An Open Letter to the Person Who Spread Dish Soap on My Stairs This Morning

I'm not sure whether it was sabotage or simply a poor attempt to clean up the cigarette ash that you've tracked up and down our staircase for the past two years, but please note that dish soap is exceptionally slippery and not suitable for commercial cleaning uses.

As for my early morning tumble down the stairs, dear Readers, you can rest assured that I merely sprained my back and my index finger. No permanent damage was done (except to my Grandmother's thermos - my only keepsake of hers - that shattered beyond all repair).

Return of the Sharp-Toothed Vermin

The mice have been gnawing again, leaving traces of themselves all over my workspace. I see whiskers and droppings and bits of sawdust from the walls. I can hear them chewing in the silence, when I am reading or staring at the blank computer screen. After several more pleas to the property management company, this is the note I received from the building manager:

Hey zombie [sic] guy –

I’m not supposed to give you anything, but this should get rid of those rats of yours.

Charlie
Bldg. Manager

I sprinkled the poison around the places where the mice have been getting in, but it hasn’t been working. Nothing works.

Nothing.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Success!

Thanks to new security measures I've recently taken, I can confidently say there will be no more unauthorized posts from a certain person on this blog.

Thank you all for your patience.

FROM: Rodrigo Weiss
TO: Mathilde Bagnoire
DATE: 05/09/98
SUBJECT: Travel plans?

Mathilde -

I must confess that seeing you lying there like that I experienced a disturbing sense of déjà vu. It was that, more than anything, which set me off.

You’re right. I am feeling raw. Perhaps my euphoria has left me with an excess of energy. I don’t know what to do with myself.

Perhaps we should travel?

Yours,
Rodrigo


FROM: Mathilde Bagnoire
TO: Rodrigo Weiss
DATE: 05/09/98
SUBJECT: My condition


Rodrigo -

You know that I can’t travel in my condition. Besides, to do so would be a flight from reality.

Mathilde


TO: Mathilde Bagnoire
FROM: Rodrigo Weiss
DATE: 05/09/98
SUBJECT: Your condition


Mathilde -

I don’t think you’re in any condition to judge reality.

Rodrigo

TO: Rodrigo Weiss
FROM: Mathilde Bagnoire
DATE: 05/09/98
SUBJECT: My reality


Rodrigo -

I know my reality, and I know that you’re not living in it.

Let’s stop this. I want to see you.

Tonight.

M.

A Plea For Help

Can someone help me with this?

To: Mathilde Bagnoire
From: Rodrigo Weiss
Date: 05/08/98
Subject: Apology

Mathilde -

I’m sorry for the things I said last night. I had spent the previous 24 hours thinking of nothing but you; perhaps the anticipation I felt was too much for me to bear. I shouldn’t have blamed you.

R.


To: Rodrigo Weiss
From: Mathilde Bagnoire
Date: 05/08/98
Subject: My condition

Rodrigo -

I don’t mind you criticizing my housekeeping skills; I have never felt cleanliness to be particularly important when the world is a living tomb. I had suspected you might be put off, given your nature. But I am not likely to change. Where I do take offense is in your criticism of my performance—you know that physical exertion is not good for one in my condition; I hope you also know that I did not purposefully imitate a cadaver.

I think you may still be feeling a bit raw emotionally, and would prefer to put everything behind us.

Mathilde

A Simple Request

Mathilde, I demand that you stop posting here.

From the Boca Raton Bee, November 6 -13 edition:

Mae Ridgecrest Weiss passed away November 3, 2004 at her home in Boca Raton, Florida. She was 92. Born in New York, New York, Ms. Weiss was the heiress to the Ridgecrest Food Company, famous for manufacturing communion wafers supplied to Catholic churches across the United States and Canada. Her husband, son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren were killed in an automobile accident in 1976, leaving her a widow.

Ms. Weiss enjoyed cooking and needlepoint. She also enjoyed traveling in the Northeast, touring Communion Wafer plants and sampling their merchandise. Later in life, despite her great fortune, she lived without luxury or electricity. She is survived by one grandson, whereabouts unknown.

Graveside services will be held Friday, November 7 at 1 p.m., at the Holy Cross Cemetery on County Road P in Boca Raton. A viewing will be held on Thursday, November 6, 2006, from 4-8 p.m. at Sweet & Son Mortuary. Memorial contributions may be made to the Sisters of Mercy Food Bank and the Animal Shelter of Boca Raton.

I WILL NOT STAND FOR THIS!

I will not stand for my blog to be hijacked.

Mathilde, since you refuse to contact me privately, and since my attempts to contact you have proved futile, I must publicly implore you to stop.

Stop.

Stop publishing my private e-mails! They were not meant to be read by anyone but you!

Readers, as you know, I’m not a technically adept computer programmer. This blog was started with the assistance of a student hired from a flyer posted in the downtown branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. Unfortunately, Z. has disappeared from the face of the earth. Calls have gone unreturned. Beware of this young man; do not be taken in by his boyish charm and assurances that his “extremely reasonable rate” will include follow-up consultations.

Obviously, I no longer trust or respect my so-called “co-workers,” so I cannot ask them for help.

Mathilde, do not force me to shut down this blog.

To: Mathilde Bagnoire
From: Rodrigo Weiss
Date: 04/28/98
Subject: Automatons

Mathilde -

When I was a child my grandmother had a massive nativity which she would set up on the hearth. Because I begged her, and because it became tradition, she left the twinkle lights on when she went to bed. As I slept on the couch, I could see the Holy Family through my half-closed eyes—I would drift off, then awaken, and each time I awoke again the blinking lights would give the momentary illusion that these figures were moving. Sometimes they became my family - sometimes just anonymous people who loved me, once - though of course I never told my grandmother, or the priest, about it - once I awoke and I was the child in the manger. The looks on the faces of the Virgin, and the shepherds, were so full of love. After a few seconds, the illusion would fade, and I would find myself drifting off again. But every time, before I started to go too deep, I would awaken again, and once again the illusion that there was a warm, loving circle - a family - surrounding me. I don’t know which was more convincing - the feeling of well-being brought on by that momentary illusion, or the feeling of bottomless melancholy when the illusion faded. I would sleep fitfully. When it was morning, I awoke with the certainty - a certainty extremely difficult to dispel - that the world was peopled by automatons.

Rodrigo

Betrayal in the 14th Century (and the Present)

Sometimes it’s important to be reminded that our petty personal dramas are utterly insignificant in the face of history. The plight of the Tzombi exerts a pull on me which helps me forget mundane day-to-day squabbles and reminds me that I serve a larger goal. In that spirit, I present more history:

When the Black Death spread through Europe, certain populations were unaffected. The Tzombi were the most visible of this plague-immune group. Since Tzombi kept their houses dark, the windows of the Pre-Deceased population were covered with shutters and heavy draperies. The Tzombi were loath to take baths, because this hastened the deterioration of their skin. The Pre-Deceased also adopted these measures. Though we don’t have any Tzombi-written memoirs (no blood circulation leads to poor eyesight, which makes them averse to writing for long periods) we do have an account from Agnolo di Tura, called the Fat, from Siena.

The ashen ones, called the Luccini, were selected by the Magistrates and were bestowed with a thousand gold florin each that they were to spend on the poor sick and to bury the poor dead. And it is found that at this time there died in Siena 36,000 persons 20 years of age or less, and the aged and other people died, to a total of 52,000 in all in Siena. And in the suburbs of Siena 28,000 persons died, so that in all it is found that in the city and suburbs of Siena 80,000 persons died. But of the Luccini there were but few victims.


As soon as the plague was over, however, some began to turn against the Tzombi, believing that their immunity to the disease suggested that they were responsible for causing it. In Strasbourg, many were tried and tortured, and despite the Tzombi race’s relative indifference to pain, a few confessed:

Balavignus the grey, a wight and inhabitant of Thonon, was only placed on the rack a short time, and his bones did crack such that when he was taken off his gait was uneven and his wrist did hang limply from the tender sinews; and he confessed that he had been sold poison in a sewn leather bag, and he was ordered on pain of ban and in obedience of law to put the same poison into the larger and smaller wells of his town; he stated that the color of the poison was red and black and did resemble muscerdae.

In 1380, there followed lynchings in several towns by an anti-Tzombi vigilante society who called themselves the Boniti. Di Tura includes a description of one:

These four the Boniti dragged out of their houses and cut off their heads. And the mayor caused their heads to be set upon poles and carried before the king. And when the king saw the heads he did greet them and the heads were known to have greeted back for a day and a night. And the king thanked the mayor warmly for what he had done. But when the second morning dawned the heads were without life.

I confess that I’ve been thinking a great deal over the past several days about betrayal, how people can turn against you for no reason other than ignorance and an unwillingness to bend their minds and wills into something good and kind. No one is impervious to pain, not even the Tzombi.

My Heart and Soul

K. and I are now sharing a cubicle. It seemed like the logical next step, as we are so like-minded in our working habits. Our research is going extremely well; I wouldn’t be surprised if we were promoted to positions of higher authority within the company. Though I normally don’t put my heart and soul into mere “day jobs,” K. has made me reconsider this policy. I feel a sense of joy simply being near her.

Tzombi Consciousness and Other Matters

I apologize if my last post offended anyone. While I try valiantly to keep emotion out of my entries, it seems to creep in anyway, like the voles at night in my office, chewing through my heart as if it were nothing more than a pulsing collection of live wires.

In any case, I’m happy to report that certain imposters have disappeared into the proverbial woodwork.

And now I can return to more serious matters.

I would like to publish a brief excerpt from Dr. Teresa Morgan’s article in Sentience: A Journal of Consciousness from March 20th, 2004 entitled “Dead or Alive? The Post-Deceased Consciousness”:

The zombie psyche is a study in contradictions. Though technically dead, high-functioning zombies are in general more emotionally alive and sensitive than their Pre-Deceased counterparts and suffer from a range of emotional afflictions, including Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Depression, Body Dysmorphic Disorder, and Dissociative Identity Disorder. Though most of them have lost their identities, they often have a more keenly developed sense of self, occasionally to the point of megalomelancholia. In the lower-functioning zombies no such afflictions are observable, though it may be possible to draw parallels between the sheer will to exist -- a will which doesn’t even take into consideration the possibility of suicide -- and the will of the higher-functioning.

Dr. Morgan has an interesting background in that she started out counseling veterans, specializing in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder treatment. Her even-handed, compassionate documentation (totaling 13 journal articles in the past five years) of Tzombi psychology has gone a long way in “normalizing” the field. I have sent her some of my own research and hope that we may open a dialogue in the very near future.