Monday, November 1, 2010

All Saints Day Special Report

fury pumpkin carving

I did manage to have a Halloween weekend in spite of myself: Saturday night I went over to shoalmate Zombea's, where delicious food was made for me and I slept through The Hills Have Eyes and woke up for The Evil Dead. Sunday night I unexpectedly got invited over by my friend Jason, whom I haven't seen in ever because of derby, and who lives in a building with a theater room, where we watched The Walking Dead. Now I keep asking sweetie man if the government would be prepared for a zombie attack, because unlike in zombie movies, we have zombie movies in the real world and hopefully would realize more quickly what was going on. Rejoinder: Hurricane Katrina. Also if it makes sense that zombies can sprint because it makes sense that they can shuffle because being pretty compromised their physical abilities are less than living abilities and I, a living and decently fit person, can only sprint for eight seconds. Rejoinder: zombies don't feel pain or get tired, they can probably sprint forever. Ghghghigghghggg.

So my sister is pretty sick. I haven't seen her yet, I was supposed to visit her in the hospital this afternoon. But then something else went down, and I'm at her house helping my niece with her homework. Hoo boy, Imo is no help with math. Imo wanted to know if she could google the answers to the girl's homework. She was "fine" all last week, where fine means that she was in a good amount of pain from her surgery and treatments. I talked to her Friday afternoon pissing steam and writing a strongly worded email to her doctor, and then Friday night she woke up not able to swallow and my brother-in-law took her to the emergency room.

If you don't know what to say to a person whose sister has serious cancer, I can't speak for everybody. But I don't really need to talk about it at length. If anything, I err on the side of not talking about it at all because I don't want to people to feel like they can't talk about anything else to me. But not talking about it at all is freaky, because then people ask you what's been going on for the past six months and you say, Oh, you know, derby derby derby, and then you feel like it's this secret. It's not secret, it's just socially awkward. I just want to tell people, and then I'm happy to go back to talking about normal life stuff like whether zombies can sprint.

It's no good if zombies sprint, says upholdski Dame Over. If you're up against a zombie who can somehow sprint, you will get tired and the zombie won't. So just one zombie is a threat. One zombie is not supposed to be a threat. Zombies are a threat because of their sheer numbers. Even if a whole bunch of zombies are shuffling your way, you think your chances are all right. But they aren't, that's the point. Because people don't react quickly or uniformly enough to stop a slow-moving and stupid threat even. What dooms humanity in the zombie genre aren't zombies, but human failure. In other words zombies don't kill people, people kill people. If zombies can run, then it's just zombies kill people. And that's not as interesting or tragic, because being totally helpless and not able to do anything basically just sucks.