by Joshua Guess
I think he blames himself in a much more specific, guilty sort of way. He feels like it's all his fault, and that he has to make it his personal goal in life to save every one of us because of that. Hey, I'm all for a gung-ho protector type willing to work eighteen hours a day to ensure the safety of myself and the people I love, but for the right reasons.
It's because of Will that they came here, while we were engaged with a vast zombie swarm, and tried to hit us. Tried to cripple us by taking our most important structures. Thing is, anyone could have been in that chopper, and it wouldn't have made any difference. Maybe he feels like if he had gone back to them they wouldn't have attacked us, perhaps thinking that he betrayed them. Well, to that I have to remind that we kept his ass locked up or under guard for a long time. He had no choice.
So he shouldn't feel guilt. I really like Will, and I want him to be as happy as possible. I like seeing him laughing with us and telling unbelievably dirty jokes. I like watching him get irritated when my wife out shoots him with a rifle.
I like more than anything that I can sit down and seriously nerd it out with him. We're both crazy for weird and trivial data, and soak that shit up like sponges.
I just think he's getting too worried and way to anal about the defenses. I agree that the work needs to be done, but he has to take the time to be a person again and not some fucking machine programmed to defend. I want to see the guy who will veer off the street to comfort someone who looks upset. The man who scrabbled in the dirt for his own food despite the pain in his damaged limbs.
So Will, when you read this, please don't misunderstand. We appreciate what you are doing for us, truly. But no one wants you to drive yourself crazy doing it. No one expects you to make something perfect and flawless. You have to relax a little, have some fun.
Come over tonight. I'm taking out the dice bag and we're gonna have us some good ol' D&D action. It'll be fun. You need that once in a while. I promise if we get attacked while you are playing, no one will blame you.
So don't blame yourself.
at 12:23 PM
Thursday, November 4, 2010
One Step at a Time
Posted by Josh Guess
I've started jogging, which goes completely against my nature. I'm pretty sedate most of the time, working on my computer and snacking a lot. I'm a pretty solid guy, about six feet tall and two forty, slabs of muscle with enough fat to see me through a hard winter at least.
Evans thinks that all of us need to focus on getting in shape. Food has been plentiful enough that no one has really gone hungry since The Fall, and a lot of us have gotten more fit by the sheer amount of work needed around the compound. The real work will be building our endurance and constitutions up to a point where we can fight all day if we have to. Run all day if it comes to that.
Not to mention flexibility exercises and building muscle. The more nimble and strong we are, the better we will fare in combat situations. Now that the cold has set in pretty thoroughly, zombies are basically not a threat for the time being. The mark at which they tend to become active is about sixty degrees, and while some days get there, they are few and far between.
So we're dealing with an excess of energy now that we aren't fighting every other day or so. I have a strong suspicion that Will talked to Evans about this whole getting fit idea, but it seems like a good one. It helps that we are on rationed meals and that a great deal of what we eat is lean meat and veggies grown in the compound or around it. We still have a lot of canned food and dry goods, but we are trying to save that stuff for when we really need it.
At my weight I'm not exactly built for running, but I do it. I do a lot of things to improve my own life and set an example, like going to as many of Evans' classes as possible. I've missed a lot of them, but he's holding refresher classes and open tutoring times to help people catch up.
I'm still doing an hour a day of teaching myself, thirty minutes each of hand to hand combat and weapons. I'm a lot better at unarmed combat, but I've learned enough over the years to be decent with something sharp and deadly.
I want to be a bigger part of the community here. I'm already in a vital position, of course, because of the planning and logistics work I do with my brother, but I am fairly cut off from most people because of that. Like I said, I sit in an office and work eight hours a day at a minimum, and that greatly reduces the chances I have to meet and get to know people.
Consider. Most folks have jobs that take them outdoors. A guard, for example, is outside all day. He or she does four hours on the wall watching for external threats, then two hours walking patrol around the compound, and finishes with two hours of sentry duty. During that time, depending on what section of the wall they have been assigned that day, a given person can meet and talk to fifty people. Some are going through the gate to scavenge or run raids on dozing zombies. Some are simply digging up potatoes or carrots. Some are off duty themselves, merely enjoying a stroll (though more rare now that it's so cold.) while others are taking classes with Aaron.
Every bit of conversation, every introduction, produces a bit more togetherness. I have tried to get to know people, but it has felt all too often like trying rather than doing. It's felt forced.
I've had a little luck with combat training, but the idea is for me to teach. It's hard to be friends with the guy who demands you try harder, be better, because he knows you can even if you feel you can't.
So despite my heavy frame, I'm jogging. It gives me a break from the endless numbers and bits of math, and I get to be out there in the streets, smiling at babies and winking at pretty girls.
And getting to know the people around here, learning their stories, is important to me. I need to keep grounded in reality as much as anyone else, keep first and foremost in my mind what it is we're doing here. It's not about my anger or pride, having basically founded this place. It's not about my principles or ethics, my desperate and sometimes murderously harsh actions and decisions. It's about these people. Anyone that wants to live in peaceful cooperation.
They are the goal. Living, growing, continuing to be. Every man, woman and child are the greatest treasure we have. All else is dross that can be burned away, painfully, but ultimately expendable.
I'm not separate from them, or different. I have as much value as anyone here, and they as much as me. Working on larger and more long term problems has done much to make me lose perspective.
I'm going to go for a run. Maybe straighten out my vision a little along the way.
at 11:48 AM
Friday, November 5, 2010
Moving Forward by Backing Up
Posted by Josh Guess
Damn, jogging in this weather is brutal. You can't wear a heavy coat because you end up sweating, and you can't just wear a shirt or you'll end up freezing.
While I was out I talked to Dodger, who has completely taken over runs to the outside with the scouts. They've been out hunting groups of inert zombies just after dawn, when it's still extremely cold but with enough light to see. He told me several very interesting things.
One is that they are still finding groups of undead here and there, but usually in small clusters. Most of those look very emaciated, as though they hadn't managed to find food in a very long time. Interestingly, those groups tend to be very small. The largest one our scouts have located so far was about a dozen. Most have been much smaller, three or four together.
Dodger found a large group this morning, and he only did so because he disobeyed his instructions from Will. Instead of staying within the radius of travel he was given, Dodger moved much farther out on a hunch. It seems that the smart zombies (smarties) might have seen the pattern in our patrols and gone outside their reach to hibernate or whatever it is they do. The group this morning was found about ten miles from here, all laying down with leaves and brush pulled over them in a dense copse of trees.
Dodger found them by the tracks they left in the mud around the place, so they must have been there a while.
He stepped on one of them before he realized they were all laying down, but luckily the cold had the zombie so immobile that all it could do was moan before he crushed its head with a crowbar.
I guess they tried to move far away from people before they became unable to move for the winter. I worry that this means a large number of them will go unscathed this winter, but we aren't going to take inordinate risks when the weather gets bad.
The flip side to that coin is that a longer distance between us and them means that any warm spells would have to last a long time for them to make it back here and attack us. I see that as a big plus, since we've had no days in the last week above fifty five degrees or so.
Oh, while I was out jogging I saw Aaron. He's been pretty busy lately trying to keep ahead of his students on pretty much every subject, but I caught him talking to a very pretty girl. I hated to interrupt, but I had some news for him that couldn't wait. I'll share it with you as well.
My sister has been working with Jack and his people up north to try and help us with some technical skills that we sorely lack here. To that end, she will be coordinating with Aaron to send some of his more interested students up north to receive training in whatever areas of engineering and fabrication (or pretty much any other subject Jack's people know). With luck, those folks will come back with some new things to teach others.
Roger's death drove home a lesson we already knew: we can't allow specialized knowledge and skills to be lost. Patrick worked with him and learned enough from him to continue his work, but Pat is gone right now, and that is too risky. Pat will be home again soon, we hope, and when he gets here he will stay long enough to teach what he knows. He's agreed to do that full time until there are two others that know was much as he does about smithing and metallurgy. That will be helped by the surprising delivery of books Roger's wife dropped off here this morning, which contain between them thousands of pages of instructions and bits of information, all written by him over a long career with metal. Bless that man for being so obsessive.
I have work to get back to, much as I hate to cut short. I have a good feeling about sending some of our people north to learn. It feels right.
at 9:31 AM
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Growing Along the Way
Posted by Josh Guess
It's below freezing outside, and many of us are missing our furnaces. It's not unbearably cold, but it really sucks. Like camping ALL THE TIME.
Moving on...
While on my now daily jog, I stopped by the main gate and helped a repair team there fix a broken bolt. Not a big deal, we have plenty of extras, but it made me think about some of the positive things the zombie plague has done.
I'm not saying I am glad it happened. The fall of society (which I often refer to in the appropriate caps "The Fall") was obviously the single most devastating event in the history of mankind. The greater majority of all people on Earth are dead, as far as anyone can tell. Families and communities have been sundered, and after enough time it's a real possibility that there will be too few of us left to continue on as a species.
But hear me out.
What is left of humankind are some of the most intelligent, versatile and resourceful people I have seen. As much as it galls me to do so, I have to say the same of many of the marauders that seem to crop up in groups across the country. I hate them, but they have managed to stay alive and thrive when most others didn't.
Mostly, though, it's the people I see around me on a daily basis. All of us have had to learn to do things that we had never considered before. People who had spent their lives as pencil pushers worrying about the cost of groceries are now farming their own land. All of us have skills and knowledge about that now, since so much of our land within the compound is used to grow food.
We've all learned some carpentry and building, weapons and hand to hand combat, how to fire a gun and hit what you aim for. A huge variety of skills and knowledge none of us had before. That's not even including the things we're learning from the books and copied web pages at our disposal. Many people are learning things that may never be useful, but have always wanted to know about. Groups of people are learning many useful things as well, from those of us in Evans' medical classes to the guys and gals trying to teach themselves electrical engineering in advance of trying to make our power stations work.
It's like we became a community full of my wife. If you've read this blog for a long time, you know that Jess has always had this weird but useful form of OCD where she gets obsessed with something and then does nothing else until she masters it. She did it with assembling computers, making chain mail, growing vegetables, sewing...the list goes on and on. She's sort of the template for us as a group.
I can't help but wonder at the changes in all of us over the last eight months. I know many of us have had to do very bad things, but for today, I like to think about the positives we've also managed from this tragic set of circumstances.
at 9:09 AM
Monday, November 8, 2010
At the end of the road
Posted by Josh Guess
I've been thinking about how we have been growing and changing as a community a lot lately, which has been reflected in my posts. I have talked about how we have done this, and why we have done it, but one thing I haven't really stated what we are growing toward.
It's common knowledge that we want to be self- reliant for pretty much everything. It will take a long time to get there, but the reason for that is our desire to build a large and safe community where anyone can come and live in peace. My personal goal has always been to work toward Utopia, an impossible goal.
My philosophy in life is a curious mix of idealism and realism. I feel that working toward an unreachable goal will generally increase how hard we work for that goal, and how far toward it we get. It also keeps people trying to improve everything they do. For now, we work toward continued survival in this world destroyed by the uncounted swarms of zombies. In the future, we will take this cluster of neighborhoods surrounded by simple and rough walls and turn it into an enormous fortification. Eventually we plan to have most of Frankfort enclosed, with enough people here to ensure the survival of the human race.
I once read that every human alive comes from a surviving population of six thousand. I can't remember the exact circumstances that caused that catastrophe, but the details aren't important. Just think about it for a minute. Six thousand people into seven billion.
I want to make the compound into a center of learning. And farming. Technology. Many things.
Above all, a place of peace. Where families can come and be certain that they won't be abused and battered. Where the stupidities of the former world are dealt with on the spot, and harming others without cause won't be tolerated.
We have a lot of hurdles to clear before we can begin to make that dream come true. It may never be possible to achieve that much autonomy and cooperation within our own walls. But if we don't aim high, we can never hope to create something worthwhile or lasting. I am determined to make sure that the zombies who destroyed society don't manage to make human beings a thing of the past.
If you're with me, with us, I beg you to show your support in any way you can. Together we can change the world. It won't be easy and sometimes you will want to quit in frustration, but I can promise that in the final equation, it will be worth it. Maybe not for you, but for those that will hopefully come after.
If I die tomorrow, I will be satisfied having said that. We live in a dangerous and unpredictable world now, and the time for skirting around what you feel and being timid has passed.
at 8:57 AM
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Impulse Control
Posted by Josh Guess
Not too many people just wake up and want to beat the hell out of someone, but there are always exceptions.
On a related note, we don't have a dentist in house.
One of our scouts, Jamie Packard, is sitting in iso
lation right now after getting into a fight with Dodger. To be accurate, I should say that Jamie and Dodger had a heated disagreement which the former tried to end by blindsiding the latter. Jamie sucker punched Dodger when the poor guy thought the argument was over and lost two teeth for his optimism.
It's not the issue of the fight that makes me want to tell you about this incident, but rather why the fight happened in the first place.
While on his daily run outside with the scouts, Dodger wanted to go searching for more groups of hibernating zombies beyond the patrol area. It was very cold this morning just as it was yesterday at that time, but yesterday got warm. Which means that some of the undead got up and started moving around. With that lovely bit of information, you might see why Dodger was so intent on finding a group of zombies while they were helpless.