Bored to [Near] Death

Is it winter? Summer? Some curious hybrid? I’ve never experienced a winter quite like this one (unless you count last winter — which was equally, if not slightly less, dry and boring). It’s certainly cold enough out… winter. But the sun is shining and it’s not snowing… summer? Although, people are still arriving to ski… winter. But we haven’t even put our studded snows on the Volvo, and haven’t even had the necessity to do so… summer? Sure, the studs are on my bicycle, but I’m not sure why. What a puzzling scenario.

Equally puzzling is our society’s semi-recent obsession with zombies (a.k.a no snow = no snow adventures to write about; therefore, I will delve into the world of the flesh-munching undead). Despite the fact that if zombies existed, they would rip our very zombie-obsessed brains from our skulls and suck them down like rabid Hoover vacuums, we still love them. We crave zombie books, like “Pride, prejudice and Zombies” and “World War Z,” both of which I devoured, pun intended. We adore zombie shows and movies, like “28 Days Later,” The Walking Dead,” “Zombieland” (which were too delicious not to watch) and the forthcoming “Warm Bodies.” We can’t get enough of zombie paraphernalia: stickers, costumes, magnetic poetry kits — even zombie jerky.

Hold up — zombie jerky? Zombies eat people, so… isn’t that some faintly diluted form of cannibalism? That’s gro — wait a minute. It says it’s made of beef. Zom-beef! I could be into that.

I digress.  Let’s take it back to bare bones: what is a zombie?

To the Haitians, zombies are actual folks re-animated through some sort of witchcraft or voodoo, which is creepy yet fascinating. For a freaky depiction of the Haitian variety, read “The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist’s Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombis, and Magic,” by Wade Davis. I leave a copy by the toilet, just to help things come out faster from sheer panic.

Haiti aside, to the rest of us undead fans, a zombie is… apparently not so easily defined. I thought a semi-undead humanoid with some serious blood lust and a wicked lurch would fit the bill. However, I found this diatribe on one of many zombie-related Web sites out there (http://www.inevitablezombieapocalypse.com — the domain name says it all):

“There can’t be any absolute answer [to the question “What is a zombie?”], since we’re talking primarily about fiction. What makes a zombie for me might not for you…”

Hold up… if a zombie was sucking your cranium out through your ear, that is a zombie to you, not me… right?

Okay, we’re back: “… I do think that when trying to determine the validity of a potential zombie, the death question is absolutely key. If it isn’t dead, or in a death-like state that strips some essential component of its humanity from it, then no, it isn’t a zombie.”

Some people have way too much time on their hands. But time spent penning reviews of zombie-related material is so much better than mixing up meth, chugging Mountain Don’t, I mean Dew on the couch all day or voting Republican (just kidding?) — so have at it little Timmy.

Anyway, since we require sort of zombie baseline, I think we can all agree that if this lurches by you better grab a  shotgun and aim for the head:

Or better yet, use a piano.

When was it that we all started to drool over leg dragging, bloody half-dead corpses? Is America trying to escape America through apocalypses of the undead kind? Or maybe we’re the zombies — not necessarily devouring flesh, but being devoured by our present era and emerging like zombies. Maybe something like The Roots laid down in “Dear God, 2.0:”

“Technology turning the planet into zombies
Everybody all in everybody’s dirty laundry
Acid rain, earthquakes, hurricane, tsunamis
Terrorist, crime sprees, assaults, and robberies.”

We got some big problems up in our grills these days — nasty stuff like financial cliffs and wars which cannot be executed so deftly and with such satisfaction as a bullet through an zombie’s putrid skull. Zombies represent whatever it is we Americans fear these days (from climate change to Donald Trump’s latest verbal dump). There is, however, at least one live human being attempting to survive in most zombie scenarios. I view this fighting soul as a metaphor for the hope America still keeps somewhere under a mound of iPads, Happy Meals, media BS and video games.

Except I had a unique thought the other day: maybe zombies are just misunderstood. All a zombie can utter is “Aaaaarrrgghhhh aaaakkkkkksshhh aaaaaaggggrrhhhh.” Can anybody translate? Maybe we should have linguistics experts trained in Zombie. Because maybe that dude was just trying to say, “I’m really thirsty, can I have a glass of water?”

Most likely zombie-dude previously had a glass of water, but in trying to walk from the sink to the couch with his bloody zombie stump-leg, he spilled it all. No one could understand him which made him madder than all the people on the plane Kanye West and Kim Kardashian held up for an hour at JFK a couple of days ago. If somebody only understood Zombie, the dude might not have become so thirsty he had to jump some little old lady and eat her face off. It’s one theory, anyway.

Unless you want to inevitably get your face chewed on, I suggest you readers out there do one simple thing: get in shape. Those of you who know me at all know that I am an active young lady. Aside from kicking boys’ butts up the mountain/looking good in a bikini twice a year when it’s warm enough at 9100 feet/being able to eat a lot of ice cream, this is why:

Go team.