Concerning Zombies: Your Family is Dead

 

One of my brothers is a dumb fuck. I won’t say which brother, he’s just the dumb fuck one; every family has one of these things. But he’s still my brother so I have a societal obligation to say something cool about him every now and then so here it is- I am not, at this point in time, mentally capable of killing said brother, even if he was a zombie. I had this epiphany one night some inconsequential number of years ago when I happened upon a pale white creature, sporting dead eyes and an agonized moan, lumbering haphazardly in the bathroom of my home. “It’s finally happened,” I thought “bring out the katanas and the shotguns because there’s a zombie in my bathroom and I could reference a number of media sources proving he’s not the only one.” But a half second later I saw the crowning head of a dilemma being birthed and it had the face of a dumb fuck. For a full second after that I just stood there.

My brother hadn’t turned into a zombie as it turned out. Though he may have been close to a more normal demise, I can’t really be sure; the full events that took place that night are still a mystery to me. This incident, while a little disappointing, holds a very important warning: When the zombies come we will be in the most danger when facing the mindless cannibalism of our friends and family. As things stand now in the American paradigm, and most other countries, anyone who intentionally murders a loved one is considered psychotic. But those who bring themselves to kill the undead reincarnations of their loved ones will be in the small percentage of people who live longer than a week post Z-Day. That full second of hesitation I experienced after seeing a zombie version of my brother is exactly the kind of moment that would have gotten me killed had the situation been a legitimate zombie attack.

Here’s the truth about “The Moment of Hesitation”, we’re all going to experience it. Our social programming tells us to remember the dead and all the cool stuff they did, but that’s exactly the kind of thing that spawns “The Moment.” The more we’re thinking the more severe “The Moment” will be. The sight of our mothers, brothers, fathers and sisters bring up memories that stay our badass, zombie-smiting hands. Our brains will try to tell us that what we see isn’t really happening, but our brains are liars. The mothers that brought us soup and ginger-ale when we were sick are dead, the brothers that used to put our hands in warm water while we were sleeping are dead, the girl who’s pants we were trying to get in all those years is dead, the boy that we thought was kind of cool but was probably just trying to get in our pants is dead. They’re all zombies. They will all eat you without a single thought passing through their heads. This is how we must see everyone before we can entertain notions of long term survival.

But therein lays the trouble. How do we prepare for the trauma of murdering our closest acquaintances? I would implore everyone, first of all, to not practice by murdering live people. That is not an act we should become comfortable with. Our goal is to reach a state of mind in which we can separate physical bodies from the people they used to be. Something akin to the feeling we get from playing intense hack and slash games like God of War and Dynasty Warriors, when we reach such a high level of morbid concentration that all the samurai, ninjas, gods and demons turn into walking bags of xp. Our hands move with lethal instinct and our eyes, while still seeing, don’t recognize things for what they are. When we come out of our comatose state the only way of knowing that we actually did anything is by looking at our game statistics. This is part of the equation, the psychologists have been telling us the solution for years: play more video games, listen to loud abrasive music, get in fights at school. Because the best way to disassociate our living families from our undead families is to completely desensitize ourselves to violence. So let fly your fingers to the R1 buttons, aim for the head, get your bats and Rage Against the Machine and remember that you’re not being a delinquent, you’re training yourself, mentally, for the day your mother tries to eat you.