By Andrew North
I had a dream of a man, slowly stumbling on brown, cracked land, wandering aimlessly. He wasn’t thinking about anything because he was too hungry. He was simply putting one foot in front of the other. A monotone growl rolled over the dry plain from the gray haze in the horizon. The man ignored the sound like we would ignore the rhythm of our own footsteps. He came across a deer that had collapsed from exhaustion just ten yards away from a pool of water and, feeling he was only minutes away from a similar fate, fell to his knees and feasted on the doe’s raw flesh. When he was done he crawled over to the water to drink and wash his face but stopped at the sight of his reflection: A pale complexion contrasted with bright red blood covering half of his face, topped by the eyes of a beast that had seen too much to be horrified by anything anymore. Drops of red liquid dripped from his face as he continued to not think. Suddenly he felt a sharp pain in his leg and looked back to see a zombie methodically chewing on his calf. And finally a thought crossed his mind, “well, was I really any different from them anyway?”
Philosophers have a strange habit of striving for years to define something and then contradicting that definition by coming up with inconvenient situations:
“What is a human?”
“An evolved monkey”
“What about the soul thing?”
“An evolved monkey with a soul”
“What if normal monkeys have souls?”
“Do normal monkeys have souls?”
“… God damn it, let’s go find out.”
They’re a very silly type of person. But this weird obsession with defining things can have practical use in the future zombie ruled world.
At some point in your life you may have noticed a social anomaly (or at least it was an anomaly the first time you noticed it). People unconsciously change according to their surroundings. If someone hangs around pot smokers that person will become a pacifist and start eating a lot of potato chips. Hanging around old folks gives people a general bitterness towards anyone able to control their bladder, and gamers cause irrepressible spasms of “your mom” jokes, usually during competitive situations. So following this pattern it would be perfectly logical to assume that being around zombies for an extended period of time will have the same effect on the human psyche. Obviously it would be very counter productive for a living human being to go around moaning, scratching doors, looking scary and eating raw flesh, particularly if it’s human flesh. What are needed to counter this mental breakdown are simple definitions distinguishing humans from their undead cousins. It is fortunate, for all of us, that I have found those definitions. All of the years I’ve spent breathing and shitting on this planet have led to the culminating fact that humans are inherently jack asses. The spectrum of morality has nothing to do with us. Or rather, we have little to do with morality. We’re simply prone to an irritating, but ambiguous, disposition.
So there it is. I’ve saved humanity from one more psychological disorder. How are we different from zombies? Simply put, we’re jack asses and zombies aren’t. Some might argue that monkeys, who are decidedly non-human, can also be jack asses therefore refuting my definition of humans. This is a typically human argument. There is an important distinction between a jack ass and an ass hole. Monkeys are the latter. Ass holes are monotonously mean spirited. They are completely aware that everything they do either annoys or just really freaks out every other life form on the planet. Also they throw poop; only a jack ass would like one. On the other hand, being a jack ass is mostly a passive act. We’re almost innocent by ignorance. It doesn’t necessarily mean “stupid” so much as “ridiculous in an almost adorable fashion.” Being a jack ass includes but is not limited to the following: Not washing your hands, not clipping your nails, saying any sentence with the words “case of the Monday’s” in it, blaming your potent and offensive stench on working out, wanting to be a jedi so bad you spend hundreds of dollars on a fake high quality lightsaber, thinking that Twilight was anything remotely close to a good film, liking anything from the 80’s, having created something from the 80’s and trying to refute the fact that there will be a zombie invasion.
By this point someone has probably thought, “But Andrew I know lots of people, human people, that aren’t jack asses!” First of all, you’re a jack ass for thinking that. This is one of those “we are this, therefore we are that” type situations. If you’re a human you’re jack ass. If someone doesn’t seem that way to you it’s only because the surrounding people are a great deal worse. From your perspective they aren’t human; but no one is free from this title in my eyes. We have a day set aside specifically for practical jokes and yet people still fall for them every year. The entire world is spiraling downward because of an economic system that ultimately exists only in our heads. We are jack asses. Embrace it.
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