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Watt? I Fathom You...
"M'dear boy, have you heard of the great Helen of Troy? They said that her face launched a thousand ships," my wise grandfather told me. He was interested in history, maybe it was mythology, but he was infatuated in this Helen chick. It must have been his old girlfriend that he still remembers from the eighteenth century.

We were out on the pier looking at the rippling water, listening to the fog horns, and talking to the crying seagulls. My grandfather seemed to be brimming with wisdom. He said if he had an Apgar Score when he was born, he'd be over 20, maybe even 100, but I later on figured out that you could only score 10. He claims that he was the handsomest, the most intelligent mind at Harvard when he went there for his quarter flipping degree. I'll give him that he is a genius, but he ain't no Brad Pitt. In fact, I'm sure he's not even human. He has a proboscis, a pair of wings, three sets of limbs, a thorax, abdomen, antennae. Before my mother became some atom splitting scientist and figured out that cross sections of an atom's nucleus was called a barn (10^28 meters squared), I proposed the idea of her dad being a human sized insect. Within sixteen blinks, she told me to shut up or move out and that I was delirious. I've learned to ignore it.

"When you say a thousand ships, are you meaning that she had a face full of acne and she couldn't help herself to popping them all? Zit rockets are gross." I was foolish at the time, I didn't know what was what: I was only thirty-three, jobless, naive, and living in my grandparents' attic.

My grandfather continued with his explanation about his former, possibly decrepit girlfriend and I inattentively listened to a couple of words from time to time. If I had listened to him at that moment, maybe I wouldn't have ended where I am now. "A millihelen is the amount of beauty it takes to launch one ship and a microhelen is equal to the amount of beauty required to sway one sailor. Of course, if the woman is ugly enough then we have ourselves negative millihelen; that's when the ship-"

And with my luck being a smidgen or two, my grandfather was driven out to sea by a rather large yet highly maneuverable sea line cruiser. SPLAT! Grandpa had turned into bug juice before my eyes. I didn't know what to do or say so I just watched...with popcorn in my hands and mouth. He could have won the Nobel Peace Prize with his essay on why Americans should use farthings instead of pennies. He proposed it a fortnight ago when he was drunk off of canola oil and some lady named Bloody Mary. Oh well.

I looked to where the cruise ship came from and there she was. Oh, she was definitely in the the negative millihelen range. Her face could launch a thousand ships in reverse if she wanted to. Her hair was very weedy and black mixed with longer strands of gray. If I didn't turn so quick, I would have said that she had a banana for a nose. Flocks upon flocks-thank goodness I listened to my grandfather before he died though, he explained that a flock was forty birds-of seabirds screamed and avoided her like the plague. I would have pelted her with a baker's dozen of bricks, and I should have, she killed my grandfather with her ugliness.

I pressed myself to just move ahead with the future as my grandmother told me. Boy, unlike my grandfather, she was dumb as a rock. In fact, I think she was a rock. She never moved or spoke to anyone in the large household. How she even told to move ahead I'm not sure. I hopped into my jalopy without another word, punched a kid in his face for asking me for a nickel, and drove off. What next? I lived in my grandmother's house without a proper education.

Let me tell you something about my ride, it roughly rode on four donkey power. In horsepower, I was sure that's one whole horse and a third: 1000 watts. It was definitely not the fastest ride out there, but my banged up jalopy got me from point A to point B. The first furlong or two the ride always started off rough and bumpy. On this day, my car which I named Pookie died out two leagues later. Usually, my car gave up after six leagues, this was very unusual indeed. I got out of the car and tried pushing it, but it would not move an inch, not even a single thou. I feared for the worst now, it was getting close to night time and I had to be in bed by ten o'clock. Uncle Enus told me that this busy highway housed zombies. Yes, zombies, the undead who feast on brains and were featured in Michael Jackson's Thriller music video. Aunt Jemima told me she had to pull out her 50 Gillette laser gun one time and set it on Fry to escape a hundred of them. That laser was strong enough to melt through fifty Gillette razors in one shot! I believed my uncle and aunt because they were the only ones who had normal lives in the household.

Uncle Enus was in the navy for thirty years before he went into retirement. According to his commanding officer, Uncle wreaked up a putrid blue cheese odor and ate like a goat. Grandmother excused his manners at the dinner table, but it was grandmother, go figure. During his teen years, grandfather had beat Enus because he would go through the neighborhood and scream, "I'm a fathom tall! I'm a fathom tall!" My grandfather "magically floated" over to Uncle Enus and then slapped him behind the head saying, "you're six feet tall, that's nothing to be bragging about!" The next day, Uncle Enus would go through the neighborhood again and scream from the top of his lungs, "I'm a hundredweight and a quarter! Look at me, I'm a hundredweight! And a quarter!" Poor Uncle Enus, grandfather whipped him good for screaming out his weight. He was 140 lbs, what was so bad?

My dear Aunt Jemima was a portly woman since she was young. Her the biggest she's ever been was now. She was 160 lbs., roughly 1/75 elephant. What was amazing about her story is that she had all twelve of her children in a jiffy. She literally had them in 0.01 of a second. The power of this woman when she was angered would compare to at least ten Hiroshima bombs combined. Her fury went unmatched, especially with cashiers at the grocery stores. The energy she radiated was at least one ton of TNT or about one billion thermochemical calories. She once threw a heavyset woman by her pigtails two football fields, a whopping total of twenty-two double-decker buses. When I heard this story from my grandfather, I couldn't believe it myself, so I asked her to demonstrate it for me one day. Back when I was a firkin, 40.8233 kg big, she threw me half a furlong into the air. That was roughly 101 meters in the air! I was quite surprised with my family and how weird they were, but that's not the point of my story.

Zombies, they wreaked a 30 Hobo Power from what I've heard from Adam Carrola and Dr. Drew. A thirty on that scale was the point of vomiting uncontrollably. Click! Clack! Click! Clack! As I walked up the highway's rocky side waving down cars in my twelve-thousand thou heels, I realized that these heels were dangerous. 12 inches of heel was considered a weapon, a stiletto, a case of another eye stabbed. If anyone had messed with me, they were surely going to regret it. There was rustling in the bushes nearby. I remembered it as if it was just a few days ago. Jumping, I flew out of my stilettos and chucked them into the bush. I was not able to give you a good reason why I was wearing heels, but I think it was for horror aesthetics.

"Who's there? Before you can make two shakes of a lamb's tail, I'll get you in the first ten nanoseconds with my amazingly deadly jump kick. I know Toe-Fu!"

"Enough man, I don't mean harm to you" the voice from the bush retorted, "you could have taken 500 jiffies to stand there and eat dirt from your nails and I still wouldn't have been able to attack you. And I don't appreciate you throwing your stupid knock-off Prada heels in my bush. You must have raided your grandmother's hootenanny days." It was the voice beyond the bush that captivated me. But as soon as the zombie crawled out, I shrieked and wailed on him with the closest log I could find. I wouldn't have allowed myself to die to something so grotesque, so filthy, so sixties. It was a hippie zombie: long unkempt hair, stoner shades, bell bottoms, tied-dyed shirt, headband, distinctive smell. As I had lay the latest beat down on the zombie he screamed, "Stop it! Stop it! What is your problem, man?"

What you think I do? I stopped.

"Hey man, thanks for taking me out to lunch. I really appreciate your generosity," said lazy Bloody Beluga, my undead peace loving friend. We decided to go through the forest and walk straight into town that way. It only took a minute or two before we were in the streets of my city, Funkytown. It was a nice place considering the high crime rate and natural disaster percentages. Instead of trekking through the projects, I decided to bring him to the only diner that didn't serve roadkill, the Happy Diner. Bloody Beluga had told me he was a vegetarian and he didn't eat the flesh of the living. Instead, he ate a gross of dandelions everyday. It was always one hundred forty-four dandelions everyday; no more, no less.

I, on the other hand, ordered a stone of hamburgers, but I didn't know that it would end up being fourteen pounds of hamburger at first. For a small time eating joint, the Happy Diner seemed to be much bigger from the inside. The outside had always been wedged between two brick buildings and stood much inferior. The height remained the most constant from the inside and outside, about 10 links or 6.6 feet. Width wise from the inside, it appeared to be a pole, 16.5 feet. Lengthwise, the Happy Diner spanned out to be 100 links, 4 poles, 66 feet, or simply put, a chain.

There I was, sitting at a table with a hippie zombie. He seemed nervous when i masticated all fourteen pounds of pure American beef, but what did I care, he was part of the undead and he was a hippie. I felt sorry for him soon enough though so I decided to make idle chit-chat. "How'd you end up being like that?"

"Man, it's a funny story. I was once a proud flower child in my day until the government ran me down, you know. I was minding my own business at this anti-war protest on the side of the highway and I was all like, 'forget the government. Let love reign. Freebird!' The president then ordered his tanks that weighed as much as an elephant, that's like around 12,000 pounds impressing you into the earth," he told me while playing with his glass of water half empty. What a poor sap, his life must have sucked ever since.

"Oh, I wasn't asking about how you turned into a zombie. I wanted to know why you're a hippie." Of course, what I said made him uneasy. I could see him glaring at me like he wanted to murder me or eat my brains, but I knew that he wouldn't give up being a vegetarian so easily. But of course, my life was screwed up from the beginning. Our waitress came up to our table and if it wasn't for her, I would have been better off on a vacation somewhere nice. I should have jumped onto the cruise to Mexico when I had my chance.

"Sir would you like a refill?"

Here I am now, stuck in a stupid mall with a bunch of other strangers. If it wasn't for that waitress, this zombie epidemic wouldn't have started. Nooo! She couldn't have stayed a cubit or two away from the zombie! What's wrong with people, haven't they heard to always keep an arm's length away from one another? I doubt that will all these people and all those zombies that we'll survive for twain fortnights. Heh, twenty-eight days later, we'll find out. Won't we?