The less new, the less new, an aphorism that describes the process of aging as well as “where are my keys?” or “I have to pee again.” It’s a jaded attitude I increasingly struggle with, along with the very real fear that the dead will rise. Whether the Zompocalyse will we be biological, xenobiological, or supernatural in origin really doesn’t matter. All that matters is where you are when it happens, and the odds are that will be at home. Is your home Zombie ready? Mine’s not, and that’s both terrifying and wonderful.

For all my adult life, including fifteen years of marriage, I’ve never had a home, rather I’ve talked about the “place I live” or “going back to the house” with my wife. For the last decade we lived near San Francisco, where a cardboard box with water and electricity starts at $500,000. They used to start at $650,000, but that’s why we opted out of zero-down ARM loans, and that’s why we have a home in North Carolina. Only Armageddon with a capital “A” brought to you by the letter “Z” for zombie could have made a home more affordable, not to mention the $8,000 Marxist Obama tax credit.

So we bought a home.

That’s the house and the new roof, money that could have been spent on zombie-proof bars for the doors and all those freakin’ windows, including the ones in the sun room on the right. Of course, the sun room should be a garage to keep the car from baking in the summer, icing in the winter, and to provide an explosive-bolt door that would blow off and clear the drive of undead so we could make our escape on Z-Day. I do like the landscaping, though.

Walking through the front door and turning right puts you in the former dining room, soon to be my wife’s home-office. The room needs a desk and some paint—that burgundy below the molding has got to go. Also, those annoying shelves are right out, but not the antique bow or blow gun, even though both are useless against zombies. Do I have a shotgun on the wall in the sun room? No, I’m not allowed to have firearms, power tools (chainsaw), or to make napalm out of gasoline and styrofoam cups in the garage—because there is no garage!

Going left from the front door is the living room, and I think we can all see the problem here. Those glass doors at the end of the room, total zombie defense failure. It’s like we are living in the lobster tank at an undead grocery store. That’s my wife’s Toy Poodle in the center. The damn thing is like 15 years old, and I’m beginning to wonder if it died and came back and no one noticed. Half the time it smells like it’s dead, but after 15 years zombie Baby Bear no longer has any teeth to tear out my throat out while I sleep, so no fear. Instead, she constantly judges me.

This is the living room from the back of the house, again easily accessible windows for zombies in the front, but not as bad as glass doors. My wife had both the orange walls “faux” painted, which is French for “really expensive paint job with a sponge.” Yeah, I know the TV should be in front of the windows dominating the room and blocking zombies from coming through the windows, but my wife played the migraine card over the glare. I hope the glare off the first decayed arm that smashes through the window doesn’t cause her problems.

There is also a bathroom in the hall that appears to have been decorated by a brain-addled undead. The mirror looks like it was stolen from a gas station bathroom and I’m surprised Oscar Wilde hasn’t rise from his grave to eat the brains of whoever picked out the wallpaper. And those lights, like out of a saloon-themed restaurant. There should be a spittoon in the corner.

The kitchen is a kitchen, better than most I’ve used in places I’ve rented over the years, though the refrigerator is in kind of an odd place, at least for cooking. It’s perfect for jamming the doorway to trap a zombie, or to keep an alien that escaped a bad M. Night Shyamalan movie pantry out of the kitchen.

Off the kitchen is the sun room, or as my wife calls it, my “time-out place.” It has two exterior doors and seven windows. The zombie defense irony is not lost on me. Still, it’s strangely comforting to have a room of one’s own, unless I’m caught in here by the undead and devoured on that fashionable Turkish rug. That’s my comfy chair and my antique secretary desk from 1912 that I believe Kate Winslet used as a flotation device. Note the clock—atomic powered.

Rather than show the upstairs, which is unfinished except for paint, here is the deck which needs also finishing, including the new gate that keeps the dogs from wandering off. Personally, I would have preferred demolishing the deck. That would have kept the dogs from wandering off and kept zombies from staggering up the stairs onto the deck and smashing through the glass doors. In the background is the shed you get instead of a garage around here.

This is what it looks like off the deck in the backyard some mornings in March. You can almost see the unliving shambling through the trees—fast zombies are apostasy! In reality, it’s people on the walking trails across the creek. Our lot is small, but very well chosen, no neighbors in our backyard, and no zombies. At least not yet.