FIGHT THE MONKEYS!  :(|)

Hi. My name's Clarissa. I live in the basement of an abandoned building with my formerly-Amish husband, Derek, and our young daugher Gretchen. We've also gained two roommates recently: DAISI, a not-evil robot monkey who cheats at Scrabble, and Maddie, a Zen master who is also unfortunately good at Scrabble. If you live in a part of the world where the evil robot monkeys haven't attacked yet, you might be a little confused about what I'm telling you, so I thought I'd take a few minutes and summarize things for you.

What happened is, hordes of evil robot monkeys have overtaken a lot of our cities. Mostly they kill people, but sometimes they kidnap them, too. No one knows very much about the evil robot monkeys - we don't know where they came from, who's controlling them (if anyone), what happens to the people who are taken, what their power supply is, and so on. We sure don't know how to kill them effectively, though laser rifles work on individual monkeys. We're also optimistic about our electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon, but haven't had a chance to try it out yet.

One night, not so long ago, they came to our neighborhood. I grabbed Gretchen and my copy of Jimmy Carter's autobiography and fled, while Derek trapped the gang of monkeys in the house and lit it on fire. Then he drove us to an abandoned building on the west side of town, which he'd spent months rigging up for our survival - and we've been hiding here ever since.

We did leave the basement once, and I learned that a lot of the other survivors are living in the West Side Convention Center. Their leader is a guy who looks just like TV's Mr. Kotter. Derek's very suspicious of him, says he's some kind of cult leader, but I think that's just macho posturing - it's important to Derek that he be able to take care of me and Gretchen himself. Nevertheless, I'm lonely in the basement and often wish that we could go live with the others - especially since the others have electricity, running water, and guns.

One day I learned that a monkey calling herself DAISI and claiming to be a non-evil monkey had somehow tracked us down through this blog. She left me a laser rifle to prove it. It scared the crap out of me to know that the monkeys knew where we were. Derek was so angry. We figured it wasn't safe in the basement any more, so we headed off to the convention center. On the way there, we got a flat tire, and were set upon by monkeys. I did a pretty good job of defending us against them, and killed 3 with the laser rifle - but then the other 3 cornered me. Just in time, DAISI came up and helped me kill the rest of them. Her hand was injured in the fight. I felt awful, and decided that we couldn't just abandon her - and she swore that none of the evil robot monkeys knew where we were. So we headed back to the basement, with DAISI. Derek was kind of skeptical but she's starting to win him over. And I think Derek was glad we didn't have to go live in the convention center, after all.

DAISI's been pretty great. She helped us set up the EMP weapon and some surveillance cameras, and she's been taking me out to practice shooting. On the down side, she painted a country goose border all along the basement, which is pretty creepy. But overall, she's a good and useful roommate.

Our second roommate is Maddie, a Zen master. She used to live with Mr. Kotter, but he threw her out when she was unwilling to join his army and fight the monkeys. Damn pacifists - and now I'm stuck with her.

We have some friends who post to the blog - Robert and Sarah who live in Florida, MimiRobbie who's hiding out in the mountains, G. in Nova Scotia, Sally in Japan. And there's Jilly, a true evil robot monkey whose pathetic attempts to pass herself off as a human being were utterly transparent.