An Open Letter to the Person Who Tried to Burn Down My Apartment Building This Morning

Dear Troubled Soul:

I awoke this morning to the smell of burning phone books and Rite-Aid advertisements. Lo and behold, it turns out you built a tower of broken chairs, cardboard boxes and recyclable papers in our laundry room and struck a match. Please believe me when I tell you that I understand the frustration that one can feel as a marginalized member of society. But lighting a building on fire is not the answer. More specifically, destroying perfectly nice washing machines and dryers is simply a waste of precious resources. Perhaps next time, you’ll take a cue from our Tzombi friends and stage an orderly protest or create an inspirational piece of art. True self-expression rarely involves arson.

Please seek help.

Your friend,


Rodrigo

Ongoing Thermostat War

Another sweltering day in a gray-and-pink, seventy-five degree hell. My only thoughts are of turning down the thermostat. Every time I begin to develop a thought, the heat prickle on my forehead tells me it’s time to attack the thermostat again.

Even worse, the dolt in the cubicle next to me keeps muttering lyrics to some song with a “Boom-chakalaka” refrain. Quite often these days the dead look like appealing alternatives to the living.

Room with a View

The view from my office window. Enjoy.

Persecution and Fear

After my recent gentle reminder to some readers that insensitive comments can lead to a tolerance for persecution of the Tzombi, I heard from one of my Wiccan readers, who commented:

We see the same unacceptable thing happening with Wicca, a movement that has started to gain more mainstream acceptance. Don’t forget the persecution of witches in the past!

This is, sadly, quite true. At my last place of academic employment, I had a (formerly Wiccan) friend who insisted on identifying herself as a “non-affiliated neo-pagan practitioner” – a term that was a reaction to negative associations with Wiccans. Sure, this is supposed to be a free country, founded on religious tolerance. But as always, the gap between good intentions and the reality of complex social structures (i.e. human failings) is vast.

The persecution of witches arises, as all persecution does, out of fear. The modern western world does not have a female aspect, other than the Virgin Mary, whose power lies primarily in being a vessel. This at least partially accounts for the demonization of female power, particularly female sexual power (Mary was a virgin, after all). Other world cultures, however, have embraced the feminine to varying degrees. My favorite example is the Hermaphrodite God Adistis, who was born when Zeus impregnated a rock. Eventually Dionysus got Agdistis drunk and tied its male genitals to a tree, whereupon he startled Agdistis and Agdistis accidentally castrated himself. When the blood fell on the ground, an almond tree sprang up. Agdistis became the goddess Cybele, whose festival involved her priests whipping themselves with knuckle bones and castrating themselves in a frenzy.

We shall hear more about Cybele in a later post.

But I digress. I was attempting to draw a parallel between the persecution of witches and the persecution of the Tzombi. Perhaps it seems initially outrageous to imply to imply that the Tzombi have the greater challenge, but on closer inspection it seems less so: while women were simply marginalized in Christianity, death was conquered. The ultimate deed of Jesus Christ was not to conquer evil or Satan, but to conquer death. Consequently, we have a severe prejudice against death and the dead which doesn’t exist in many other cultures. One need only look at the use of the word “Death” in the English language: “I was scared to death,” “She looked like death warmed over,” etc., where death is universally regarded as a negative. Compare this to cultures in China for example, or the pre-Hispanic Philippines, in which ancestor worship was practiced to have our fear of death thrown into stark relief.

As someone who has experienced death close up, I know that it can often be kinder than life, and that the sudden, unexpected death which we all fear is far less traumatic than one in which a person wastes away gradually.

A further kindness of the sudden, traumatic death is that this is the sort which, according to research, “activates” PMMS (note: this idea is controversial in many circles). For the Tzombi at least, this sort of death is the beginning of their new life as fully realized members of the Tzombi race.

Thermostat Wars

In my last post, I was attempting to prove that philosophical zombies do exist -- an impossible task, but I might point to the example of a coworker whom I shall call J. Every day, without fail, she insists the temperature in the office remain at a sweltering seventy-five degrees. When she is not looking I turn the communal thermostat back down to an ideal sixty-eight degrees but it is seldom long before she catches on and turns the temperature back up again. Her behavior is representative of that of a psychological zombie, for whom material comfort is everything. I need not add examples of numerous and regular cigarette and coffee breaks. Her lack of affect when I confront her is alarming.

An informal survey of my coworkers has affirmed that sixty-eight degrees is the preferred temperature, but J. is such a domineering personality, and my coworkers are such mindless drones -- further example that such a “zombified” state exists -- that my attempts to create a petition have been failures.

Nevertheless, I shall endeavor to continue. Da Corella was able to record his observations of zombie civilization while in the sweltering heat of Kongo; I shall be able to record mine while baking in a cubicle.

I shall overcome J. with sheer persistence.

The Zombie Conundrum

After re-reading my last post, I was reminded of the Zombie Conundrum, which refers to the philosophical construct of a zombie: a person who has no interior life to speak of, but who behaves in exactly the same way the rest of us do. Assuming this individual was able to mimic human behavior in a convincing way, even, perhaps, to the point of saying things like “I feel sad” when s/he in fact has no capacity to “feel” “sad,” it would be impossible to determine whether or not this individual was, in fact, a psychological zombie, or whether s/he actually “felt” these “feelings”.

There are the people you see who “cheerfully” go about their workdays, engaging in “witty” “banter,” and “worrying” about how they’re going to have a little “fun” after “work.” They go out for “happy” hour, or they go home to their “lonely” apartments, “enjoy” their dinners and go to “sleep” to have “dreams” of perfectly banal topics.

Sounds a lot like us, until you compare this to the responses of an interview subject -- let’s call her “Mathilde” -- who, while not of the Tzombi race, demonstrated many of the traits of the Tzombi psyche:

…but I feel invincible. My flesh is rotting, I know it. I have no organs. I am obsessed with my own skeleton and the knowledge that it is stepping out of my skin, like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. This is the part of me that is eternal, and I feel an invincibility knowing that it is going to be released. Life is the shroud and Death the unveiling. I find myself drawn to decay, and rot. I feel my breath rattling up and down my windpipe and know that when I am dead it can rattle through the empty spaces between my bones. What is it that keeps me moving, even though I am dead?

Happy Thanksgiving

Once more, apologies for the delay. I have a wealth of information I want to share, and my intent is to post entries on a daily basis. However, as I mentioned in a recent musing, funding is difficult to come by for independent researchers like myself, and my grant applications are as bogged down by bureaucratic red tape as the maintenance requests for my office. I have therefore taken a job on a temporary basis to supplement my income. The work is challenging, though slightly sensitive, and consequently I am forced to shield my readers from the finer points of my employment. I will say that many of my colleagues treat the work as a soulless endeavor, devoid of any personal or professional meaning. Few of them have any interest in my research, possibly because they have become consumed by thoroughly ordinary interests like Pilates or in-line skating. I can’t help but chuckle when I see them hunched over their computer screens, these “living” creatures who consider themselves superior to the Tzombi, if they consider them at all.

Happy Thanksgiving, by the way. Though I personally don’t celebrate the holiday now that my grandmother has passed away, I am happy to have the day off to contemplate my blessings. Of course, it would be nice to have a more steady source (or any source) of funding for my research, but I am alive and well and not bitter in the least that my blessings are so very thin at the moment. Enjoy your turkey, creamed-corn and mince-meat pie, dear Readers!

Zeitgeist

Every culture since has registered the same basic fear, from medieval Europe’s revenants to Haiti’s trodotoxinated nzambi, from which the word zombie originated.

LA Weekly 10/30/2006

One more article for our current examination of Tzombi culture. The LA Weekly – a fine weekly newspaper I have come to love as much for its erotic personal ads as its usefulness in creating papier-mache barriers to the vermin that crawl into my office in the dead of night – recently published a very interesting (if factually inaccurate) story on the subject of “zombies” in modern pop culture. I think you’ll see many of the prejudices apply to a disturbing degree; still, it is nice to see writers (albeit writers who work for a “free” paper) taking the presence of Tzombi (zombie) culture seriously.

Perhaps next time they will contact me for assistance. Though my consulting services aren't inexpensive, most will say I'm worth every penny.

Link to the entire article here.

Art in Echo Park

Funny that I should have mentioned a renaissance in Tzombi culture last post, as I have just attended a wonderful art show that demonstrates this very fact. Last night I attended an opening at a gallery in Echo Park, a showing of Tzombi artists from around the Los Angeles area. I have a few pictures:





I particularly enjoyed the work of an artist named Glen, who was showing some very nice charcoal voids (unfortunately, he wanted to charge me an exhibition fee for posting pictures of his work on the blog).

I also heard some exciting rumors that there was a documentary film crew in attendance, though I personally did not run into them. Apparently, someone is taking my research seriously enough to explore the Tzombi population through our most popular modern medium: cinema. I’m sure they will be contacting me very soon for advice and guidance with their project.

On the Early History of the Tzombi

While I certainly appreciate the ongoing debate about “zombie movies” that is taking place in the comments section of recent posts, I fear we’re simply rehashing all-too-common stereotypes. I don’t want to be a spoilsport – everyone is entitled to their guilty pleasures – but it seems prudent to keep historical FACT in mind. For example, I enjoy Netflixing Cirque du Soleil performances as much as the next person, but I know these programs aren’t an accurate depiction of, say, flexible people or Italian ice vendors.

Therefore, let’s shift our focus from the degrading portrayals of Tzombi in pop culture to the tangible and quite important contributions the Tzombi have made to human civilization. I mentioned an emergent Tzombi renaissance, and much as it vexes me that certain individuals, who are no doubt very open-minded when it comes to other issues -- the legalization of marijuana, for example -- continue to tout the virtues of offensive “zombie” films. A renaissance is generally preceded by a dark age, and though nothing could be darker for the Tzombi race than the flourishing of these offensive films in the 1960’s and 1970’s, there is nowhere to go but up (or at least co-exist with the current resurgence of the modern horror genre).

A similar dark period occurred in Greece around 1200 B.C.E. The Tzombi, fleeing persecution elsewhere, overran Greece and existed with the living in an uneasy truce. In yet another example of the way the Establishment consensus betrays the Tzombi people, one need look no further than the currently accepted translation of Thucydides On the Early History of the Hellenes, in which one passage reads: “The people were migratory, and regularly left their homes whenever they were overpowered by numbers.” If we look at the original source text, it reveals that the Greek word zontanos is here translated as “people”, when it literally means “those who live.” The word aperantos here is translated to the English word “numbers”, but it can be more literally translated as the phrase “many without end” or the words “infinite” or “undying.” The undead. While the accepted translation presents a picture of Greeks fleeing from hostile invaders, a more accurate translation reveals a displaced people searching for a home.

Eventually the Zontanos realized that, despite their sheer numbers, the Aperantos were for the most part docile and good laborers. They also discovered that they could be controlled through their fear of fire. The hearth became the center of home religion, and the defender against the Tzombi hordes. So began several hundred years Aperantos slavery.

Though slaves, the influence of the Tzombi can be felt through the artifacts of the period. The written word ceased to exist, a phenomenon in keeping with the poor eyesight of the Tzombi, and the art of the period reflected this as well. If we look at a piece of Mycenaean pottery from the era which preceded the migration of the Tzombi, we discover a wealth of realistic detail:

Tzombi-influenced pottery, in contrast, favors bold, abstract designs:


As previously mentioned, this “Gray Age” was followed by a glorious renaissance, which I shall attempt to document in a future entry.