Little Problems: Fixing Common Problems

Photographer: Matt Kloskowski  Exposure: 0.4 sec  Focal Length: 35mm  Aperture Value: ƒ/22

The title for this chapter comes from the 2009 movie Little Problems (written and directed by Matt Pearson), but I could have just as easily gone with the 2008 short Little Problems (written and directed by Michael Lewen), but there was one big thing that made the choice easy: the first movie was about zombies. You just can’t make a bad movie about zombies. It’s a lock. Throw a couple of hapless teens (or in this case “an unlikely couple”) into some desolate location with a couple hundred flesh-starved undead, and you’ve got gold baby, gold! Now, has anyone ever wondered, even for a second, why every zombie in the rich and colorful history of zombies, has an insatiable hunger for human flesh and only human flesh? Why can’t there be zombies that have an insatiable hunger for broccoli? Then, in their bombed-out shell of a desolate vacant city, on every corner there would be other zombies selling broccoli the size of azalea bushes. Anyway, it’s just a little too coincidental that every zombie wants to eat you, but they don’t want to eat something that might actually keep them alive, and is in ample and easily reproducible supply, like broccoli, or spring rolls, or chowder. Nope, it has to be human flesh, even though you know and I know (say it with me) it tastes like chicken (well, that’s what I’ve been told, anyway). Another thing that drew me to the first Little Problems was the director’s last name, seeing as all my books are published by subsidiaries of Pearson Education, a company who somehow chose to hire Ted Waitt as my editor, despite the fact that they were forewarned by the DCBGC (the Desolate City Broccoli Growers’ Consortium) that Ted might not actually be the strict vegetarian he claimed to be in his resume. I probably shouldn’t say anything bad about Ted, though. I don’t want to bite the hand that feeds me.