was like leah, you're in shock, go and even I was like I'll be okay I'm just gonna go to the emergency room and that's the second time I've seen you in a hospital.
Speaker 2That breaks my little heart, seeing you in a little hospital gown. What's crazy is like you're such a like a giant of a man, a gentle giant, and then when you're in that hospital, gown in a bed, you look so small. It's really weird.
Speaker 1I've become a little tiny boy.
Speaker 2Yeah, you look so vulnerable.
Speaker 1And I just want to smush you. I'm like I'm in a hospital bed. I'm like, look, I'm sick.
Speaker 2Yeah, I just want to snuggle up in there with you. I need somebody to fix me.
Speaker 1Oh, hospitals, let's move on. Yeah, what else? Let's move on.
Speaker 2Yeah, what else? What's next on our list? Dan Dog food delivery. Oh my God, yeah. When your brother told me about Chewycom also, I should get a sponsorship for this it changed my life. I used to go to PetSmart. I used to go to PetSmart every month and get the things I needed, yeah, and then some other shit. I didn't, because I was there, and now it just arrives.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2It just arrives.
Speaker 1It's probably one of the only things that we can really order and have show up.
Speaker 2We can't order food for ourselves and have it show up at our house but we can order food for our dogs yeah, and I'm such a win. And their dentistics, their favorite things. They both just looked at me. Oh, they're both so sleepy right now, dan, yeah, they're sleeping.
Speaker 1They're very helpful as podcast friends. Yeah, I think we could lump a whole bunch of, uh convenience delivery items in there, like ordering things from amazon amazon's the devil, but I would miss the devil, yeah for sure it's.
Speaker 2It's the devil I need yeah, I mean, it's the world we live in now, again, like we have chosen to live somewhere really remote, our shopping options are limited. I can't walk a bunch, so delivery is kind of how we get most of what we need at this point. Um, unless I feel like going around one of those drivey things in walmart, which is fun. Yeah, sometimes I hate the backing up beeping though. Um, true, this is an important one. I just thought about this number six. I would really miss the luxury of smelling good.
Speaker 1Yeah, I don't suffer from that as much because I have diminished sense of smell, yeah, but I think just like basic hygiene becomes so much more difficult.
Speaker 1I mean, this was my life when I was a kid and I lived in a log cabin.
Speaker 1My parents, way back before it was cool, built a cabin on my grandfather's land and we lived off grid like no electricity. Water was provided by a hand a literal hand pump that we installed inside the house, and doing things like bathing and going to the bathroom were so unnecessarily complex to the bathroom were so unnecessarily complex, um, to the point where, like every little thing that goes wrong it's just like a little bit extra. That just kind of breaks you in those moments where, like you know, it's negative 20 degrees out and you're like I need to go to the bathroom so I'll go out, and then the uh, the toilet seat in the outhouse is freezing cold. So you're like, okay, let's warm this up behind the stove, and so you gotta wait inside by the stove for it to warm up so that your butt doesn't freeze to it. And then you go out there and then, like I don't know, like a deer wanders in while you're in there and you're like get out of here, deer. And the deer, just like, freaks out and starts running around inside of this little tiny box with you and kicks you in the face uh, you know, all these little things add up life in the log cabin was very dramatic
Speaker 2yeah and the weasel come and sleep with you and you're oh, willie the weasel.
Speaker 1I gotta tell people about willie the weasel, but he was pretty great. We had bad mouse problems. I remember one time um, they all lived under our fridge. We had a propane, a propane powered refrigerator, um, and it was like one of the warmest places for a rodent. And there I remember that there was this one time that suddenly there was, like I thought there was, a carpet. Oh, oh, my God, it was a horde, a zombie horde of mice, and they were just like rippling. As I ran across the floor, my mom freaked out and jumped on a couch and I'm like they're cute.
Speaker 2I mean mice are very cute but I do have an instinctual fear of them and I do, like actually was saying this to my friend the other day I was like how did we live like we live for most of our existence without any kind of pest control? We just like lived with mice well then, uh I guess they gave us a bubonic plague willie the weasel moved in.
Speaker 1when he moved into the loft on the second floor and we welcome willie the weasel because he ate all the mice and he even even after we moved out of the cabin and moved back to civilization, willy remained in the house and when we would go back to go hunting he would be there.
Speaker 2So for pest control in the Apocalypse we need either a weasel or a cat or something that eats mice.
Speaker 1Okay, A cat would be easier to get. Weasels are a little bit harder to wrangle.
Speaker 2Remember our friends that owned the farm where Atlas lived. They had two pet weasels are a little bit harder to wrangle. Remember our friends that own the farm where atlas lived, they had two pet weasels. No, they had two pet ferrets and apparently they would like they'd collect their ferret poop and like put it in places that mice would like, and apparently it deters them yeah, like that's that's why animals smell each other's poop because, like, that's how they information tell what it is.
Speaker 1And if a mouse smells that, they know that that's a predator. Yeah, that's wild um snakes, we can have snakes. Yeah, um oh yeah, willie the weasel was great. I quick story, quick story time.
Speaker 2Uh, we brought this guy to our hunting smelling good because this has gone real sideways.
Speaker 1Yes, okay um, we're talking about willie the weasel.
Speaker 2Okay, sidebar story did you smell bad, no, really weasel, like your smell he loved our smell.
Speaker 1So that's part of the story right here. So we go back to go hunting. We all know willie the weasel. He lives there more than we do. It's more his house than ours and when we're there, willie will sometimes come out of the loft, come down the stairs and look at us. And when it's really cold at night, willie will sometimes get really curious about these strange animals inside of his house that are inside these warm bags, and he'll crawl inside of your sleeping bag with you, oh God. And we know that this is a possibility. He's a wild animal, so, like the best course of action is to just let him do it and don't freak out.
Speaker 1Okay, because that's when you like get scratched or bitten is if you freak out yeah you know he's choosing to come and snuggle with you, so just let it happen that was your instruction as a child just chill with willie and that's also the instructions that we gave to this guy that came to visit from New York City.
Speaker 1Oh my God, it was all in his Eddie Bauer brand new orange hunter camouflage Wow, brand new gear. He thought that he was going to a hunting lodge and we're like, well, it's a little bit rustic. And he gets there and he's like, yeah, no shit. We're like, well, it's a little bit rustic. And he gets there and he's like, yeah, no shit. He wanted to know where the TV was because he intended on watching football. And we're like, there's not even electricity bud, wow. And so we tell him about Willie the Weasel. He thinks that we're pranking him and he's just like, okay, sure, whatever. And in the middle of the night we hear shrieking and somebody violently thrashing around on the floor. Oh, no, poor willie, there's an animal. There's an animal in my sleeping bag. And he gets up and he's like throwing his sleeping bag. And, uh, we're like weasel, I don't just willie, and he's like I thought you were.
Speaker 2Wasn't your shirt was just one weasel. It was just one weasel. At some point he did have a-.
Speaker 1At some point he did have a family there, but we didn't. That was only for a couple of years and we don't know what happened to them.
Speaker 2Oh, that's kind of sad. They might have moved out.
Speaker 1I hope so. Yeah, but anyways, willie the weasel, he was perfectly fine. The guy from New York City left the next day and we never heard from him again. Wow, he went to a hotel room.
Speaker 2This is a classic city slicker story.
Speaker 1He went to a hotel room so that he could watch football, and he never came back.
Speaker 2You know I love all animals, but I don't know how I would feel about a weasel randomly crawling into my. It's an experience.
Speaker 1Yeah, but you know, like we, we we already knew willie, so it was almost like a pet. Yeah, that makes sense, but it was also a pet that, like you know, you couldn't like go pet willie no, he wouldn't choose to come to you, yeah if he chose to come to you, then you're okay, as long as you don't scare them oh willie, how big was he, uh, I don't know like a foot and a half long I keep forgetting.
Speaker 2You've basically lived a life without all these luxuries. Yeah, back to smelling bad. Yeah, um, the reason why I put this on the list is because humanity has a long history of smelling bad. I do wonder if we just all become nose blind that does happen.
Personal Hygiene and Comfort at Home
Speaker 1So that happened when I was in Iraq. Yeah, when we were on the trail you know, we were on the Thunder Run the ride to Baghdad. It was three weeks without a shower. It was three weeks without washing clothes or changing your clothes. Really, you changed the important stuff, but like underwear and socks, yeah, but like there's a point where you're out you gotta replace you got.
Speaker 2Did you start doing like the inside out? Yeah, oh, I mean the skin stains on the outside. Yeah, nice.
Speaker 1Um, you know, you did that a couple times, you know it's like. Now I'm back to the ones that were already inside out, like if, if you, if you have a good rotation, they're already dried out by then. But anyways, when we got there, uh, we were able to shower.
Speaker 2I remember this story. It's a good one.
Speaker 1Um and the, and it was marvelous because, like the first shower that you have in three weeks, it is something miraculous and wonderful. You've been wearing body armor, uh, load-bearing equipment, a fucking rucksack, kevlar, a rifle, like everything's slung on you. Your whole body just aches and like it's like the hot water just washes it all off and it goes down the train. You're just like, oh my god, this feels so nice. I feel that way every time I shower and it goes down the train. You're just like oh my God, this feels so nice.
Speaker 2I feel that way every time I shower and I've never gone three weeks. I've gone like a week because I've gone camping and you don't realize how bad you smell, because until you get in your car and you close the doors and you're just contained with your smell.
Speaker 1Well, here's the thing I didn't realize how bad I smelled until after my shower and I had to put my clothes back on. Oh no, and they were just like hanging on me and damp.
Speaker 2Oh and it was.
Speaker 1it's hard to describe. It's just like. It's like was I made of beef jerky? I mean kind of you are meat, it's just. It's just such a powerful, strong smell and it's just like how did I not know?
Speaker 2Yeah, and deodorant only goes so far. You can't like Us. People used in the past used to wear a lot of perfumes to basically cover up your stink.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2But yeah, I guess smelling good goes along with running hot water. Let's just count that all as one. The ability to get clean easily would be so missed. Yeah yeah likely, you're not gonna have hot water.
Speaker 1You're gonna have cold water at best. I would be very uncomfortable.
Speaker 2I would boil some water in a pot of some kind on a fire. At least get it warm. Have a washcloth and whatever soap I can find, because I think you'll be able to find soap pretty easily, that's how we did. You can always make soap too eventually. And then I would just like you know, get the important bits.
Speaker 1Yeah, I actually had a whole plan worked out for how to make both soap and explosives from zombies. Wow, yeah, it's an intricate process, but you can render animal fat into tallow. Yeah, you can render animal fat into tallow and add nitric acid, which creates you can then create glycerin, and with that glycerin you can either make soap or nitroglycerin.
Speaker 2That's a great combination. I think this is something you think. I want to stock up on coconut oil while it's still accessible, because you can make soap out of coconut oil too. Yeah and lye, yeah, um yeah. So let's get some lye and some coconut oil, and then we'll be okay yeah, and you know what?
Speaker 1um, if you don't have anything water does a big difference. Yeah, sandal, scrape it right off. Yeah, natural exfoliant. What an episode we're doing let's move on.
Speaker 2Yeah, what's what's number seven, dan, our bed. Oh my God, we, I have we ever talked about our bed? Because this is a very important topic and all you listeners are like why would I want to hear about your bed? You, you want to trust me. What's our bed like, dan? Let's let's start at the beginning.
Speaker 1OK, I don't think that we could sleep in anything. That's not a king size bed. We've tried and it just sucks.
Speaker 2It really does. We both kind of starfish at night and like we cuddle with our feet in our hands, like we do a lot of feet cuddling yeah, which might sound weird, but like I love touching your feet in bed.
Speaker 1Yeah, with your feet.
Speaker 2Yeah.
Luxuries in a Post-Apocalyptic World
Speaker 1Yeah. But our bed specifically, we have an adjustable frame, so like we can make it glorious different angles.
Speaker 2You know the zero, the marketing term that we we put it at is quote unquote, zero g. It's like basically you're in space, yeah like if you're sleeping no pressure points, which is not true.
Speaker 1There's obviously pressure points, but much less and ever since then I'm like anytime that we've been required to sleep on anything that's flat, I'm just like, ah, we gotta sleep like peasants, yep, and like immediately like. I'm like, ah, my back hurts too much, I can't wait to get home so that I don't have to sleep on the this fucking two by four also any bed that has like real bounce to it and like you can feel the other person moving.
Speaker 2I'm offended, I'm like I don't want to feel you move in your sleep, like I do not feel you move most of the time in my sleep you know so so many zombie apocalypse fantasies involves like hitting the road, like we got to get out of here so that we can survive.
Speaker 1It's like we're we. We need to stay where we are because that's where our bed is. Yeah, and I feel like I just can't sleep and we have anywhere.
Speaker 2We have to have a backup plan for how to make the battery work so that it will go up and down yeah, we've run a generator just to be able to adjust the bed yeah, if you're in the market for a bed, get yourself an adjustable bed.
Speaker 2We have a tempur-pedic because when before we got this. So what happened was we were not technically in the market for a bed and this mattress guy got us because we knew we would eventually need one. But what was happening is like both of us were in a ton of pain. The bed that we were using was super old. I was bent over constantly trying to help atlas towards the end of his life with his feet issues and yes, I do know there's irony that he had feet issues and now I have feet issues.
Speaker 1But whatever, and I have a lower sacral lumbar strain.
Speaker 2Yeah so from the army lots of, lots of pain, Like we were both just waking up in extreme pain. We're like let's just go look and see like what a bed even costs.
Speaker 1I just take painkillers before going to sleep.
Speaker 2Yeah, so we can save and buy one. This guy got us like he, it was his fault, I'd never been in an adjustable bed before. He was like go try this one. So we lay in it and like this is great, like just lying flat. And then he was like wait for it. And then he pressed the button and got us to zero g and I was like, oh, my fucking god, I'm never going back yeah, I don't care this costs.
Speaker 1I remember we were laying in it and I was like, okay, this is all right and then uh, but then we hit the button to go flat again.
Speaker 2I'm like oh no, never, never again, yeah, yeah, it has ruined us like I don't want to travel anymore because I'm like what is the bed going to be? And this is the height of privilege. I would just like to say that we have an adjustable bed, but if you can afford an adjustable bed, um, or you're in the market for a new bed, I recommend it. You can also ask them if they have any deals from, like, return beds, because it sounds kind of creepy, but our bed was like a tried for 90 days and returned bed, so we got a really good deal on it, um, and it was worth it, uh, let's move on.
Speaker 2This one's, this one's just for you, because I have perfect eyes contact lenses I would like to say this is not a luxury item, this is a requirement yeah, but it is something that I've thought about in my, in my story is like what if?
Speaker 1what? It like because. What if you have to leave your house immediately because there's zombies? Right, it should be in our. Go back. You run out and all you have is the contacts that are in your eyeballs.
Speaker 2Oh, my god nightmare.
Speaker 1Um, you don't have your glasses, you don't have your contact cleaning solution. At some point you got to take those things out. And then what?
Speaker 2I mean you cannot take them out. I know people who just including my sister who would just like sleep in them the same ones for months on end. Not good for your eyes, yeah. Also could be really painful. I get dry eyes really easily, so this would be bad. But yeah, I technically I would say this is like a need less of a luxury for someone like me, but I think it would be like a luxury in the apocalypse and I wouldn't.
Speaker 2I would also miss sunglasses, because if I ran out of contacts my prescription then I would have to wear my glasses and just hope those don't break, which means I can't wear sunglasses, which means I'm going to be squinting in pain every day because I have really sensitive light eyes because my ancestors are basically not made to be outside. Like I mentioned before in previous podcasts, I am a vampire and, uh, I am melanin deficient, including in my eye. I don't know if it's melanin in your eyes. I think it is, is it? Yeah, either way, I was designed to live somewhere that was cloudy all the fucking time, yeah, and cold um, I also have incredibly light, sensitive eyes, to the point where I actually actually I can.
Speaker 1I can see in the dark, um, and it's it's something that I'm trying to get a service connection for from the VA, because I feel like it just happened when I was in Kuwait. I don't know why, but if there's any amount of light outside, I need polarized sunglasses. Just regular sunglasses doesn't cut it. If I don't have polarized sunglasses, my brain explodes.
Speaker 2It's so painful that I can't even keep my eyes open yeah, you couldn't even keep your eyes open yesterday and we were doing the my swearing in ceremony and the lights were flickering at a certain thing you need your sunglasses on inside yeah, we were inside and they had fluorescent lights that were like at some weird refresh rate and I'm just like I cannot keep my eyes open anymore.
Speaker 1I'm just. I'm the only the only person there sitting there with sunglasses on, like I'm some kind of cool guy or something what's next on our list?
Speaker 2dan chocolate and coffee this is real the little things in life oh also things like clementines, bananas, avocados, any kind of fruit that's grown in the south any kind of actual nutrition that would keep you from getting scurvy. Yeah, I mean, maybe you could get apples up here, you could get berries in the summertime, you'd have options. You just wouldn't have access to things like chocolate or coffee or avocados. What else? Coconut oil.
Speaker 1Coffee would be a big one for me. Yeah, teas, I mean, I don't't need coffee to live, but it does go a long way to make me happy chocolate is um really important to me.
Speaker 2I make sure to always buy fair trade um chocolate, because a lot of chocolate is comes from slavery. Fun fact it's a slave labor. Yeah, yeah, uh. But uh, yeah, like I said I think in a previous episode is odds are we will not have easy access to chocolate in the next 25 years or so and I will miss it greatly. I feel like we're just going to be going back to a different time.
Speaker 1Yeah, we might, if we're lucky.
Speaker 2We're like every year for Christmas. My mom would put clementines in our stockings because it's like a tradition in our family, because back in the day clementine was like like when my grandpa was a kid, a clementine is wealth and, honestly, like we laugh about that, but that's probably kind of how it should be.
Speaker 2Yeah, you know, if we want to live in a more aligned with, like, the natural world around us, but I that doesn't mean I won't miss chocolate and the luxury of chocolate. Oh, oreo cookies, also terrible for the environment. Made it a palm oil rip the orangutan species. I'm so sorry what we're doing to you. I'm so sorry we're doing to all the indigenous people that we're clearing your land for more palm oil plants palm plants to make palm oil. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1I really love oreo cookies you know, I don't know if I would, if I would have the same, um, you know, like chocolate and coffee and things like that, I feel like I could do without them pretty easily. But things that I couldn't do without with is like a lot of my things that I find comfort in, like french fries, pizza, some, some, some nuggies, pizza and nugs, yeah, um, I don't know what else.
Speaker 2The list goes on. All the yummy convenience foods that we eat. Ketchup being ready to make, I mean we could make our own ketchup, which is really good yeah.
Zombie Book Club and Tall Tales
Speaker 1It would be a lot of work to satisfy these desires. I remember reading a book a long time ago, one of the first books that I ever read for fun. It was called Guardians of the Flame. It's about this group of people that's playing dungeons and dragons and then they get sucked into the game and they're they are their characters in this world and they get stuck there for a really long time. They live like an entire lifetime there. One of the things that they do after completing their quest to, like, fight the mage or whoever the they're fighting. I don't even know what the plot is, but what I do remember is that after they've been established, they conquered a kingdom. They have a lot of things going in their direction. They have a dragon friend as they, uh, recreate a big mac. They make sesame buns, they like. They do it the best that they can, but even then it's not the same thing. It's close, but nothing compares to what they make at McDonald's. And even these fries we can't get the shoestring recipe.
Speaker 2Well, you know you'd probably be able to eat a McDonald's french fries. You'd just have to go in people's cars and find the 50-year year old fry that's still not decomposed move the seat.
Speaker 1Yeah, there's fries in there. There's some old chips in there down there too, for sure it is wild half a milkshake oh my god, ew, that would be molding, I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 2But the french fries, they I they lasted disturbingly long time. Um, I've got number 10.
Speaker 1Yeah, making this podcast yeah, I mean we could still make the podcast, it's just we wouldn't have any way to distribute it I guess we could just talk yeah to each other. We could do it live people would show up like come around the fire.
Speaker 2Yeah, they'd show up on sunday nights, that would be so weird that, like I'm trying to picture this, like with real people in real time, like all, all right, come around for the fire. Zombie book club. Yeah, what would that be like in person? Would we just pretend that they're not there?
Speaker 1No, it just becomes like a show. Like I know some podcasts go on tours and stuff, but like It'd be like a talk show, Like they would sit in the audience and we would be on like a little stage and we would have the conversation like it was a podcast, but there's a live audience.
Speaker 2I think if it was a live audience and it's the apocalypse I would change it up a little bit. I would make it actually a book club because, let's face it, we're bored, yeah, when we're not busy surviving, we want to like actually read some books because, we don't have Netflix.
Speaker 1Everybody has to share the same book. Yeah, because everybody has to share the same book. Yeah, or, oh my god, it could literally be like story time, where we read it out loud to each other, like I do for bedtime sometimes with you. Yeah, except the zombie book club, because zombies are real in this world. Um, it's just a regular book club, but the zombie part is the fact that we live in a zombie apocalypse.
Speaker 2Yeah, we're just reading any books we want, and then we could pick books that have some sort of like survival messages or tools, even if they're fictional, just to help us.
Speaker 1This month's book is the SAS Complete Survival Guide.
Speaker 2Yeah, you know this kind of sounds fun. I just sit around a fire and take turns reading books out loud and then telling stories. I do kind of like I think about my grandpa's era and he would just spend time around the fire with his brothers and they would tell tall tales. They made up some shit. That was not true. And then my grandpa's era and he would just spend time around the fire with his brothers and they would tell tall tales. They made up some shit. That was not true. And then my grandpa would play spoons and like recite poetry yeah, I don't know how to play the spoons.
Speaker 1Um, you know, that kind of reminds me this, uh, this thing that I learned about, um, you know, the days of yore, back in like the 1800s. I remember reading all of these stories that were published in newspapers and these stories were so obviously fake, like, like you know, jim johnson uh, walked, took a, took a, went for a walk from his farm and, uh, an alien spacecraft landed in front of him and the alien got out and explained how his spacecraft work worked, and then he folded it up into a little box, put in into his pocket, and then a blip showed up. He jumped into the blimp and flew away it sounds like it's like dark matter and it's like this is so obviously fake.
Speaker 1this was printed in the newspaper, turns out there was a thing that most towns had. It was called the Liars Club. Wow, and they would gather around and everybody would tell the biggest lie and they would all vote to choose whose lie was the most convincing. And then that lie would be printed in the newspaper. That's amazing. Yeah, yeah, and that's how they entertained themselves.
Speaker 2I think we need to come back to some of these things as a society. This is actually inspiring me, like a long time ago you and I talked about having like um a fire and just inviting our neighbors over and being like bring a story or a song or a poem or like something to share, and like I have so many good ones just from my grandpa's poetry that I have not memorized. He has it all memorized or had it all memorized. I think this would be fun. You bring your, bring your biggest lie, all right.
Speaker 1We're going to do this. Yeah, tell us your biggest lie. Oh my God, leave us a voicemail with your biggest lie.
Speaker 2And tell us you're lying, otherwise we won't be able to know.
Speaker 1Yeah, we be able to know. Yeah, we need to know. It's a lie.
Speaker 2Yeah, we just asked for the most random shit on our voicemail. It's time for groans from the horde. Dan, we got groans. We have one, actually the most important one, that we need to take a beat to discuss Chris, you admitted that you've only watched the first two seasons of Walking Dead. Ah, chris.
Speaker 1Does Chris get to belong in the club? Chris, you're kicked out, you're out of here.
Walking Dead Seasons and Characters
Speaker 2Get out of here, chris, you, you can, you can catch up, though it's not too late. You have, uh, seven more, no, eight more seasons to watch.
Speaker 1Don't bother a season 11 yeah, um, chris said that he that he stopped watching when frank darabont left.
Speaker 2I I, chris, I have darabont left I, I, chris, I have Darabont, he's a director.
Speaker 1Oh, okay, or a writer, frank Darabont, also wrote the mist, or he directed the mist, the adaptation of the Stephen King. I love the mess, yeah, 2004. I think it was. So I I know that Frank Darabont is a very talented person. I acknowledge this. However, however, you stopped watching at the exact moment that the series actually got good. Frank Darabont didn't actually do a very good job with the walking dead. He did a good enough job, but season two was long, slow, boring as shit what happens in season two?
Speaker 2just give me the high level they go to herschel's farm.
Speaker 1Oh yeah, and they um, I don't know there's a cute love story.
Speaker 2Yeah, started between maggie. It was good. Don't get me wrong.
Speaker 1This isn't season 11, yeah, but uh it it did not. It did not cover a lot of the um drama that it should have. It was very slow paced, which is fine I like season two for the most part nothing really happens in season two and it was losing a lot of viewers because of that. So they got rid of frank darabont so that they could really amp up the series and actually like get people excited about it.
Speaker 2Interesting. I enjoyed season two. I would never have known that I did too.
Speaker 1I was one of the few people like at the time people were really talking shit about the Walking Dead. Really they were, they were really upset. I was one of the few people that I was like I think that season two was great. When you say people were people who, like read the uh, graphic novel, it was like a novel or comic series. I guess it's technically comic okay, um, but yeah, at this time there isn't.
Speaker 1There isn't a fan base for the tv version of the walking dead I was by episode one well, most people that are watching it are fans of the series, so they're they're not seeing the grittiness, they're not seeing the survival aspects, they're not seeing the moral dilemmas that the comic.
Speaker 2I'm mad at these people retroactively because they're all of those things. Yeah, I think it was too much. You know what this is like. This is like saying the thing that they made that was like a Big Mac is not a Big Mac.
Speaker 2You can't expect shit to taste exactly the same you have to you have to enjoy it for what it is instead of being like oh, I don't like oat milk because it's not cow's milk. Um, it's a different kind of milk, y'all. It's not meant to taste exactly the fucking same. Ps doesn't go sour and nasty in your fridge, just saying it's true.
Speaker 1That's how I feel about the walking dead.
Speaker 2Like I again. Like I think sometimes there is a benefit to not having a preconceived notion about something. It's true.
Speaker 1But my point, Chris, is that season three is when it gets good.
Speaker 2Season three is the prison right. Yeah, so good.
Speaker 1And you know I I hear a lot of people talking about how they stopped watching once Negan came into the scene, and I get it watching once negan came into the scene, and I get it. However, I I would implore you to give it a second chance, because there is so much more to those seasons than people give it credit for. They think that just another bad guy is showing up. But there's so much to those, to those seasons, that you don't see with the naked eye until you actually like think about it.
Speaker 2Yeah, I think Negan is a character that is not just a bad guy. Yeah, we should do a whole like I think a whole episode should be dedicated to Negan, because my second time of watching the Walking Dead I had a whole new appreciation and perspective of his character.
Speaker 1Yeah, so anyways, Chris, let us know when you've watched another eight seasons of the Walking Dead and we'll get you back in the club, hurry up.
Speaker 2Uh, we'll see you, I guess, in like six months.
Speaker 1I don't know how fast can you do it yeah, you can uh put it on fast forward if as long as uh, as long as you can process exactly yeah well, uh, this is your last chance to send me a zombie.
Speaker 2Cluck is uh last chance you get one more week because we gotta get ready to record episode 50. Oh, we've got some things up our sleeve. Doesn't have to have clucks, but we will be pulling for the evil, magic chicken, zombie, uh t-shirt. So if you want to enter that contest, you got to give us a cluck, otherwise you can go buy one. That's also excellent.
Speaker 1Help us get some better podcasting tools that'd be fabulous yeah, we pay for this at our own. To be a undead chicken.
Speaker 2Yeah, this is our child, basically like the money we'd spend on a child, we kind of spent on this podcast yeah I would say that this podcast costs what a two-year-old might cost really not including child care, which obviously is very expensive, but like to feed it and clothe it yeah, you know, if you're, if you're feeding a child like a couple of chicken nuggets and a handful of fries, yeah, yeah, I feel like our podcast is the cost of a two-year-old child.
Speaker 2Yeah, and I don't remember why I'm talking about that. Oh, also, actually I'm talking about that because you could buy a T-shirt or you could commission your very own portrait of yourself as a zombie. Send me a picture, tell me what you're willing to pay. I am open to pay what you can. I will tell you. It takes me about four hours to do one, sometimes more, sometimes less. Yeah, depends on what it is. Yeah, and you will have my full hyper focus, because I am so hyper focused on my zombie hot dog Watch like a hundred come in and you're like I don't want to do this anymore anymore.
Speaker 2Yeah, I have to reserve the right to say I can't do it, but, um, if, if you feel so inspired, uh, I would enjoy doing that and um, yeah, that's the it for this show. What are we? What are we talking about next? Because, even though, we're recording this before the laurie calcaterra episode comes out. It's technically the week after, so what's the new zombie homework, dan we're traveling through time here. Yes time travelers officially.
Speaker 1So episode 55, we're going to be talking about the Remaining by DJ Mole. If you don't know what the Remaining is, this is a great series for anyone who really wants like a very gritty, like military-centric zombie apocalypse story. It's about a character named Lee Harden. He's a captain in the US military and his job is to, whenever there is a crisis, he goes into a bunker and then he comes out when the crisis is over. He's supposed to be a designated survivor. Basically Just so happens that he goes down into his bunker and when he comes up, the world is overrun by zombies Fun.
Speaker 1And it's now his job to rebuild civilization. So he has to go make contact with survivors, help them survive and navigate problems along the way sounds similar to follow, but with two different realities.
Speaker 2When you come back up from your bunker, yeah, we're gonna. We're gonna talk about followed. I'm in a casual dead, but then we decided it deserves an episode, so that's coming soon. If you've not watched fallout, watch it, because we'll be talking about it shortly. It's so good, um, another thing I have not read the remaining yet. I will be reading it for the book club, but, um, when I was reading the description of it from the remainingfandomcom, they says that what sets the series apart from the others in the genre is a new type of zombie, a somewhat smart zombie yeah, they're.
Speaker 1I would say they're infected, infected type zombies. They're not undead.
Speaker 2Yeah, and they can evolve and adapt to their surroundings, which sounds really interesting. Some of them develop pack behavior, others linger about in hordes. They learn basic avoidance when facing powerful weaponry that's wild, yeah. And they learn how to hunt together more efficiently. That is a pack of hunting zombies, yeah. What a great idea.
Speaker 1The ones that find themselves in the woods tend to group together into small packs and they are called hunters. Find themselves in the woods, tend to group together into small packs and they are called hunters, and they kind of evolve and become more agile and faster and smarter Do they have a language of any kind?
Speaker 2Do they grunt at each other?
Speaker 1I think they do to some extent. I don't know if they are using words, but it is clear that they're using pack hunting techniques.
Speaker 2Like when coyotes howl to hear, so they can know where they're closing in on techniques. Like when coyotes like a howl to hear, like, so they can know where they're closing in on their coyotes, do they all howl once they've gotten somebody? Yeah, that would be so fun. Oh yeah and sign me up.
Speaker 1I want to be part of a zombie pack and they're active at like nighttime, so they're nocturnal, whereas if you go into a city area they all just kind of clump into a giant horde and they're not as smart, but they are active during the daytime I like this because this is like selective, um, not selective breeding.
Speaker 2It is like, um, evolution. Yeah, this is the law. What is that? What is it called again? Oh, darwinism, I guess so. But just like you know, adapting to your uh environment actually sounds honestly more realistic than the other version, where zombies are just the same forevermore. Yeah, um, so yeah, start reading that, if you haven't. Is it an audiobook too?
Speaker 1it is that's, I mean and any of the ones that I that I've already read are probably audiobooks. Um, the remaining series is six books plus two novellas. Then there is a series that follows that, uh, which is like three years after. That's just called um lee harden, and he is now just starting another spin-off called abe, and abe is a character that shows up in the remaining interesting.
Speaker 2Okay, so this person is a prolific writer. Dj mole, um the uh.
Speaker 1The two great names, the two novellas are of characters that were antagonists in the series Got it, Got it Backstory basically, Well, check that out.
Speaker 2I'm going to be. In the meantime, give us a phone call 614-699-0006. Or send us an email zombiebookclubpodcasts at gmailcom. We love hearing from y'all. Yeah, I did send an auto reply on our email because I am in charge of email for the most part and I am exceedingly slow at responding. So I apologize in advance for the auto reply, but that will make sure that you know not to expect me to respond to you in any timely manner, because I'm slow like a zombie. Yeah.
Speaker 1I've also been pretty slow on social media because of my work schedule. Yeah, thanks for hanging out with us y'all. Yeah, don't forget to subscribe Rate. Thanks for hanging out with us y'all. Yeah, don't forget to subscribe Rate and review. Spread us like a virus, infect people with us. Yeah, yeah, we're infectious.
Speaker 2A couple more t-shirts are going to come out too, of some drawings I've done so if you're interested in supporting the podcast, do that and on that note, let us know what your number one luxury you would miss the most.
Speaker 1Yeah, let us know. I feel like someone's gonna say porn. Someone will say porn, yeah, and you know what I get it me too. Yeah, uh, thanks for listening. Follow us on thread. Subscribe rate review. Uh, there's a link. Tree description. Have a good day, everybody or good night.
Speaker 2I won't tell you what to do have a bad night.
Speaker 1Have a bad night. Bye everybody, bye, bye. The end is nigh.
