Survival Guide

I love zombies.

I don’t say that as a prelude to a love-fest celebrating the resurgence of zombie films in popular media. Nor shall I rant against the ill-advised and uninformed re-imagining of zombies in several recent productions. (Though if you want to read about that sort of thing, Shaun of the Dead’s Simon Pegg elucidated wonderfully about it in this article from the Guardian.)

I mention it because, for much of my early adolescence, I was deeply terrified by zombies and other creatures of the night. Now they entertain me.

It all started one summer in 1980 or thereabouts. A local tv channel was showing horror movies in the afternoons, and with plenty of summer break time on our hands, my brother and friends and I took in a lot of them. Them!, Empire of the Ants; movies about killer snakes, giant spiders- they weren’t terribly good movies, but they were fun and scary. The one that truly terrorized me, though, was Son of the Blob. I find it amusing now, but after watching that film, I could not sleep at night without leaving a light on. Visions of a mindless, gelatinous mass slowly oozing its destructive path through the world, absorbing every fleshy body it touched into its corpulence and slowly digesting them filled my dreams with fright. Aside from the need for nocturnal illumination, I also couldn’t watch scary movies at all without breaking into pangs of fear.

Then one day, several years later, I got over it. Horror movies just didn’t faze me. No more nightmares. I even began to actually enjoy watching scary movies, or going to haunted houses for Halloween, and reading horror novels. Maybe I just grew out of it.

Or maybe I realized that real life is much scarier than any fiction.

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. – H. P. Lovecraft (Supernatural Horror in Literature)

The thing that I love about zombies over any other horrific creation out there (no slight to the great and powerful Cthulhu intended), is that to me, they are metaphors. Zombies represent, for all intents and purposes, death. They are scary because, like death, they are inevitable. They are ponderous, but tireless; you can try and outrun them, and possibly succeed for a while, but they will always catch up with you in the end. They are free of malice; they’ll kill you because that’s their nature, their function- they don’t do it out of anger, or spite, or vengeance. And, more often than not, they appear in the guise of our friends and family- which is frightening on several levels. Do we not fear the loss of our loved ones? And how disturbing is it to think that we might not only outlive them, but that they might themselves be responsible for our deaths? You only hurt the ones you love.

To me, zombies are truly the iconic horror monsters because they epitomize that fear of the unknown. At least, to most people. Because most people view death as the great unknown horizon. Me, not so much.

Stop me if I’m getting too morbid, but to me death just- well, it just is. I don’t believe in any sort of afterlife, any great reward or punishment awaiting when we shuffle off this mortal coil. When this too, too solid flesh of mine finally gives out, that’s all there is to it, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t fear death because I know that it’s going to happen at some point, some day, and the rest of creation might as well cease to exist when I do because I won’t be here to testify that it didn’t. Very empiricist of me, I guess. Or solipsistic. As you will.

Horror writer H.P. Lovecraft believed that the true nature of the universe was so alien that any human mind attempting to comprehend it would descend into madness. To me, the sheer breadth of human activity is alien enough in many ways. Making choices, going through the motions, even just the tedium of mundane activities can just get too overwhelming to even begin to comprehend. (I hate having to constantly buy socks because I wear the heels out so much; and what kind of creator would have ever thought that dust was a good idea? Chalk one up to agnosticism.) Just the things required to do to maintain one’s solitary life can be maddening enough; factor in other people- their feelings, their routines, relationships- and it can be paralyzing.

Not long ago, a good friend challenged me to tell her something about myself that would surprise her, and I told her that I felt like the most terrible coward in the world. Much to my chagrin, she stoically nodded and said that didn’t surprise her at all. Now, I’d like to think I’m not that transparent (though, to her credit, she’s uncannily insightful), and I know she didn’t intend any slight in her assessment. Recently, though I’ve been considering that perhaps her lack of surprise was simply a recognition that being afraid is the only sane response to such an anarchic world as that in which we live.

In any event, such is the case: life, with all its myriad aspects, is horrifying to me. Much as I am dissatisfied with many of the things I do, there is a cold comfort in the familiarity of settling for less than I know that I’m capable of. I’ve spent a good part of my life underachieving. I know how to get by; I know how to do without, how to accept what comes my way and not go outside my comfort zone trying- and possibly failing- at attaining those things which I might truly desire. I think I’ve settled for so long that I no longer have a clear picture of what my real passions might be- if I ever did.

Which isn’t to say that I haven’t accomplished some wonderful things in my life, or that I regret every moment of it; that’s certainly not true. In spite of myself, I have managed to do and share some amazing experiences with many beautiful people.

It’s a struggle sometimes, though. To just slog through the day, feeling like I’m just going through the motions. Pretending at being like everyone else. Trying to avoid the craziness of being a cog in society’s endlessly grinding gears- because I’ve never quite understood why and how people allow themselves to become a part of the Rube Goldbergian machine that is modern society- and yet finding myself flitting in and out of the contraption anyway, because I ceaselessly fail to chart my own course.

To further complicate matters, I am horrible at seeking out and accepting help from others. I’m not entirely clear on why, though I think I can largely pinpoint two factors in my life. The first stems from a conversation I had with my brother shortly before I went away to college. I’d been lagging in applying to schools and for loans because I really wasn’t sure if I even wanted to go to college, or what I wanted to do; my brother was sternly trying to encourage me to get it in gear. His exact phrase was “to grab sac,” and make things happen, because no one else was going to do it for me. I don’t think he intended for me to take his words so fully to heart in the way I internalized them- as a testament to self-sufficiency to the point of virtual isolation- but that talk we had has always remained fairly vivid in my mind, so it was clearly formative.

The second big factor is probably my mom. She always seemed to live her life in the roles others selected for her rather than one she chose for herself. I know for a fact that she always wanted to write, and kept journals and poems that she wished she’d pursued. But instead, she opted to be: a daughter, a wife, a mother. When those roles ceased to be sustained by their instigators- upon the death of her parents, my parents’ separation and later divorce, her children growing up and moving on to their own lives- her world quickly and profoundly began to fall apart. Seeing that, living with that for as long as I did- it was pretty brutal to experience. And, I’m near certain, greatly informed my own decision to rely as little as possible on the assistance and influence of anyone outside of myself.

I’ve slowly been coming around to the realization- due to the love and companionship of such incredible friends and family- that what I do isn’t really important to them, just who I am. Even more, that who I am isn’t defined by what I do. It’s an incredibly liberating notion, and though I’ve miles and years yet before I truly comprehend and accept it, I feel it has helped me to be more open and able to accept the love of others than I ever have in my life prior. And to accept and be happy with who I am and what I have to offer as well.

Ultimately, the only one who really cares what I do with my life is me. I would definitely love to be doing something that I feel passionately about, that fulfills me. It could only make everything else that much more satisfying, and make me more complete. I just don’t know quite where to begin. It may be that I whatever I do doesn’t have to encompass my work or “career”; maybe just having more outside interests is a key.

Life is scary when you’re steering rudderless. But I hope I’m getting better at navigation; time will tell. In the meanwhile, if you’re looking for wisdom and insight into a harmonious nirvana, or how to walk that fine line of the Golden Mean, I might not be the best person to turn to. On the other hand, if there’s no more room in Hell and the dead start walking the Earth? There’s always room in the back of my armored truck for fellow survivors.