Evil Origins: A Horror & Dark Fantasy Collection (117 page)

J.: If a parent asked you
if a private school education is worth it, how would you respond?

EMILY: I’ve gone to
private schools my entire life, and I saw it as something really worthwhile,
but I don’t really know the answer to that question because I haven’t really
experienced public school aside from coaching. It’s a lot of money.

J.: What are you getting
for your money in a private school?

EMILY: One-on-one
attention, constant communication, good or bad. Teachers and administrators
always know what’s going on with your child. Private schools don’t just focus
on academics. They’re also concerned with kids’ social skills and making sure
everyone’s included, and I don’t know if you really get that in a public school
where you’re kind of fending for yourself. There are a ton of great things
about private school, but it is a lot of money. If I had the money, I’d send my
kid.

J.: If you could share
your wisdom with a current student through an anonymous channel, what would you
say? What advice would you give a student, from a teacher’s perspective, to
help them navigate the challenges of middle school?

EMILY: I really don’t know
(laughing).

First Edition Cover Art

Originally
published as Educating Zombies, the original cover art mimicked the composition
notebook we all know and love.

Raising Zombies
- What's in a Name?

Dictionary.com
defines a zombie as “a person whose behavior or responses are wooden, listless,
or seemingly rote; automaton.” Wikipedia states, “The zombie also appears as a
metaphor in protest songs, symbolizing mindless adherence to authority,
particularly in law enforcement and the armed forces.” Given these two highly
academic sources, you can probably draw your own conclusions as to why the book
is titled
Raising Zombies
. However, my love of the macabre is deeply
rooted in my point of origin.

Beginning
in 1971 (with my birth) and until I moved to New Jersey in 1994, I lived in an
eastern suburb of Pittsburgh known as Monroeville, Pennsylvania, where an
endless array of fugly (fucking ugly—fugly) strip malls and fast food grease-buckets
straddle a commercial highway.  But my hometown differs from all the rest of
America’s sprawl in one significant way:  zombies.

George
Romero attended Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and chose western
Pennsylvania as the setting for most of his movie-making for decades
thereafter.  Many credit him as the grandfather of the zombie flick, beginning
with 1968’s
Night of the Living Dead
, filmed in Evans City near Butler,
PA.  In 1978, Romero’s next installment,
Dawn of the Dead
, was shot on
location inside Monroeville Mall.  My parents would not let me watch the film at
seven years old even though
Dawn of the Dead
was one of the most
critically acclaimed films that year.  They were always so unreasonable.  I
vaguely remember the mall shutting down during the holiday season so Romero and
his crew could film through the night before the real zombies (er, shoppers)
would show up the next morning. 

Monroeville
Mall is one of the few commercial establishments in the country to carry such
cultural significance.  There is an unofficial zombie museum in the mall’s
arcade, complete with t-shirts and souvenirs.  Zombie walkers and tourists
alike continue to roam the promenade with cameras in hand, especially while on
the central escalator in the middle of the mall.  Kevin Smith shot segments of
2008’s
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
in Monroeville, and the amateur hockey
team in the film is the “Monroeville Zombies,” a respectful and quirky nod to
Romero’s cinematic relevance.  Seth Rogen has no connection to Monroeville.  Or
zombies.  He is, however, Canadian.

I
spent countless nights as a teenager in the 1980s stumbling through Monroeville
Mall (like the undead, but with worse acne) towards the Cup-A-Go-Go or a pack
of big-haired Madonna wannabes.  When it comes to zombies or brain delicacies,
I know what I’m talking about.  I was raised in a town where the most
influential zombie filmmaker of all time made a masterpiece.  That gives me a
certain pedigree, as they like to say. I know what it takes to be successful at
Raising Zombies
.

Quick Setup Guide for Parenting

Throw
out those volumes of parenting books with the covers that include
Gaussian-blurred photographs and pastel borders. These guidelines work for me.
Therefore, they should work for every other parent on the planet. That’s a
100-percent guarantee.

Treat children with
respect.

Parents
typically treat their kids worse than pets. Find a bench next to an old man at
your local mall and take note. Adults will yell, berate, coerce, and often
smack their children in public. Directing these behaviors at coworkers in the
office would most likely result in a prompt firing without hope of a wrongful
dismissal lawsuit.

Stop using punishments.

They
do not work. If you have never heard of Alfie Kohn, go to his site and order a
book. Do it now, I’ll wait. If punishments served as deterrents for future
undesirable behavior, we would not be creating inmates faster than we can build
prisons.

Stop using rewards.

They
do not work. If you have never heard of Alfie Kohn, go back and click on the
link in the previous section. Do it now, I’ll wait. If rewards created desirable
behavior, every straight-A student would be a successful adult, and every
dropout would be a failure. Don’t believe me? Two words: Bill Gates.

Allow true natural
consequences to occur without abandoning the child or rubbing his nose in it.

“Natural”
consequences are vindictive punishments disguised as “good parenting.” If you
force your child out in the winter weather because he left his coat at school,
your “natural consequences” are interpreted by your child as a dickhead move.
The lesson is that forgetting your coat means your mom let you get the flu.

Honor creativity, for
real.

The
idea
of honoring creativity feels safer than honoring creativity.
Creative outlets provided through art and music are not a luxury of smart,
motivated kids. It is not a privilege. Creativity is essential to the social
and emotional growth of everyone. Divergent thinking followed by convergent
thinking is not fostered by absolute-authority parenting. Creating shit is what
sets us apart from the apes, except the ones that finger paint.

One final comment on
parenting. For you, bonehead.

Nobody
cares about your kids. Nobody. They might feign an interest in the same way men
do about other men’s lawns, tolerating your rambling while waiting for the
opportunity to talk about their own. It happens to me every time I attend a
gathering of parents.

“Susie
has dance lessons twice this week and then a recital on Sunday.”

“Joey’s
baseball coach is really great. He understands the kids.”

Unless
your child can do something really cool, like fart fire, I don’t care. I like
to think it’s some sort of inherent genetic coding that makes me want to die
for my child and kill yours. I suspect it’s not quite as primitive as that. In
fact, I presume it’s me. I don’t like people. I don’t like most people my age
or in my socioeconomic bracket, or in my neighborhood. There is nothing bad
about these people other than that I can’t relate to them. I don’t relate to
them because I have interests outside of work and family life. They do not,
which makes them boring, which makes me not interested in socializing with
them.

To
be fair, I have grown to dislike people the older I get. When you are in your
twenties, people are doing stuff. They are starting careers, going to school,
doing really great drugs, etc. Somewhere between passing out in an alley behind
a trendy nightclub and waking up in a pool of vomit (owner unknown), they
become stagnant human beings. People quit learning, because they feel they now
know shit, as if age delivers wisdom all on its own, exempting us from any
further education.

People
that give up on learning are boring. The only thing left in their lives that
they can share with others socially is the stupid shit their kids are doing.
And that makes me want to stab them in the eyes.

Obligatory Charts