All of a sudden this past week, my Little Bear
(henceforth known as LB, ‘cause I’m lazy and don’t feel like typing it every
time) has been preparing, along with his new best friend, for the dreaded
Zombie Apocolypse. Unless you live under a rock somewhere or are without
internet (which would beg the question of how you are reading this), you know
about zombies.
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| "Zombie Night" courtesy of Kittisak Found on FreeDigitalPhotos.net |
Zombies (by modern, Hollywood definition) are dead,
re-animated human corpses. They eat the flesh of other humans to survive and
apparently living human brains are a delicacy. Zombies used to be relegated to
bad sci-fi movies (there’s a reason they call them “B” movies) shown on
smaller, independent television stations in the wee small hours of the morning—filler,
basically. If I haven’t mentioned it before, there’s a part of me that misses
the good ol’ days, when television stations reminded you that it was bedtime by
flying the American flag before signing off (I know this wasn’t their
reasoning, but still…).
These days, zombies are everywhere—movies, books,
video games; they are becoming as popular as vampires and werewolves. If you
can believe this, there’s even zombie romance. Zombie romance! How desperate do you have to be to fall for a dead,
rotting corpse that really is after
you for your brain? Given my druthers, I’d druther be alone. What if something
falls off while you’re hot and heavy in the midst of in flagrante dilecto? I mean, just, EWWWW! Zombies are bad enough when
they’re trying to kill you; I don’t need to think about them trying to do other
stuff.
Now, to get back to my L.B. and his belief that the
zombie apocalypse is upon us. Don’t know where the idea got into his (otherwise
intelligent) brain, but there it is. Was it the video game that his father,
brother, and brother’s best friend seem to be addicted to? Was it the internet
in all its BS-filled glory? Was it television or the other idjits at his middle
school? (Don’t take offense—I believe all middle schoolers are idjits to some
extent—I was an honor roll student; I was still an idjit at the time.)
In the end, it doesn’t matter where L.B. got the
idea; he and his friend have been preparing. They have been running “drills”
for escaping over walls and making lists of the supplies they will need. L.B.
asked me to drive him to Home Depot yesterday so he could waste his allowance
on rope and such. When I told him that I did not have the time, he wanted to
ride his bike there. I put my foot down. He claims that this is real, that the
government has done experiments to make zombies. I believe a lot of
not-so-shiny things about our government. I believe they probably even tried to
make zombies. I do not believe that some rejects from the experiment are going to
break out and kill us all. (Although, in light of the gun-control legislation
they’re trying to pass, they might just be out to get us. Make zombies. Ban
assault weapons. Zombie buffet. Hmmm…)
Later this morning, I will share some of what I
learned about actual zombification with L.B. Hollywood zombies—the ones who are
going to kill us all—bear no resemblance to the actual thing. In real life,
zombies can only be made by a voodoo priest, for example. You cannot become a
zombie by being bitten by a zombie (that’s werewolves, y’all). Nor can you, as
the commercial shows, become a zombie when the power goes out and you drink bad
milk (love that commercial J). Most often, zombies are not even
dead, but, like Shakespeare’s Juliet, are in a paralytic state that is very
close to death, often brought on by using the poison of a blowfish. Zombies are
not capable of functioning on their own, without a master—given that
information, I would think that if you kill the master, you kill the magic that
created the zombie, thereby destroying the zombie and freeing the victim. I may
be wrong, but that makes sense to me (if anything about zombies can make sense).
So, what do you think of the zombie craze? And are
you ready for the zombie apocalypse?
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