I am Zombie

I'm going to quote Simon Pegg. He's going to be talking about Zombies. And, I'm going to be completely fucking serious.

"[T]he zombie represents a number of our deeper insecurities. The fear that deep down, we may be little more than animals, concerned only with appetite."

That quote comes from the shortest and best afterword I've ever read in a comic collection. I realize that I'm stacking nerdyness upon nerdyness here, but this is a concept that I want to delve into a little bit.

The zombie is witless, hungry, and persistent. They see living flesh they devour it. They see life, they destroy it, consume it, and make it theirs. They are death incarnate. Scary as Fuck.

Zombies are scary because they are us. They are what we all have to look forward to after we fail at surviving, which we all do. In the best zombie stories, the act of "turning zombie" isn't the result of an infection, or a bite, but rather the natural progression after death. In the original Night of the Living Dead, in which George Romero firmly established some very long-standing rules of zombiehood that have only recently been broken, albeit with quite some success, zombies were, as the title would imply, dead people who crawled their way out of their graves. In the Romero universe, it doesn't matter what takes your life, you will come back, and you will be hungry. If there is an infection, we all have it.

This is the form of the zombie that disturbs me the most. In a zombie story, we know that at least one of our rag-tag bunch of heroes is going to turn zombie before our very eyes before the end. But, before that happens, they will be wholeheartedly engaged in the basic struggle to survive. The heroes fight, kill, starve, fall in love, and try to hack out some small niche of existence in a world that has given up on living. All the while, there is a zombie inside of them, just waiting for them to give up along with the rest of the world.

Every morning, I wake up and look into the mirror in my room, and I see the zombie. The zombie wants food, coffee, cigarettes, and sex. The zombie wants life to be easy and go smoothly. The zombie wants to satisfy it's desire for life, and in doing so, the zombie will destroy it. Every day, I spend hours fighting the zombie away. Sometimes it wins.

The zombie is an infection we all have. Dostoevsky called it "The Sensualist." Some people call it human nature. I want to kill my zombie. The thing is, nobody really knows how to do that. In the zombie stories, all it takes is a swift crack on the skull to get rid of the zombie on your front porch, but what about the zombie in your living room? How do you cleanse the infection from your system. Where is it? What is it?

Without this knowledge, there is no way to cure oneself from turning zombie. All we are left with is prevention. Prevention in the form of survival. So, I will survive. I mean this in a spiritual/emotional/metaphysical sense. Usually when people say "I'll survive" they mean they'll scrape by, or sometimes, they mean that they'll go zombie. When I say "I'll survive" I mean that I will live. I will fight the zombie with all my might, and I will not turn.

It'll have to kill me first.

Online Therapy

I try to make people feel better.

How many times have I heard people hypothesize that our culture would save billions of dollars on counseling bills if we'd just listen to one another?

I want to listen. And I think I'm pretty good at it. Maybe that's my problem.

The problem I'm facing now is that I want to talk. I desperately want to let out a lot of the frustration and angst that's been building for just about a week now, but I haven't found a chance too.

Let me explain.

Just under a week ago, my older brother was drunk and got in a fight with a meth-head. If any of you don't know, the only reasons one would get in a fight with a meth-head are a suicidal nature or another form of impaired judgement. Now, his jaw is wired shut, and there's been "structural damage" to the bones in his face.

He was always the prettier one. We're only 18 months apart. Ever since I started noticing girls, they were all busy noticing him. He dated a beautiful blonde super-christian who broke his heart because she read "I Kissed Dating Goodbye." Then, he got edgy.

Older Brother got into drugs. Slowly at first, but my current tally of the drugs he's done include Cocaine, Ecstasy, and possibly LSD. I've been watching Older Brother slowly choke himself to death on half-hearted hedonism, and all I could ever do was watch and try to learn from his mistakes (I didn't learn well enough, I date blondes).

Anyway, he's recently been skipping across Lake Rock Bottom like a perfectly smooth stone slung from the sidearm of a major-league pitcher. He got in trouble with the law a few times, got into debt with friends and our parents. And, now, he can't chew.

Growing up in Philomath, you learn pretty quickly a few things about meth and meth-heads. Number one, first thing you learn: Leave the meth-heads the fuck alone. They are stronger and less mentally stable, than they look. Older Brother knows this just as well as I know it, just as well as Littlest Brother knows it. He had to be really drunk.

All this to say... I hear this, and it kills me. I don't know what to do. I want to help, but I don't know how. I want to talk to him, but I'm afraid to call. I want to be home so that I can help in some way, but I'm here. I'm far away. And I always will be.