Great news, as they say. My biographer will certainly take note of this momentous re-occasion. That said, it's hard to imagine what they will say. Perhaps something along the lines of the following:
"Clearly, this soon-to-be-famous author had not an iota of an idea as to
how, exactly, to begin a blog."
Let us acknowledge the truth of this statement for a moment.
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| HEY LOOK EVERYONE, I GOT A BLOG! |
Okay, that's good. Moving on!
Since Halloween is approaching with neither speed nor subtlety, I feel that it is most appropriate to discuss an aspect of pop culture that has become as bloated and mindless as its very namesake, a plague upon our mentality so lush and rife that, despite its deeply horrific and increasingly gory aspects, even children are aware of it.
I refer, of course, to the modern mainstream zombie.
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| Pleased to meet you. |
It began as a worker exploitation scam, of course: workers magicked unto death and buried are reborn as the ultimate wage slave. What a terrifying thought for a colonialist, a worker, a serf! Even in death, you are not free. There are fields to work and a mill of economic progress that must grind ever more wheat with ever greater efficiency, and damned be the stubborn.
It was the robbery by reason of the promise of Heaven. No God could save you from your place in the economic machine. Your mind, the you of YOU, now expanded beyond the edge of the ocean, was the new anathema of the new system of the strong forcing the dispossessed. And they (THEY!) had a new enemy. The enemy of YOU.
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| Your Soul: not included in the modern economic model |
Then, when we addressed social problems by making their consideration and study fashionable, the zombie became Guilt. Because by that time, there were too many of us doing too much at once. Our sins were no longer simple.
We had so many new fears. Freddy was the fear of bad men and little girls. Ash was the fear of your cowardice in the face of your fucking cowardice, because you have unaddressed insecurities, you coward. Predator was Time coming for you, slowed not an iota by all your education and technology and good grammar and healthy diet. They were all you, all along. And you worked through them and eventually forgot about them.
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| Now thay're just cute. |
But things have changed. Now, you seem to be a zombie. Why? Because everybody's a zombie. I'm a zombie. Look at me, starting a blog. What are my expectations? Why do I write? Do I create art or consume bandwidth? It's terrifying. Not knowing is always terrifying. Now not staying dead has eclipsed the actual fear of death.
If we must be afraid of concept zombies, then at least we have the consolation of knowing that our fears have become sophisticated. Socially acceptable. Even fashionable. Zombies give us the power to become fearsome brutes again, (in a fairly clean, recognizable, and attractive way,) despite our framed degrees and clean shoes and manicure appointments at three. I don't mind this concept. If I have to be a menace in the end, then let me at least return to my bestial roots and be frightful like our brutish prehuman ancesters, to take on in death the dignity of an apex predator despite my spoon-fed life of powdered chicken soup.
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| Just like the noble cave dwellers once rehydrated. source |
But time leaves savage nobility in the dust again and again. If I am to believe Time Magazine's Joel Stein and several others, then I am of a particularly feckless and narcissistic recent generation known as millennials. I shun work and worry constantly over minute and nonexistent ailments. Narcissism is my defining characteristic. I create most of my own problems by purchasing overpriced organic food and avoiding exercise. What a bitch am I. Lowly, lowly, sadness, woe. My shame is complete, or something.
Granted, he ends the piece by talking about how millennials are digitally savvy and highly creative and some other made-up arbitrary stuff, but since I'm making stuff up myself right now, I'm not about to blame him for that. Also, plenty of better writers have had smarter stuff to say about Stein's irritating cover story since then. Still, the jibe stings. It makes me feel like biting something.
How I relish the day I join the ravenous twenty-something hordes in assailing the headquarters of Time Magazine. Cold, hard data, my ass. Give me Stein's soft brains any day. I need not work out to be a good zombie. I don't even need a place to live after my undeath - my parents probably wouldn't have me anyway, but more to the point, my landlord would probably try to kill me. Anyway, an apartment is no place for a free-range zombie. And a job? A job? Excuse me, but I didn't go through the entire reanimation process to spend my precious time working instead of spending my time running down the brains that I love. Occupy Zombies!
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| www.dailymail.co.uk |
To put it briefly, millennials love zombies because we are so darn tired of hearing about what lazy assholes we are. Some of us go to fairly exhausting lengths to untooth that stereotype, which of course makes us want to give it bigger fangs. We want what we can't have, et cetera.
Because aren't zombies the perfect despicable young people? To live the terrifying dream as a piece of ultimate resilient networked swarm intelligence, I need not read up on leadership or human resources or C++. There's no reason to put in a few years of time at a job I hate. Zombiehood is monsterdom without all that tedious preparation. It is a release of personal responsibility, a simple, focused, 100% effective pattern ad infinitum, a part in a single whole that is more successful than a plethora of individual human beings over all of human history reliably failing to work together for any reason. It's OK to be obsessed with eating and making more of myself when I am dead. That's the point of being a zombie.
Zombies are better functional humans than the excitable monkeys that go around digging up minerals and pumping weird gasses into the air. The monkeys create stuff and then can't figure out what to do with it. The zombies just consume. They kind of clean up the place, actually. Their only joy is the act of communion turned creation, sex and eating and social sauce all in the same action. They are joyful, these zombies. They've found the magical item we're all looking for on Black Friday: the One Thing That Will Make Us All Happy.
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| by the brilliant randyotter |
This is why we must defeat zombies again and again in videogames, movies, in ourselves. Zombies are just better. Zombies are already here. The zombie inside us has already won. We just don't know it yet. Think of a way to make yourself better than a zombie - any way at all, really - and you're winning.
