Undead Anonymous

Being A Zombie Is Like Eating Pot Brownies

January 31st, 2009

It’s difficult, if not impossible, for most Breathers to relate to what it’s like to be a zombie.

To empathize with all that we’ve lost.

To understand the daily challenges of maintaining a sense of humanity while your body decomposes and body fluids ooze out of various wounds and orifices.

For most zombies, time leaves us standing by, watching as our old lives move on without us.  It’s as if time crawls along at half speed and we’re stuck in the middle of it, spectators to the slow, methodical, maddening tick-tick-tick.

While it’s difficult to imagine what this feels like, one Breather in Dearborn, MI apparently understands better than most.  He and his wife.  At least with respect to how slowly time moves for us.

My First Zombie Christmas

December 26th, 2008

so, for christmas, my parents bought me a book.

monsters: a field guide to blood-thirsty beasts, by dave elliott

i’m not really sure what mom and dad were thinking.  maybe they thought this would be good research material for me on my own nature, a feel-good book to compare and contrast me with the other living damned and their cousins.  whatever their reason, the author of the book has no idea what he’s talking about when it comes to zombies.

first of all, he differentiates between zombies and the living dead, saying that with zombies, the transformation is reversible.  nothing against the whole voodoo thing and i don’t want to piss of the haitians, but i’m a zombie and there’s nothing reversible about it.  undead.  living dead.  zombie. it’s just semantics.

he goes on to say that we can’t think for ourselves, that we lack conversation skills, and that we feel no physical pain or have feelings of any kind.

well, he’s right on the physical pain.  mostly there’s just an unpleasant sense of dead weight, which i think comes from the body fluids settling.  and even though our tear ducts have stopped working and we can’t physically cry, we can still get our feelings hurt.

Random Dismemberment & Other Breather Sports

December 13th, 2008

getting dismembered isn’t as much fun as it sounds.

first of all, it’s tough enough being a zombie without having to shuffle around on one leg or to try to tie your shoes with just one hand.  a lot of zombies end up having to wear shoes with velcro straps.  plus there’s the shame of having one of your legs or arms stolen.

but the worst part about being dismembered, other than the humiliation and the loss of self-esteem, is having to watch the breathers who stole your appendages use them for entertainment in zombie-appendage sports.

stolen zombie arms are frequently used for zombie handball games, wielded as bats in zombie wiffle ball games, and stuck in the ground at beaches or playing fields to denote out of bounds markers.  while they don’t have as many uses and are typically more difficult to remove, stolen zombie legs are used for zombie kickball games and occasionally end up in the zombie punt, pass, and kick competitions.

and in more extreme zombie-appendage sports, it’s not uncommon to see school children kicking around the head of a recently decapitated zombie.

Zombie Thanksgiving

November 27th, 2008

when you’re a member of the living dead, there’s not a whole lot to be thankful for.  bloat and sloughage and hydrogen sulphide farts aside, the stigma of being a zombie in a world ruled by the living makes the torment of being a high school nerd seem like a birthday party.

i don’t have any rights.  i can’t talk a walk without being pelted with expired food products.  my friends have abandoned me.  my mother’s disgusted by me.  my father wants to sell me to a research facility.  and i live in constant fear of indiscriminate dismemberment.

if you’ve never had your arms ripped out of their sockets by a gang of drunk fraternity pledges who then slapped you in the face with your own hands, then you probably wouldn’t understand.

helen always tells us to look on the bright side of things.  to accentuate the positive.  to remember that although we’ve all lost more than our share, we need to keep our chins up.

sometimes i wonder how many hits of acid helen did while she was alive.

i suppose helen’s right.  it doesn’t do me any good to think about everything i’ve lost.  helen says that we need to let go of our past before we can embrace our future.  i’m still working on that.  right now the past is all i have and the future looks about as promising as the new fall lineup on cbs.

Social Undeath

November 16th, 2008

the social options for zombies are pretty limited.  for starters, we’re not allowed in restaurants, shopping malls, movie theaters, bars, grocery stores, or any other place where we might disturb the living.  we’re not even allowed in cemeteries, at least not during the day.  and with an 11pm curfew, that doesn’t leave us with a lot of time to mingle.

of course, you don’t really want to be out wandering around alone after sunset, not unless you’re willing to risk getting dismembered by fraternity pledges or dragged around by rednecks while tied to the bumper of a sports utility vehicle or duct-taped to a utility pole by teenagers with a firecracker shoved up your ass.

i always did play it a bit more cautious, even in life, so i spend most of my time in the wine cellar watching cable television and drinking my father’s wine collection.  other than the twice weekly undead anonymous meetings, i don’t get out much.  and as one of the living dead, my options for romance are pretty limited.  i haven’t been to any of the zombie sing;es’ mixers, but i hear they’re a regular maggot-fest.

Zombie Birth

November 5th, 2008

when asked about their first memory, most breathers recall breast feeding, riding a tricycle, being afraid of the dark, getting dressed for bed, discovering their bellybutton, playing with bugs, their first day of school, their first stuffed animal, or their first christmas.

no one remembers their birth. getting evicted from the womb and squeezed out through the vaginal canal. your skin covered in amniotic fluid and placental blood. emerging into a noisy world with strange smells and blinding lights. someone with a white mask and gloves grabbing your soft, malleable head with a pair of forceps.

no wonder newborn babies cry.

my new existence, my zombie birth, began with the realization that my external body cavities were packed with autopsy gel.

not exactly one of the top ten moments of my life.

except this isn’t life anymore.  and it’s not death, either.  it’s not even in between.  it’s more like a bad spin-off from a successful sitcom that the network refuses to cancel.

not every corpse that’s prepped for burial gets plugged up with cotton soaked in autopsy gel like me, but my mortician was a stickler for details.  a real by-the-book kind of guy.  even dressed me in a skin-tight plastic body suit to control the leakage of any body fluids.  i had a hell of a time getting out of that damn thing.

Day of the UnDead

November 1st, 2008

my name is andy and I’m a survivor.

at least that’s what i’m supposed to say and think and believe.  but i can’t say it, i don’t think it, and the only thing i believe is that this is worse than anything i could have imagined.

just so you understand, here are the basic facts you need to know about what happened to me:

- i died in a car accident when my volkswagen passat slammed into a redwood tree at sixty miles per hour
- i reanimated three days later and walked away from my coffin, just like jesus, only without the halo and the all-expenses paid trip to heaven
- my left ear is mangled, my face looks like a jigsaw puzzle, and my vocal cords were so badly damaged that i have to wear a dry erase board around my neck to communicate
- my left arm is useless, the bones pulverized from my shoulder to my elbow, ending in a twisted claw that used to be my left hand, which makes using the shift key a pain in the ass
- my left ankle is broken and twisted at such an angle that my toes are pointing at my right foot, so when i walk i’m hunched forward and limping, one arm hanging useless, the quintessential, stereotypical zombie.  even if i wear a hoodie, i stand out like a vegetarian at a texas barbecue.

needless to say, halloween seems more fitting than it used to.  after all, it’s not like I need a costume anymore.