Zombies. The Walking Dead. According to the dictionary, the definition of the word Zombie is : A corpse said to be revived by witchcraft, especially in Caribbean or African cultures.
If you watch TV or read apocalyptic books and stories, a Zombie also has an insatiable need for human flesh and walks the Earth forever seeking what it needs. The only way you can stop it is by eliminating the brain, i.e.. stab it in the head, chop off it's head or shoot it in the head. Cool, huh? Messy too.
Now you know and I know logic dictates that the half life of a Zombie is limited. It's body and brain is rotting. It's dead. That's what dead things do. They dissolve without the soul or energy to hold it together. It would walk for a limited time because the tendons and ligaments, muscles, skin and organs would break down very quickly.
There are movies and books about Zombies, so many in fact that it's become a whole genre in the writing world. And every author changes the rules under which the Zombies can exist, to match their story line. There's even a show on TV, one of the top rated shows by the way, called THE WALKING DEAD.
Yup. There's even recreations of THE WALKING DEAD scenes using Legos. Oh my. I've watched some of the seasons of this show. I enjoyed the interactions between characters put in to impossible and illogical situations with the odds against them and, literally, no one left to care. In one episode it's made clear that whatever it is that makes a human revive after death as a flesh eating Zombie is not only infectious but all of us have it. The only way to prevent becoming one after you leave your body is to shoot yourself in the head. Fun.
But I love the metaphor too even though gore is not my cup of tea, pun not intended. I think I'm at last becoming more conservative with age because it seems to me the majority of humans are now in the category of Zombie. And I'll pass up the opportunity to compare politicians to Zombies here. Too easy a target.
I see people walking around with their eyes on their phones, texting or watching video. It's sad when I see parents walk in to a restaurant with two wonderful children and then they spend the whole time at the table looking at their phones, texting with friends and ignoring their babies and each other. Drivers drift all over the road while texting and even the new President elect here in the USA is addicted to tweeting.
I'll reserve my comments on how I feel personally about the man . But I do wonder how they will control his mouth. He has absolutely no idea of how important it is to protect the people who work for his country. And he has no sense of diplomacy. He'll text without thinking about it and endanger people's lives. Phone addiction is serious stuff. He is one of the Zombies in the worst sense of the word.
Why do I think people are Zombies? They walk in to walls, drive off the road, fall while texting and talking. They walk down the street without seeing the world. All they can think about is their next interaction on a machine, talking with an artificial world. They eat without thinking, stay up too late, sometimes for days on end, because they're 'gaming' and in between they watch TV. Zombies. Do you see the similarities here? The only difference is they're eating their own brains and destroying themselves one inch at a time.
Last night I disconnected myself from some of the social media sites I enjoy so much. I realized I was beginning to look forward too much to connecting to Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and so on. Even worse I began to think their opinions mattered more than my real time friends and what they had to say or wanted to do. It was like, horrors of horrors, going back to high school and walking down a hallway, hyper aware of my not so stylish clothes or a pimple on my cheek. Been there, done that, survived it and I never want to go back either.
But here's the down side for me. I love people. I was a pen pal kind of kid. I had friends I wrote letters to all over the world. And when I was a young adult, I traveled and I wrote to family and friends back home about where we were, what we were doing. I love a nice piece of paper and a good pen in my hand. I doodled on the pages too, painted and played with the surface, putting small sketches in the margins and decorating the top of the page.
I love verbal and visual composition. And I love debate, discussions, learning about other lifestyles and languages. I am, most definitely, a learn-a-holic who loves people. So for me, ending social interactions online is a true and genuine loss. I love the complications of being human on a vast scale. There are seven billion of us and I was connected to people on every continent and nearly 2/3's of the world's countries, all of that via a phone and computer from a little ranch in Kansas. That verges on miraculous for me. I've had so much fun learning from other people!
Somewhere along the line it began to go sour. What felt like free and open discourse between people who were curious became something corporations and big brother governments wanted to control. How dare we find out the so called boogey man was just another bloke in a different location with the same set of problems and ideas! Even better we can exchange ideas and help each other.
Add a particularly rancid and foul election cycle here in the states and a population that is easily persuaded to believe anything published by the media and my need to communicate began to hurt. People attacked other nice people because of their political preferences. That's just another form of bigotry as far as I'm concerned. I am American through and through. I firmly and absolutely believe in our freedom of choice here. EVERYONE has the right to practice whatever political preferences, or religions they want to, at least as long as no children are involved or injured in any way. What happens between consenting adults is their business.
And I loved learning from them, all of them. Putting myself in to the shoes of another is something I've practiced for years. I do my best to make no assumptions about anyone because they all have a story. I'm not interested in judging anyone. I do love learning from them though. I might not agree with them but I can nearly always see their point of view.
In short, I was addicted to communicating with people . In the meantime I became more distanced from my world. I love complexity and color, pattern and the interconnectedness of Nature. Watching it from a laptop computer was not interacting with it. It was just whispers, gossip and innuendo from voices in the dark.
I'm done with that. I forgot that I'm not longer forced to deal with high school hallways and snickering gossips. I can walk away.
I'm back to my pastures and hills, camera and sketch book. I hope it helps to clear my head and stop the crying. I need laughter and puppies, kittens and horses, a recalcitrant donkey and my sense of humor in tact and healthy.
I hope you'll all stop in from time to time to visit, maybe to add to the story. But, please, leave your Zombies outside the door. It's such a mess having to clean up after them.
I am, ever yours, Nancy, moving on and laughing at the way things go
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