Zombie Spaceship Wasteland
Author: Patton Oswalt
Release: November 8, 2011
Tagline: A book by Patton Oswalt
Publisher: Scribner
Genre: Comedy, Memoir
ISBN-10: 1439149097
ISBN-13: 978-1439149096
Synopsis: Oswalt combines memoir with uproarious humor, from snow forts to Dungeons & Dragons to gifts from Grandma that had to be explained. He remembers his teen summers spent working in a movie Cineplex and his early years doing stand-up. Readers are also treated to several graphic elements, including a vampire tale for the rest of us and some greeting cards with a special touch. Then there’s the book’s centerpiece, which posits that before all young creative minds have anything to write about, they will home in on one of three story lines: zombies, spaceships, or wastelands.
Declassified by Agent Palmer: Zombie Spaceship Wasteland by Patton Oswalt is Brilliant, Funny, and Insightful
Quotes and Lines
Of course, “justify my immobility” was just “fool myself” with exactly triple the syllables.
It’s probably fifty feet high, maybe. I can’t jump over it, so that’s probably fifty geet. Numbers are how you understand the world. Like, a dad makes a million dollars a year. Gum stays in your stomach for seven years. Only grandparents are allowed to buy special shirts that always have five pieces of candy in the pocked. And anything I can’t jump over is fifty feet.
None of it chanced our reality… If the victories we create in our heads were let loose on reality, the world we know would drown in blazing happiness.
…a kid who thought coolness acted like the Fonz, sounded like Kiss, and rode a motorcycle like Evel Knievel.
I began thinking of life—a real life–being about movement and travel and awareness. Or, at least, I thought awareness came from seeing the world, experiencing it. I still think like that.
I suspected, around the time I graduated college, that we’re all versions of targets, fired at by indifferent events. If that was the case, then I wanted to be a moving target.
We lucked out living on a planet made thrilling by billions of years of chance, catastrophe, miracles, and disaster, and he’d rejected it. You’re offered the world every morning when you open your eyes. I was beginning to see Pete as a representative of all the people who shut that out, through cynicism, religion, fear, greed, or ritual.
Are you a Zombie, a Spaceship, or a Wasteland?
Each of these categories represents differents aspects of a shared teen experience–not fully understanding how the world works, socially or economically. The early outcasts–like me– were late to sex and careers. If we did find a vocation, it usually involved drawing or writing or something creative–work that’s done in the home, and usually alone. The real-world experience we’re going to need, as writers or artists or filmmakers, will come later, when we actually have to get a real job to support whatever creative thing we’re hoping to do.
So until then, anything we create has to involve simplifying, leaving, or destroying the world we’re living in.
Zombies simplify.
Spaceships leave.
Wastelands destroy.
The idea of writing a book, becoming a journalist and then, hopefully, a novelist, couldn’t withstand my sudden ambition to craft a perfect dick joke. Five thousand words a day seemed silly when I could bring a room full of drunks together with fifteen perfectly chosen words.
I want to experience as many different tastes, sights, emotions, conflicts, and cultures as possible, so that I can expand the canvas of my memory and enrich my comedy.
Also, the term “gifting suite” has this sinister, Orwellian quality. Like something Warren Ellis or Grant Morrison would come up with as a creepy throwaway bit of dialogue in one of their mind-bending stories. Maybe a “gifting suite” is a torture room or a lab where they infect subjects with biological agents, shit like that… It still wouldn’t be half as horrifying as the actual suite I visited.
But during that time the production company had an empty office, where my writing partner and I would go in, and bang the pilot script around, and try to stay off the then infant Internet. Downloading porn was even more time consuming over a chattering, spitting modem line.
Words on paper, no matter how many times they’ve been rewritten and edited, are forever.
Obi Wan realizes they need the help of the Wookies so he goes to the planet of Wookies where they use Ewoks as tampons.
They only bad movies are boring ones.