Zombies Love Tryptophan.

Zombies used to say “brains” and that was what they were after. Just brains. But then modern-zombies started eating the whole person. There’s a huge difference there. My theory is that while older zombies went after our “moral” cores, the new zombies go after our “identity’ cores.

At the end of Night of the Living Dead, a bunch of rednecks have some zombies strung up from a tree, and are shooting at them. Barbra is visibly disgusted. These barbarians are no better than the mindless brain eaters that had earlier terrorized a house full of survivors. The barbarians are just as brainless, or a-moral, as the zombies.

But you’re modern zombie film or TV show is about guts. Do the characters have the guts to do what needs to be done to survive? Or will they give in to a false sense of themselves, the person they “used” to be, and in the process, be taken down by a hungry horde of intestine-gobblers?

Here’s the key, and the cheap thanksgiving tie-in: Tryptophan. The tryptophan in turkey, and most meats, most protein-possessing foods, gets converted in your body into serotonin. Ninety percent of that stays in your gut. So when the zombies eat your guts, they’re getting a nice fat dose of serotonin. And since they’re brains don’t work so good, that serotonin stays in their gut, too.

They eat it so that their guts will keep working, allowing them to eat more. This circle is the core of they’re identity. Not eat to live, or live to eat, but eat to eat. Juxtaposed to that is the survivors. They eat to live, of course, but their vicious circle is about survival. They survive to survive.

And what’s survival but evading death? And what’s death but the big sleep? And what’s serotonin but the sleep transmitter? And what’s serotonin but what is made out of tryptophan? And what’s tryptophan but the amino acid that comes from Turkey? And what’s turkey but the result of “living to eat?”

Thanksgiving is a day to be thankful that we can choose who we want to be: Gluttons. Even zombies don’t get to choose that.

Would a Zombie Eat a Turkey?

Basically, from the neck down, there isn’t much difference between people and animals. So when zombies were eating just brains, we could see why they weren’t eating animals—there was something about human brains they wanted. But now that they’re eating everything, why aren’t they eating everything?

The more I think about it, the more I have to conclude its because people are everywhere. Or, people are where people are. When a person becomes a zombie, he is in place where there were people. There’s probably a term for this in virology. Like target-rich environment, or close-sector vectoring, or something.

And it might also be the case that animals can’t turn into zombies. I know this has been treated in a few zombie movies. Help me remember—did 28 Days Later have zombie dogs? I can make an excuse for that—dogs are basically humans, when it comes to social structures, especially human ones.

Either or, we could say that the only reason zombies aren’t eating animals is because there are no animals around. They would, like in the first episode or The Walking Dead, when they ate that horse. Would a zombie eat a turkey? Would it make the zombie sleepy?

No, and no, I say. No because they would not recognize it as food, or sentient, for that matter. Turkeys have a reported IQ of -10. I am not making that up. They’re basically plants with feathers. No, worse than that. Plants at least don’t drown in the rain. Turkeys will stare at the sky when it rains until their gullets fill with water and they keel over.

Yes, all of that comes from myths that are as perennial as the “eating turkey makes you sleepy” trope. But zombies are fictional too. I can put turkey tropes in my zombie world if I want. And in that world, turkeys are stupid and safe from zombie attacks. They're symbols of a world where there are no shuffling gut gobblers.

In that world, people gather once a year to appreciate just being alive. Then they chase down a turkey, rip it to shreds, and devour it in greasy bites just because that's what zombies wouldn't do.

That's what thanksgiving means to me.

(not) Zen and the (not) Art of (not) Zombies

Today on my way to work I passed a neon sign with a girly devil face on it, an art and design studio of some kind, called “Zombies.” Art and design, I will remind. Girly devil face, I will remind you.

Let’s do some meta-analysis. There’s “classical” which is the idea that truth is beauty and beauty truth, that there’s an underlying universal structure to things. Then there’s “modern” which is the idea that there’s no underlying universal structure, only the structures we create. Then “post-modern,” which says not even the structures we make have any structure. ‘Post-post modern” would be “Ironic,” and so would say there are structures after all, but only in a lack of structure, and “Post-Ironic” says nevermind structure at all, just be.

That’s glib, but sue me if you don’t think a person who never took a single philosophy, art history, or music survey course has any business talking about this stuff. This is a zombie blog, for Romero’s sake.

Let’s apply my glibness to zombie history. Start with the first zombie movie, call that classical. Then the first zombie apocalypse move, call that modern. Then the first zombie movie where people are killing each other more than zombies are, call that post-modern. Post-post or ironic would be all of this zombies stuff we’re experiencing now, zombies in commercial, cute zombies on T-shirt, zombies as metaphors.

Post-ironic zombies, then, just are. The zombie art and design studio doesn’t try to do anything to discuss the zombie “thing,” to further any kind if understanding. It’s pseudo-zen. It’s returning the word to the very core of existence—just a word, devoid of connotation, barely even a label. A sound stuck on a wall over an image next to a place where they… well, I don’t know what they do. And so I don’t know what they do, I don’t even know if they exist.

There’s cartoon out there on the web, showing four zombies at a dinner table. One says “I've always thought of zombies as representing a pervasive American xenophobia.” The next says “Really, I’ve always considered us a metaphor for runaway consumerism.” The next one says, “There’s something to the idea that we illustrate the tenuous line between civilization and barbarism.” The last zombie thinks to himself “I feel really stupid for ordering brains now…”

“Xenophobia” is the classical concept. “Consumerism” is modern. “Barbarism” is post-modern. Ordering brains, and the cartoon itself is “ironic.” This blog post is post-ironic. Get it now?

Yeah, me neither.

5 Reasons People Who Listen to Surf Guitar Will Survive the Zombie Apocalypse

Have you read “5 Reasons Independent Filmmakers Will Survive a Zombie Apocalypse” yet? Basically, it pays homage to the new Zombie Genre, pokes fun at Walking Dead fanboys, and then uses a zombie survival ethos to describe how great independent film makers (IFMs) are. IFMs: Work well in teams, are great problem solvers, aim for the head, are resourceful, and aren’t afraid to get down and dirty.

I gotta say, I kind of like where this is going. This idea to use a zombie ethos to lionize some person or organization or gestalt. I want to try my hand at it. So, here are my 5 Reasons People Who Listen to Surf Guitar Will Survive the Zombie Apocalypse:

Lots of Energy: surf guitar is frenetic, explosive at times, non-stop, unrelenting. These are the perfect ingredients for staying on the run when zombies are on the loose, chasing people down and devouring whole the slower ones.

Willing to Make their Own Way: surf guitar ain’t top 40, ain’t pop, ain’t showing up an any oldies station, is barely even touched by College radio or the Hipster Underground. People who like surf guitar are fiercely loyal, and don’t mind at all that they can’t cram themselves into the rescue shelters, repurposed stadiums, or other hell-holes that fall apart under their own broken infrastructure and become feeding troughs to the zombie hordes. 

In Tune with Deeper Rhythms: Surf guitar is about reverb, feedback, fuzz, and licks played so fast it breaks picks. But underneath all of that is a driving rhythm that holds it all together, a sense of time that surf lovers never lose in the noise. When chaos breaks out and zombies are running amok, when everyones gone completely banana bonkers, surf guitar lovers will hang on to the pulse of humanity and ride out the storm.

A Sense of History and Respect for Current Movements: Surf guitar got its start in the early sixties, and only the most cynical poser doesn’t still love Dick Dale, the Ventures, and the Chantays. But you can’t surf unless you get yourself some Laika and the Cosmonauts, some Man or Astro-Man? And some Daikaiju. When the zombies come and tear apart our world, it’s the surf guitarists who will remember Who We Used to Be, and keep that spirit alive even as they help build a New World of Hope.

Intense Survivability: Have you been to a surf guitar concert? They’re loud. They’re played in small venues which means all that loudness is packed into a tiny space. They’re dark. They’re full of teenager and guys in the 60s thrashing around wildly. They’re full of cheap beer and cheaper whiskey. The women at surf guitar concerts are tough as nails and will give you a black eye either to shut you up or demonstrate their love for you. In the mad rush of idiots running from the zombies who are ripping them to shreds, it’s the surf guitar fans who will hang in there with the best of em. You though the zombie was scary? Just try and take down a surf guitar fan, I double dog Dick Dale dare you.

 Okay, now it’s your turn. Send me your 5 reasons your favorite thing shows how someone will survive the zombie apocalypse.

A Negative Review of a Zombie-Related Thing.

Quick n dirty zombie blog post today because I am way behind and trying to get stuff done. Think of this as a make-shift zombie-killing weapon, like a chainsaw duct-taped to a baseball bat or something.

An article popped up on my radar, over at the Boston Globe, called “Zombie-proof your home.” The gist is that, since the zombie thing happens due to some virus, you can save yourself by making your home a place where a virus can’t get in or propagate.

I’m a big defender of “let people use zombies to do/sell/describe whatever” but here, I have to draw a line. There’s nothing zombie-useful in this article. It describes how you have to, basically, control air quality in order to avoid the zombie virus. Its zombie pictures throughout. But it doesn’t say a word about what will REALLY get you:

Teeth. Grasping hands ripping into your flesh. Other humans fighting you over scarce resources. Depression and doom.

Now, if this was an article about making your home cleaner, with a zombie theme, that would be fine. But none of this is useful in the real world either. No one’s going to tape up their house just to avoid the indignities of cold and flu season.

Taping up your house and hacking an air pressure system, if anything, is only fit for folly: I can imagine some guy in a zombie movie go to all of this trouble to keep the “virus” out of his lungs, only to have a horde of shuffling gut chuggers rip his duct-tape-and-plastic-wrapped windows to shreds as they devour his family.

The post mentions the Walking Dead too, but I can’t complain about that, since I do it all the time myself. Suffice it to say that, much like this post right here, I get the feeling this was slapped together in a pinch just to get on that zombie train.

Giving the Gift of Zombies

Today is my birthday, and I’ve already written about a blog post for The Great Brain Robbery about the effects of “giving” on the brain. (It makes the brain feel good-- perhaps instead of eating people zombies should work for the Make a Wish Foundation). So why not do the same for the zombie blog? So I Googled “giving the gift of zombies.”

First hit: the Zombie Cafe wiki, a post on how to gift food to your friends’ refrigerators. Intriguing. So I looked up the game itself-- its Diner Dash, with zombies.

So add this as another brick in the wall of “zombies are everywhere.” However, I’m not complaining. My own book, Still Life, with Zombie, takes this approach. Even if a thing simply puts a zombie “skin” on something, I’m calling it legit.

Right now, you can get all kinds of Star Wars Lego things. Is this “Star Wars?” That’s not a rhetorical question. You have to decide for yourself. If you call yourself “hard-core” and you claim to be a “purist,” you might have reached the point where your identity includes sneering disparagement of all this brand-abuse. But zombies, see, they’re not a brand. Go ahead, get mad when they make Walking Dead Legos (and I just drooled at the thought of that, so you know where I stand).

Merely slapping a zombie skin on something, as a marketing technique, is fine, and is no different than the way Hooters brings in customers to eat bland burgers. Sex sells, and so do the undead. But we don’t call Hooters a brothel, and we don’t claim Zombie Cafe adds to zombie lore.

So go ahead and play Zombie Cafe if you want, and if people sneer at you for doing so, just remember, they do it to define themselves, and it has nothing to do with you. That’s my gift to you today. Enjoy!

Can Zombies Feel Pain?

Dr. Dratoc is having a nice, relaxing cup of coffee in his favorite café, Sodium. He likes the place because it doesn’t get a lot of business, probably because of its name. He’s often alone in there, and has his choice of seats. Usually he sits in the back, away from the windows. Working in a hospital gives him plenty of opportunities for people watching, so when he’s at Sodium, he likes to face the wall and zone out, just forget everything for a while.

Today he’s thinking about as little as possible as he sips his cinnamon mocha. Caffeine and L-theanine, good for what ails you, and what ails Dr. Dratoc is overabundance of stimulation.

“Ouch!” he says suddenly, before he evenly realizes his hand is burning. He looks down at the spilled coffee on the table. Man, that smarts. Afferent nerves working as evolved, he thinks, looking up. He sees a man shuffling away, the one who bumped into his table. “Excuse you,” Dratoc says, a little peeved.

The man turns around, eyes glazed, a deep, bleeding gash in his forehead, blood running over broken teeth and dripping on the floor. He reaches a hand up, mumbles “braaiii” and takes a step towards Dratoc.

“Damn it,” Dratoc mutters. And Sodium used to be such a nice place.

~~~

Congenital analgesia, or congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP), is a very rare condition that afflicts only a handful of people in the world at any one time. People with CIP don’t experience pain, although they can feel heat, cold, and pressure on their skin. This is opposed to CIP with anhidrosis, where the sufferer feels almost nothing except pressure on the skin.

Science still isn’t sure exactly how nerve endings send different signals for pain, temperature, pressure, and other sensations, although CIP does appear to be an affliction of the brain, and not of the nerve endings themselves. In a sense, people with CIP do have pain, they just don’t know it.

Congenital analgesia is usually an inherited condition, although there are cases reported where it was theorized that a malfunctioning excess of endorphins mitigated pain reception. It can be very dangerous to have, since feeling pain is an evolved survival technique, and suffers are at risk of sustaining life ending injuries without being aware of it.

Fortunately, people with CIP do not usually suffer from any other defects; while they don’t feel pain, they do grow and heal as normal.

~~~

Dr. Dratoc kneels over the now recumbent man, listening to the distant but approaching wail of an ambulance. He reads the man’s medical bracelet. “Congenital Analgesia. Please alert a medical professional if I am bleeding freely.” Well no duh.

The barista, dreads, goatee, ironic t-shirt and all, emerges from the bathroom with a green face. “Blood everywhere, man. Not cool, not cool. It’s all over the sink, all over the Dyson Airblade hand dryer, man.”

“He probably slipped on the wet tiles, poor guy. Banged his head pretty good, put him in a daze. I’m surprised he was able to walk out of there at all.”

“Aw geez, ya think he’s going to sue?”

Dr Dratoc shrugs. “If he even remembers what happened,” he says, looking at the burn on his own hand and wincing. “They say experiencing pain can enhance the making of memories. This guy probably won’t remember a thing.” Dratoc blows on his hand, although the pain won’t go away. “Must be nice.”

Are Zombies Evil? Yes, We Are

It’s Philosophy Thursday (which I just made up as an excuse to write about something. I probably won’t even remember to do this again, and next week I’ll declare “It’s Zombie Tacos with Too Much Cilantro Thursday!” although, to be honest, I have no idea what that would even be. But that’s the great thing about making up stuff about stuff that’s made up: I can say just about anything I want.). So let’s talk about evil.

Are zombies evil? The word “evil” has connotations of viciousness and cruelty, of sadistic delight in another’s misery or suffering. It has connotations of apathy, as well as selfishness, a love of destruction, chaos, heartlessness and oppression. 

Central to all of those concepts is a theme of will, which is to say, a conscious desire and drive. I think we can all agree that while zombies have a desire and a drive-- specifically to consume flesh in great bloody chunks, gore dripping from their jaws even as they shamble in ripped clothes, wounds oozing, towards their next victim—this is not a conscious desire.

Indeed, as we’ve talked about before, the word zombie is used in philosophy to define an entity that does not have consciousness but is otherwise unidentifiable from an entity that does have consciousness (which is why I disparage the usage because if there are two people standing there and you don’t which is the zombie and which isn’t, you’re in big trouble—not to mention the non-zombie person, who’s about to get eaten).

And yet, it’s easy to apply such consciousness to zombies, even if we know they’re dead, albeit inappropriately mobile and deadly in that death. Look at one of the words I used above: “victim.” It’s easy to say the zombie is seeking another “victim,” and with that scenario in mind we can easily suggest such hunger is “evil.” Rationally we dismiss it, but our gut wants to attribute a foul Theory of Mind (look it up. It’s a psychology term, but whatever).

The take away from all of this is that a zombie attack is different from, say, an earthquake, even if you could style a movie based on ether, if you’re going to focus on survivors competing with survivors. In each scenario, rationally, there’s no “will” that cause society to break down. But since we can’t help but to “feel” that the zombies are evil, it changes the way we survive at all—by being evil to other survivors. 

My suggestion is that we individual living humans see reflected in the zombies our own evil, and I contend the reflection is all the sharper for the realization that zombies are not actually evil. We use zombies to justify cruelty and selfishness, and when we think on what we’ve done compared to mindless shufflers with no actual consciousness, we either kill ourselves out of guilt, or embrace the evil and take delight in the suffering of others.

Damn it, this got WAY deeper than I meant it to. I didn’t even get to discuss how I think the above definition of “evil” isn’t even correct (although I stand by the concepts posited here if man’s innate selfishness and love of cruelty). Fine, next week, I WILL talk about tacos. Or something. Man oh man, it’s going to be a long Thursday.

Top Ten Reasons to Buy My Book(s)

Trying to justify in that great big brain of yours why you should spend three dollars and ninety five cents on my book, Still Life, With Zombie? Here are ten reasons. I guarantee one of these will apply to you.

1. You’re a doctor on your way to Puerto Rico to help treat people who have been taking xylazine recreationally, and it’s turning them into mindless, shambling horrorshows. You need something light to read on the plane.

2. Your Husband or wife or brother or mother is TOTALLY into zombies, and you need a nice introduction to what’s the big deal.

3. You’re a discerning reader, given to an eclectic approach to collecting book experiences. You enjoy deep, thoughtful prose as well as more effervescent, playful stuff.

4. You just got a Kindle, or any of the many, many devices that can run a Kindle app, and you want to inaugurate your acquisition with something that the critics are calling… well, who cares what the critics say. You’re more discerning than those fools anyway.

5. You’ve come across this blog, and you want to see if the brilliance you’re reading here is matched by similar brilliance in book form.

6. You just love you some zombies. You’ll take ‘em any way you can get ‘em. Barbecued, boiled, broiled, baked, sautéed, zombie-kabobs, zombie creole, zombie gumbo, pan fried, deep fried, stir-fried, pineapple zombie, lemon zombie, coconut zombie, pepper zombie, zombie soup, zombie stew, zombie salad, zombie and potatoes, zombie burger, zombie sandwich….

7. You’ve seen all the zombie movies, all the zombie TV shows, played all the zombie video games… and now you want to know if a zombie book can hold its own against such juggernauts of zombie awesomeness.

8. You want to support a struggling, self-published writer who genuinely believes that talent and hard work have nothing to do with success, while the number of times he writes “shuffling, gut-feasting blood-hungry undead” will have a positive impact on SEO.

9. You heard from a good friend that there’s a secret code of some kind buried in some zombie book somewhere. Something to do with that Joss Whedon zombie movie that SHOULD be made, god damn it.

10. Razors don’t stop them; rivers don’t drown; acids won’t drop them; and drugs? Get outta town. Guns aren’t quiet; nooses work… till they’re freed; gas starts riots; You might as well read.

Philisophical Zombie Abuse

I’ve mentioned it before but it bears repeating: brain research leads to zombie culture. Once again, while researching and writing for the Great Brain Robbery, I came across another reference to zombies.

Can’t say I agree with the assessment offered, this time. 

“In director George Romero’s 1968 horror classic Night of the Living Dead, terrified people trapped in a Pennsylvania farmhouse try to survive zombies hungry for human flesh. 

But real zombies aren’t like that, …. The word ‘zombie’ is a surprisingly technical term, introduced by philosopher David Chalmers.

This is very misleading. First of all, there are no such thing as “real” zombies. In as much as philosophers have taken the word zombie to as a metaphor to describe beings in a thought experiment, they’re as real as anything else you can think up. For zombie lovers, every zombie move is a thought experiment; every video game is a “what would you do” scenario. Reality = zero.

Nor is “zombie” a technical term. It’s a metaphor. Its descriptive—and in every introduction to thought experiments that use “zombies,” there’s by needs a lengthy explanation of what that means. Then the “term” is as “technical” as any other co-opted word.

And of course. David Chalmers may have “introduced” the use of the word, but not the word itself. As any dedicated undead enthusiast already knows, the word comes from Haitian Creole, “zonbi,” which itself probably comes from an older word “nzumbe” which means “ghost.” Interesting, isn’t it, that the above article claims “Consciousness is definitely the modern conception of the soul” and then tries to confound a “soulless” being with a word that originates from the concept of the soul itself.

But, you know, that’s what we’ve been saying here at Zombie for Life: zombies are a thing. Zombies are here to say. People are going to use the word in metaphors, co-opt the term in new nomenclatures, and in general, abuse the concept like an erstwhile apocalypse survivor abusing trusted colleagues, while outside the brain eaters bar him in from precious resources.

The Zombies News is a Horde, No, Really!

Don’t know if you now this but I am one of the people who contribute to The Great Brain Robbery, a blog that discusses brain research. I read a dozen blogs every day until I find something I want to talk about, and then I talk about it, and then I shake my head out how little we know.

And I am amazed at how many times the subject of zombies comes up. Not just because zombies eat brains! Zombies really are a thing, they’re everywhere, they’re in the annals of scientific discourse. I mean, talk about a metaphor eating its way through the flesh of innocent subjects, sheesh.

There’s this story, about the uncanny valley, which is a metaphor for our comfort with life-like robots. At first we’re okay with ‘em, but as they get more human-like we get creeped out, and then we’re okay again. It’s in the eyes specifically, according to the research, which is why zombies eyes can be made to terrify us before they even drool blood and gurgle a request for our intestines.

And then there was this story, which led me to the source of “Ataxic Neurodegenerative Satiety Deficiency (I wrote about that a few weeks ago). Again, found it from a brain blogger. He also provided this: How World War Z Should Have Ended.

I could dedicate a whole blog post to any one of these. But I have one on Zombie children in Africa, Zombies in Puerto Rico, and one on necrotizing fasciitis to write (all of which will feature Dr. Dratoc, by the way). There’s too much!

A few weeks ago I switched from two posts a day to one, and I was thinking about dropping to three times a week. But then they’ll get me. The zombie news will crash through this brittle walls, rip me to shred and consumer my quivering flesh. I am literally shaking right now. Ignore that coffee cup. I am literally shaking!

Running After Zombies Running After Me

Went for a run this morning, to practice for when the zombies come. Long runs can make a runner better at sprinting, although sprinting will not improve your long run. I’m sure there’s research out there somewhere that says so, and even if not, I can make up whatever I want since we’re talking about zombies anyway.

Passed a sign for the Monster Dash, a 5k run those goes up and down the Interurban trail in Shoreline. Gnashing of teeth and wailing, I wanted to do that run! Last year I saw the signs post-run as well, and thought I’d take part this year. Then I forgot. Now I’ll be seeing the spray-painted directions on the asphalt when I do my jogs for the next six months, like last time.

But it got me to thinking about runs and zombies, how they go hand in hand. Zombie runs all over the shop. And I keep missing them. There’s The Zombie Run, which used to be “Run for Your Lives.” Tomorrow is the Dawn of the Dead Dash in Honolulu

(“Honey! Can I spend a couple thousand bucks on an airplane ticket tomorrow? You’re working all day anyway, right?”).

And of course there’s Zombies, Run! An app for your smart phone, which I helped Kickstart back in the day. It’s pretty fun—as you run, it keeps track of your progress, and you’re audibly chased by zombies as you go, picking up survival gear for the in-app game when you aren’t running. It even meshes with whatever music you’re playing so you don’t have to go out there alone.

I see people talk about shot guns and fire axes and crossbows all the time, show pictures of their dream zombie fortresses, discuss food rationing and survival techniques… but not enough is said about good old fashioned running. It’s the most basic, and I would say, most essential, of all the tools necessary to survive the undead apocalypse.

Cars run out of gas, guns run out of ammo, hatchets lose their edge, buildings fall down. But as long as you can trust your legs and lungs, you’re going to be doing pretty good.

Free Zombies (But Not: Free the Zombies)

If you’re reading this, you’re not playing No More Room in Hell. Well, guess what, neither am I. But man I want to. I was on my computer last night and I saw an ad pop up. Was it Reddit? Or maybe Steam itself? Yeah, it’s on Steam. I downloaded it but had to go to bed before it finished. Cause I have this job I go to everyday and I have to be up early. #$%^& morality.

Go download the game now. I am telling you this even though I haven’t played it yet. It’s free, damn it, it’s zombies, what more do you need?

Why are you still reading this? You’re like the shuffling dead, chasing me to the last line of this blog post. You can’t be reasoned with. All you want to do is feed. Well, here’s me screaming and writing away. Thank goodness for spell check. I need a weapon of some kind. I could bash in the brain of your sensibilities by saying something awful to get you to stop reading. George Romero was an idiot! That’s a shotgun blast to your guts!

Ah but it’s not true and you’re still coming after me. No More Room in Hell is, from what I can tell on their website, a first-person survival mod of the Source engine (that’s the Half-Life one. Hey, is that cool or what: Zombies are dead, but walking around like they’re alive, so they sorta have life, or Half Life. Yes it’s a stretch. When you’re being chased by reader-zombies you use anything you can to keep going). It’s not unlike Left 4 Dead in it’s co-op aspect, but up to 8 can play, which reminds me a bit of Killing Floor. But in NMRiH (name taken from that line in Dawn of the Dead: “When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.”) you’re defending your base, which is different enough from those others to be intriguing.

Maybe you haven’t stopped reading this and gone straight to Steam because you don’t have Steam. What is wrong with you people? How can you be the sort of person who reads zombie blogs but doesn’t play zombies games? Yes, you can get Dead Island on your X Box, but come on, man. No wonder you’re still after me.

Oh no! The inevitable tree branch/trash can/random object as tripped me up! You’re closing in! My workmates are arriving and I have to finish this blog post! You got me! Oh the horror as you feed on these last final words. But before I go: go downloadNo More Room in Hell now and tell me what it’s like!

Zombie Blogs

Hint-- he has this image on his website.

Since I am writing a zombie blog I often Google the words “zombie blog” to see what the other Zombie blogs are doing.

The top hit hasn't updated since October 30th. I mean, what the damn hell? No HALLOWEEN update? I think the person who writes it is in Canada. Do they have Halloween in Canada?

Not only that, but previous updates include one at the beginning of October, and the one before that is in July. A two-month span of no updates. And this is the first hit you get on Google when you search for “zombie blog.”

My complaint is not against the blogger himself. Actually, it’s a pretty good blog, and I’ve been enjoying my shuffling wander through the blood-soaked organs of its archives. Nor do I think mine is “better.” I’m not out to stare and compare.

Its just that I want fresh zombie stuff, so I can mingle with the freshness. Its all about SEO, right? Search Engines are zombies and I am trying to get their attention by shouting and looking like food.

Which is why I haven’t mentioned that other blog by name-- if I link to it, I increase its ranking on Google. That might make me a jerk, but, I have told you how to find it easily, and, I’m thinking about sending him a copy of “Still LIfe, With Zombie” for him to review, which means I’m hoping he’ll link to my site.

If he does another update this year.

And when he does, I will, of course, put a link back to him. I’m not a monster.

Everything's All You Can Eat for Zombies

A horde of them at the doors to the department store, moaning, gnashing their teeth, pounding with enraged fists. More of them, attracted by the noise, shuffle up and join the throng. The glass starts to crack, metal door frames bending, until finally, with the a crash, they’re through. The Christmas shopping melee has begun. Hungry shoppers, looking for the best deals.
There’s this idea that the zombie is a good symbol for consumerism, but I just don’t buy it (pun intended). I don’t agree with this idea of a mindless, monstrous crowd eating up everything before them with no more motivation than the simple need to feed on pretty plastic products, like the ones they read about in the magazines and online.

It seems to me to be too elitist an attitude. Zombieness is the constant mindless eating, but it’s also the infectious nature of a zombie bite, and the irreversible state of being a zombie. In order for me to believe these vicious consumers are zombie-like, I have to believe that it’s catching, that that catching it against the will of the new consumer means he’ll never not be able to spend all of is money as fast as possible.

Zombie stories are about survival, essentially, and for me to cotton to this idea of zombie-like consumerism, I have to agree that there are consumerism survivors, fighting each other over the last few precious resources. What are those supposed to be: art, culture, education? What are the elites spending their money on if not iPads and Tickle Me Elmos? Am I to understand that so long as consumers are going to Best Buy, they’re not creating the culture the elites want to wallow in, and this is why those resources are scarce? That sounds like slavery.

Calling some aspect of society zombie-like is to do nothing more than to dehumanize them. To other them, to establish an sense of self predicated on the idea that there are those who are different. It’s a bad use of Derrida, if you ask me. Unless we’re talking about Keeping Up With the Joneses, or Conspicuous Consumption, we’re not talking about people who identify with buying, or with what they buy.

Zombie is not an identity, it’s a label, and its abuse by those who turn up their nose at wanting the latest Nikes gives zombiedom a bad name. So stop it. If you want to feel superior to people who’d rather go to Starbucks than Cat Fiend’s Koffee Shoppe, just call yourself a hipster and be done with it.

Lots of Zombies to Play With

Desperate to write a post in Zombie for Life today, but having had a tough weekend of zombie-free thought, I Googled, simply, “Zombie.”

A little window popped up and told me that a Zombie is an animated corpse raised by magical means. Now, I’ve talked about the difficulty in classifying the different kinds of zombies across the meta-verses of lore, but I, myself, don’t much like the “magic” type zombies.

But I clicked the link and it went to Wikipedia, and more importantly, it took me to the page about Haitian voodoo zombies. So “magic” here does not mean “in a world where magic is real, such as described in a fantasy novel.” Here, “magic” means “a word we use to describe what people think makes their religion work.”

I’m no fan of religion, but that seems a bit condescending.

But nevermind that. Wikipedia is great about letting you know that there are alternatives to what you thought you were searching for. It told me that could instead read about zombies from films at Zombie (fictional) or I could see Philosophical zombie or I could go to the disambiguation page.

The disambiguation page, as expected, mentioned the use of the word zombie in the titles of things, like movies and games and songs and drinks. Lots of those. But I was, of course, most intrigued by Philosophical zombie.

P-zombies are people who don’t consciousness or sentience, but are indistinguishable from normal people Apparently these hypothetical people are used to argue against philosophies that boil human existence down to non-conscious parts.

It has something to do with Descartes arm wrestling Kierkegaard in Plato’s Cave. And Star Trek teleporters. Fascinating stuff, really, but hardly a metaphor—the word zombie is a convenience for these philosophers, and brings with it none of the delicious connotations of:

Blood and guts and brains and shotguns and hunger and terror and all that fun.

Ah well. Back to the disambiguation page. I wonder why the Cranberries called their song that?

The Day After Zombie Day is Zombie Day

Halloween’s done. For the most part. There’s cheap candy in the grocery stores, leftover costumes in bargain bins, lazy people’s decorations moldering in their windows. It used to be that November 1st was the first day that you’d start to see Christmas advertising, a sure fire-way to erase Halloween form your head. (Of course nowadays Xmas starts worming it’s way into ads as early as August. Talk about eating your brain, sheesh.)

But die-hards stick with their zombie love year round. This is the way it should be. Zombies, in the movies and books and videogames, are unrelenting. So to should zombie fandom. We don’t call this blog Zombie for Life for nothing.

Going on today, right now, is the Zombethics symposium at Emory University. They’re discussing apocalypse survival, pop zombie culture, “the ethics if defining brain death,” and other topics, all in the context of zombies.

I found about this only just now myself, from a blog post at Psychology Today, where Dr. Steven Scholzman talks about ethics, and explores what is essential the question of euthanasia (although he never uses that word) via an examination of zombies. It’s the same question that pops up in all the zombie flicks: are zombies still people, can they become people again?

Of course, the zombie movies only ask this questionto set up the more important question of: are the bad guys still people, can we kill them? The zombie apocalypse is just a gore-coated way to examine existentialism, really: you’ve been isolated by these zombies, and so your only choice is murder or suicide.

The irony is that, if you choose murder, that is suicide, because you’ve justified some other guy killing you. And this is why every day is zombie day, because existential angst never ever goes away.

Candy helps, though.