Why Are the Dead Still Walking?

I watched an episode of The Walking Dead with BF last night. I did my best not to be an askhole and follow along but there was one thing that always bugged me. Why are the zombies a continuing problem?

If they follow the basic rules of decomposition, the decaying flesh would eventually lose functionality to the point of rendering the zombie immobile. Soft tissue would be the first thing to go like the eyes and brain. Eyes are self-cleaning organs so with cells regenerating or doing anything helpful, most zombies would be blind in a matter of days.

Even if Walker #3 has glasses, he lacks the instinct to swat away the flies who want to lay maggots in that nice soft tissue. Territorial stray dogs might attack them and even some birds might figure out the blind ones are easy pickings.

There’s also the vast amounts of bacteria living in our bodies. The idea of vampires rising like started from the swell and release of fluids by unembalmed dead. If you’re in a hot and humid enough location, zombies are going to pop like rancid balloons from hell. If you’re guts have blown, the zombie will be knocked to the ground and possibly immobile since a lot of what keeps our joints moving and together is soft tissue.

Other environments are just as bad for walking necrotic flesh. Deserts would dry out and slowly mummify the tissue. It also poses the possibility of cooking what’s left of the brain. Freezing temperatures would freeze whatever water remained in the tissue making them rigid and slow.

Even if I focus on the poppable zombies of TWD, Georgia has animals. They’re not exactly stomping around Atlanta for most of the show so why aren’t bears, cougars, and aggressive stray dogs picking these bastards off? Where are the bugs going after the soft tissue?

Even if they are wandering around Atlanta, it’s still freaking Georgia. The streets make for nice corrals to light ‘em up, either with guns or Molotov cocktails. The fire should destroy the tissue at least rendering them immobile and cooking up what’s left of the brain at best. We’ve established they’re not smart enough to stop, drop, and roll.

Also, how did this even become a thing? Most developed nations are pretty on their shit about rare diseases. Even if the zombie virus started in rural Africa, it’s not going to spread to the entire world. How many Americans who never left the continent got Ebola? 0.

All zombie viruses in the mythos start as blood borne. Even if it turns airborne, it doesn’t turn people until after their dead. Even if it’s an air born virus that turns people upon infection, most countries haven’t forgotten what quarantine is. If someone is visibly sick coming in to a foreign country, they don’t get to stroll around the airport. Customs is going to have some questions.

Even if the zombie virus started in the U.S. (and Fear the Walking Dead makes me think otherwise), there are cops, multiple branches of the military, a freaking government agency dedicated to disease, and how many universities and hospitals available to work on this shit? At least some of those people have to be competent when a national emergency is declared. Can we please write a script where someone, anyone, has seen a zombie movie and has common sense? Sure it might only be 90 minutes but it’d be an interesting, realistic 90 minutes.

How Did I Get to Alone?

I have struggled with depression off and on for most of my life. Sometimes it's worse than others but more people need to talk about what ails them so that healthy people can better appreciate what we're going through.

Regular people don't understand how much this illness does to people. It's more than just a 'bad day.' It robs you of the ability to feel joy. It saps your energy and puts such a spin on your mental state that you're not in total control anymore. Because it's such a personal feeling and experience, it is a very isolating illness.

Depression is isolating not only because of how it makes you feel but how it makes the people around you feel.

A lot of people don't want to get that close. They know you have a problem but if they acknowledge it, they might have to deal with it. They don't want to know what you're dealing with.

If you try to tell the wrong person, you figure it out pretty quickly because they shut you down. They deny what you're trying to tell them, dismiss it, minimize it. They jump through a lot of socially acceptable hoops to ensure this doesn't become something they have to deal with. They want no responsibility for your mental health.

Of the few who don't happily leap toward denial, you have to decide how much you let them see. What can they handle? What can you count on them for? Did you make a mistake picking them?

Getting support from people who can't see the depth of your struggle often makes it worse. They offer suggestions but they're the suggestions of people who don't understand the bad days can last for weeks at a time. Positive words and kitten videos don't cut it when you're contemplating what's tying you to this earth. How do you explain to someone their off bad day is sometimes the best you can hope for?

What happens if you let someone see how deep the rabbit hole goes and they can't or  won't deal with it?

They've never 'casually' contemplated suicide. Which method hurts less? Which has the easiest cleanup? How do you make sure you're found? Ridiculous reasons to ignore the urges like a new movie, unread book, or upcoming holiday. How can you make them understand?

You can't.

They can't handle your negativity in their life. They don't believe you really want to get better. They get sick of the impotence of being unable to help. Worst of all? Some just don't care.

Rather than risk adding all of this to your burden, you keep it to yourself. You get burned by the uninitiated enough times, you eventually stop asking for their help. Why ruin a relationship by giving that person the chance to do something you won't be able to forgive or forget?

You already feel alone in your experiences. Sometimes it's easier to try to bear it alone than feel abandoned by your supports.

PopSugar Reading Challenge Book 30 or Seven Wondering WTF Is Going On?

For a book with a number in the title, I chose Seven Wonders by Adam Christopher. I saw it sitting on my friend’s shelf and thought it looked like fun. Everybody’s gotta be wrong sometimes.

From the cover and general description, the premise is great. The last troupe of superheroes, the final supervillain, and one ordinary citizen who just became super himself. I expect Tony to be the main POV character but we don’t really spend that much time with him overall, and that was a huge problem.

Christopher was trying to tell too many stories: Tony, Blackbird, the Cowl, Sam & Joe, the Seven Wonders, and a few others. Because there were so many different narratives going on, none of them were very deep. We weren’t able to go deep enough into Aurora, Dragon Star, or Cowl’s mind to get a good picture of them as characters or find out what they know. It also disrupted the narrative flow to jump from character to character. We’re following the cops and now we’re switching to Tony and now we’re switching to the police chief.

What was almost as distracting as the ricocheting narrative? Never know anything! I was able to make some educated guesses in the beginning but toward the end it got more and more convoluted. I’m dealing with issues from a dozen characters and nobody can know what the hell is going on at any point in time? I wonder if this is how amnesiac characters on soap operas are supposed to feel.

By the final 100 pages, I was only still reading because I wanted to see what would happen with the plot. I wanted to see if, by some dues ex machine of epic proportions, this could be tied together. If 90% of the remaining characters died, I was fine with that since I had no investment in any of them.

Austin Grossman did a much better job of telling a superhero story with Soon I Will Be Invincible. There were 2 POV characters and it worked pretty well. Christopher was trying to do all the subplots of Game of Thrones with none of the depth and it didn’t work. Mildly entertaining but not worth the amount of time I wound up putting into this book.

What Should I Be?

I’m not sure what I’m going to do for Halloween this year. I was originally thinking a feminist Hulk but that requires more pieces and makeup than I can really afford to buy. I need to come up with 2 costumes for 2 different parties. Here’s what I’ve got available to me:

-Victorian widow
-Pirate
-Vampire
-Serial killer (they look just like everybody else)
-Stand-up comedian (they look like everyone else except broke)
-Cereal killer
-(Fallen) Angel
-Death/victim of higher education
-Catholic school survivor

Last year I was the color purple and the year before that I was a witch. I might be able to pull off a fae but it’s reachy. I have a bunch of RenFest stuff but that maybe be a little overdone since our RenFest wraps right before Halloween. There’s a little too much of me to love for me to be comfortable as the TARDIS or Lolitapool all night.

I could do a ‘spirit of Halloween.’ I could reuse some of the same pieces I used for the witch but I want my costume to be a bit more straight forward this year. I did a conceptual costume last year.

I’m leaning toward the pirate for one weekend and the widow for another. The widow will require some makeup but I should be able to pick something up at the drugstore. I’d have to make my face very pale but I’ve already got the rest of the makeup for both looks.