The Middleman: The Flying Fish Zombiefication

By Lisa Fary

I guess it’s good to know that art kids never change.  Or maybe they have, and Wendy and her friends are acting like art kids from the 1990s.  In any case, they’ll all be disappointed when the current art boy of their dreams grows up to be a 35 year old, polo shirt wearing, golf aficionado.

Wendy and Lacey’s Art Crawl was eerily reminiscent of open mic night at Epitome, the coffee shop where I used to hang out in college (except the Art Crawl kids looked like they showered).  Even then, when we were the same age, the art kids made me feel old.  I was such a square. 

The most arty thing I’ve ever done was help my friend Nick with his graduate concert.  I read Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra” under a blue spotlight while Nick played a clarinet piece by an obscure Italian composer.  I don’t know why he put a metronome in the middle of the stage, but there is was.   Nick said we should do it again at open mic night, and by way of encouragement, insisted it would get the attention of Adam, the arty barista boy of my preppy girl dreams (he thought my name was Kim for four years despite numerous corrections- reading a Ginsberg poem at open mic night was totally going to change that).  

At least Wendy and Lacey recognized that Pip’s “Dear Mister God” was utter crap.  I don’t know that the Tallahasse, FL crowd would have recognized that in 1995.  

So, what went on in this episode?  A capitalist pig exploited the venom of the Peruvian Flying Pike to create an energy drink which would turn the drinkers into trout-craving zombies.  

Looks like he didn’t have a sound business plan.  

How sensible is it to turn your target market into mindless zombies who are incapable of counting change or using debit cards?  The entrepreneur is basically getting one purchase out of each customer when the goal should be to get as many as possible.  True, the drink had the venom and the trout extract to counteract the zombified side-effects, but the end result was still trout-craving zombies.  Common sense says he should have gone back to the drawing board before distributing vending machines with his energy drink.  

Maybe I’m thinking about this too much.  That’s what we squares do.  

Meanwhile, Wendy tries to ditch work early to see Lacey’s latest confrontational spoken word performance art piece at Art Crawl.  If I were ten years younger, I might have cared about that storyline, but at 31, I’m more interested in zombies (because that’s, like, so much more mature). 

I missed last week’s episode due to lack of cable in my new apartment.  During the previous episode, I was so tired and out of it from loading the moving truck that I’m fuzzy on the details (I remember luchadores, that’s about it – luchadores always rock).   “The Flying Fish Zombiefication” seemed flatter, less inspired than the other episodes.  I got a little bored with this one. 

And that’s why I started thinking about Epitome and the Allen Ginsberg Reading of Doom.  Adam, the arty barista, finally did get my name right shortly before I graduated.  

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Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.

The Middleman, Volume 2

Castle: The Complete First Season

The Middleman and Other Stories

Pushing Daisies: The Complete Second Season

The Middleman: The Collected Series Indispensability