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Zombie: gueeeeduuuweeeb uhhhz uhhhna ah buhhrdddab ah.

Translation: Keanu Reeves was one of the first of us.

Just a stray thought:

Watching an old second-generation Outer Limits episode about a computer taking over the world, I listen to  talk of mainframes, as I watch discs being frantically carried about, and I think of Columbo’s typewriter ribbons and daisy wheels. Too much technology dates movies and TV episodes immediately.

As I watch, characters are talking about the need to merge with their technology. How many of us carry our phones everywhere now? How many of us sleep with our phones?

Hmmm.

Sometimes all you need are uncooked burgers and a bird bath.

zzzummmdayzz awooeeurhhhh uhnnguhhggg urhhhurhh aha ihrrrbahh.

Readers:  What’s that perfect summer meal? Barbecue and corn on the cob? Salmon and gazpacho? Clam chowder on the beach? A simple turkey sandwich with potato salad and chips? Why not think about this for a minute, make a grocery list, and set out to create a few of your favorite summer classics?

Let’s carpe the hell out of these summer diems.  They don’t last.

English: “Sometimes when I close my eyes, I can’t see.”

Zombie: “zzzhummdie ennn ahhgoze mīayyhhhz ahgahnzeeee”

Question for readers: Should we close our eyes more often? An observation from the recent cross-country road trip. I never missed the news for one moment. I found a bar in Big Sur for the NBA finals. That was all the TV I watched during the entire drive.

Of course, driving itself requires open eyes. As my friend Alex would observe, the number of drivers staring down at their laps is reaching epidemic proportions. I like how the some states are now labeling rest areas as texting zones.

Having a zombie blog, a biography blog and an education blog just seemed silly. I merged the biography and the zombies to simplify life. This “new” blog will be a bit disconnected for awhile as I attempt to fit my biography into tips for the apocalypse.

I still hope to encourage others to tell their life stories, with or without zombies.  As I noted in the previous bio blog, as a society, we have become so busy multitasking and screensucking that we are not telling our stories. In place of a campfire, we sit around large, flat-screen TVs, alone or in groups, and the conversation dies. We discuss plot lines, characters and tomorrow’s itinerary, tossing in fragments of our day. Our backstories are sacrificed to work and leisure demands, and electronics, supplemented by the latest developments in the Game of Thrones.

We need to tell our stories before they become lost in time. Many of us know the old stories, our parents’ stories, because once we took time to listen. Sometimes we listened quietly while dad sucked down bourbon around a grill, visiting friends who sat in camp chairs, cup holders and laps laden with their own bourbon and burgers. Other times we sat at dinner tables while family members recalled the stories of their youth. I remember eating grandma’s beet soup while my mother described her own mother’s livid anger after my mom accepted a meal from a nearby family during the Depression. Grandma was going to have to sacrifice a chicken to repay the favor. That chicken threw my calm, analytical grandmother into an uncharacteristic rage, a memory of hard times in the 1930’s that stayed with my mother through decades to come.

Do our children know our stories? Do our friends know our stories? Do we know our own stories?

Whether we stumble into apocalyptic times or not, we are always charting our lives’ directions. Here’s a first question: Do you own your screen or does the screen own you?

Are you clicking on link after link, spending minutes of your life finding out what Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston have in common? Are you reading about abnormal eating behaviors in frontotemporal dementia? Or are you even keeping up with the Kardashians? If so, maybe it’s time to write, not read.

(I don’t want to seem overly judgmental here. Readers, if you feel like researching the adventures of Tom and Taylor, I’d say go for it. I am merely concerned about the amount of time that gets lost to that click-click-click, as link by link, we travel down the rabbit hole.)

If they were due on the 21st, our zombies are late. Maybe they are even now shuffling up rural Mexican roads, but maybe they’re not. Hmmm. Apocalypse #2347 may have been averted, fortunately or unfortunately.

Still, time may be short. Accordingly I’m going to suggest that tomorrow you tell one person something you like or admire about them. Let’s make the world a better place until we actually hear the moans.

(Written during the last school year on a cold, winter morning. )

Characters:

Mommy, a person who greatly resembles Jocelyn Turner.

Shasta, a giant, bloblike, invisible garden slug, about the size of a four-year-old human, although shaped more like a fat Buddha when she sits. Shasta loves to dress up.

Conversation with Shasta:

(Shasta and Mommy are having breakfast at Saranellos, an Italian restaurant at the Westin Hotel in Wheeling. Mommy has gone there for Capricon, a science fiction convention she regularly attends. Shasta is tagging along as usual, invisible to other diners, but resplendent in her bright purple cape and gold-sequined top-hat. Her slug body is slouched over the square wooden table as she rests and talks. Mommy has finished her oatmeal and is sipping Brahmin tea as she types. Mommy is up early and has gone to breakfast with Shasta while her girlfriend sleeps.)

M: Good morning, Shasta!

S: Good morning, mommy. Is Splenda good for you, mommy? (Shasta looks doubtfully at a yellow packet.)

M: Nobody knows. Right now, they have been investigating for half a century and they still aren’t sure if bacon is bad for you. Carbs are hurtling up to the top of the food pyramid. Who cares? I don’t eat much anyway.

S: You should eat leaves. Leaves are great.

M: Well, no one is debating that leaves are healthy. Except for the poisonous ones of course. Shasta, I did a lab this week. They were supposed to take apart lilies and identify the plant parts. Can you imagine that I felt I had to tell both classes not to eat the flowers? But they were doing such weird things as they tore up the flowers. Minions. Crazy-making. If flower abuse was a crime, maybe I could have a peaceful week while some of them worked their way through the criminal justice system.

S: You were murdering flowers anyway, mommy.

M: They were already dead. Those were autopsies.

S: You can’t abuse the dead.

M: Point taken. I wonder if necrophilia is even a crime. Necrophilia per se, that is. I see all sorts of possible infractions that might be committed while obtaining dead bodies.

S: The minions were a little crazy this week.

M: They are just kids. It’s easy to forget because twelve to thirteen is a twixt age. They can go from little kid to pregnant in a heartbeat if you don’t watch all the signs. I love this age. I get this age. But they can drive you just about bonkers. Jackie took off into the twilight, wearing a thin, worn, gray hoodie in windy, nineteen degree weather, before her mom arrived. Custodians and I end up wandering around, looking at cameras, and calling for Jackie. At first, none of us could believe she had taken off walking. But she had. Mom called me while I was driving home to tell me she was safe.

I have so much whole-child education to do on Monday.

S: Patience, mommy.

M: Don’t let me start planning next year. I have to let go. I’m too old for this madness.

S: I know. I keep trying to remind you.

M: I never was the best listener. Too ADHD, way too ADHD, although I have slowed down. Too unaware of my surroundings too. I ought to talk to Sam about that. I don’t think she is a dreamer. Non-dreamers can manage surroundings much better than their counterparts, even the attention-challenged ones, but she is working in a dangerous place. I worry about Sam. Maybe she is more aware of her surroundings than I am, though.

S: Maybe. But she is a phone loser.

M: Exactly.

(Pause. Mommy takes another sip of her Brahmin black tea.)

M: I need to quit. I get tempted by those job listings. I like teaching. I like kids. That feels like a truth. But I am losing my patience for bureaucratic bullcrap. I like Joel but some of that last interview was just goofy. I loved the part where he suggested I should not call the students minions because the dictionary definition of the word was not what we wanted our students to aspire to become. Do you think the minions have ever looked up the definition of minion? Not a chance. They know that minions are cute, little yellow creatures who bumble around having fun while working at mysterious tasks for an autocratic, but essentially lovable, adult. That definition fits my minions like a surgical glove.

S: Time to leave, mommy.

M: I know, Shasta. My patience is going. When Alex asked about the quiz yesterday, I had to laugh. I couldn’t cry. But it was one line – ONE LINE—of short, simple directions. I understand asking someone to clarify the meaning of a line. But they are supposed to read the line first, just read the line first. I can’t keep reading everything to everybody. And I can’t save anybody who won’t read. I would be so happy to buy books for readers, but as far as I can tell, I don’t have a single reader this year. How long am I supposed to wait for the next reader to arrive from Mexico? This has been a long, dry spell. At least Joelle Arizmendi works.

In fairness, the U.S. needs a DACA plan desperately. These kids lack hope and I am running out of cheery lectures about how it will all work out somehow. They need dreams. That lack of a social security number sucks those dreams dry. (Sigh.)

Well, the oatmeal was good. The tea, too. We could go to the con suite.

S: (Doubtfully) More food? Why don’t we go back to the room? We might try to pick up a program book.

M: I kind of like wandering around in a lost haze. It’s restful. I don’t feel like planning. The world’s waking up, though. We ought to relinquish this table, see what the world looks like.

S: It looks big. It always looks big. And it’s filled with details. Plus way too much salt. We could go back to bed.

M: That’s silly. Let’s go find a program book. Don’t worry about the salt. It can’t pass over into your dimension.

S: I know. I just object to it on principal.

M: Gotcha. There’s a lot to be said for objecting to inanimate objects. Salt hardly ever slips off the chain. We have it neatly trapped in this round, silver container and I guarantee you, Shasta, that salt is going nowhere while I’m here. Any slugs around here are safe today.

I’ve got this. I can handle salt.

Waiters are more complicated. I am going to have to do the whole eye-contact thing to get that check.

S: I like the guy in the Star Trek uniform behind us.

M: Me, too. Why not costume before breakfast? I spy gang colors and signs all over this room. Nothing shouts out a gang affiliation like that Star Trek red security shirt with its spiffy Starfleet emblem. Puts my Batman t-shirt to shame.

S: Well, you’re tasteful, mommy.

M: Thanks, sweetie. Waiterman is looking somewhat harried. Buffet or no buffet, the surging crowd is clobbering him.

S: We weren’t in a hurry.

M: True enough.

You want an excuse to retire?

Zombies!

Every time you walk into a crowd, you take a chance. Every time you walk into your office, you take a chance. You never know who may be walking into a cubicle down the hall. At what point does Joe cease to be Joe? While this last may be an interesting academic question, some questions are better left unanswered. And you are better off avoiding the office, where microbes may even now be swirling through Joe’s thickening blood.

If you have to go into the office, I suggest you reframe the usual morning questions. You want to force coworkers to talk. “How are you?” won’t do, since a grunt makes a perfectly reasonable and often accurate response to this question. Try, “How bald do you think Donald Trump is under that weird hair?” or some cheery political question such as “What should we do if President Obama is really a Kenyan, Islamic terrorist?” These questions require a verbal response that should reassure you as to the humanity of your coworkers. With luck, they will also send coworkers scurrying off to their cubicles, leaving you to work in peace. That last question should empty the room. If it doesn’t, you may want to think about changing jobs.

We all have our personal zombies. They may not be mindless, reanimated human corpses with a hunger for human flesh. They don’t always moan. Some may not even possess corporeal forms. What forces can eat the brain? I’ll list a few:

☻Deadlines

☻Time pressure

☻ Heat

☻Sleeplessness

☻Gaming

☻Anxiety

☻ Disorganization and Lost Stuff

☻ Crazy bosses.

I’d like to report that retirement slays all of the above except gaming and disorganization. Disorganization and his spawn Lost Stuff appear to be hardy zombies, possessed of a fair number of hit points. I am whittling away at them slowly.

The entire magnetic field of this solar system blinked.

Marianos ran free alcoholic beverage and cheese tastings last year. I don’t know if they still offer free beer and cheese, but the grocery chain posted the events in Eventbrite. I recommend looking up Eventbrite. Sushi and sake was a reasonable $15 or so. I enjoyed sampling the various free beers and cheeses.

Krankshaft above is spelled with a “K” and is a very pale but tasty brew. Our local Costco stocks the Goose Oktober Fest, heartier and mellow in flavor. The Oktober Fest will pair with many cheeses, while the Krankshaft may not do well with stronger flavors.

I present this as one more advantage of free evenings and never having to grade papers.

Zombie observation: Always remain alert when entering crowded venues, especially ones that offer free beer. How do you differentiate between someone who has had a few too many Krankshafts and someone whose viral load is pushing over the edge, as a poor soul sinks into the dark, mindless horde? Asking questions may help but as words slur and answers become less comprehensible, the wise consumer buys their cheese and gets the heck out of Dodge, Marianos, the party or the pub.

Zombie or not, incoherent people aren’t much fun.