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.

Cotard's Syndrome and the Swirling Black Void

K. and I had a wonderful evening at a reception for a new exhibit at the Museum of Jurassic Technology last night. In case anyone is wondering, I think this relationship is definitely serious. It has erased all memories of previous relationships.

By the way, since some of you have asked, I’d like to post some pertinent scientific information about Cotard’s Syndrome. It is a condition – a mental illness – in which a person believes she has died and become a walking corpse. The delusion is often so persistent, she believes she can smell her own flesh rotting, that she can feel worms crawling through her skin, that she is putrefying, and that she has lost her blood and organs and is merely a shadow in this earthly existence.

I feel it would be remiss at this point to not share some details about a certain participant in my study (for the sake of the blog we will call her Mathilde). When I asked her about sensations relating to the “swirling black void,” she responded:

I’m drawn to it, even though it wants to destroy me. 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. What is it that keeps me moving, even though I am dead? It is the void.

As you will note, this mental delusion is quite serious, not only for the victim, but for anyone who crosses the victim’s path and becomes emotionally entangled with the victim.

Lives have been ruined by far simpler things.

Geophagy in the Non-Living Community

To answer a question posted in the comments section of the previous entry: yes, I was once acquainted with a young woman who indulged in the practice of dirt-eating.

Dirt-eating in the rural south and among the Tzombi population is a complex phenomenon and worthy of an entire paper of its own. The literature presents us with a number of conflicting testimonies about the “mud eaters”: it is sometimes difficult to separate racist propaganda and cultural bias/misunderstanding from disinterested observation; what we do know is that the earliest known reference to the “mud eaters” is in the aforementioned Kish stele.

The next mention comes from the diary of Agnolo di Tura in his 1347 A.D. plague remembrance. There is also an abundance of documentation regarding dirt eating among slaves in the rural south in the United States; because many American slaves came from various related regions through whatever circuitous route, it seems probable that the dirt eating which persists in the rural south was spread by this means. Whether dirt eating is a legitimate practice among the Tzombi population remains to be seen.

Of course, there are also members of the Living Community who still consume dirt, even in modern times. Here, from the White Dirt website:

Some people have actually been known to consume White Dirt regularly and not only like the taste but crave it. It has been said that the taste of white dirt is akin to the fresh way that the ground smells when it's real dry and a little sprinkle of rain falls. Dirt-eating is an ancient tradition that is practiced all over the world and although the demise of the practice has been predicted for many years, it still persists, particularly in rural areas of the South.

Aside from psychopathology (see aforementioned Soil Pica link), there are also possible medical reasons for dirt-eating. One may simply be that, though the need for eating has ceased, the habit continues, and dirt requires no digestion. In some African cultures, dirt eating is practiced among pregnant women, and medical studies have shown that it helps in producing antibodies. Since the post-deceased body is essentially a new life-form with a known susceptibility to certain viruses, it’s entirely possible that dirt-eating functions as a means towards increasing resistance.

Brahmagupta and the Void

A small setback today: another letter to the Center for the Study of the Living Deceased has been returned, unopened. How they can simply ignore my research is beyond human understanding. Adding insult to injury, the Sheriff’s Department rejected my request to conduct a seminar for the officers on Tzombi tolerance (this, despite their so-called public relations campaign to promote tolerance in the greater Los Angeles area).

Doubters and racists can turn a blind eye and pretend that the Tzombi race never existed. Meanwhile I am gathering a mountain of evidence which will soon be impossible to ignore.

I cite as an example the account of Sir Arthur Crawley, writing his Lives of the Mathematicians in the early 1800’s, who brings to light a few facts about the Indian mathematician Brahmagupta which might otherwise have been lost to the ages.

Brahmagupta’s major contribution to mathematics was in treating zero as a number in its own right, and in establishing a set of rules for working with negative numbers. Sir Crawley describes a near-fatal rodent attack which had Brahmagupta laid up for a number of days, presumed dead. He writes:

Upon recovery, Brahmagupta refused all nourishment and devoted
the lion’s share of his time in contemplation of the “cow’s udder,”
the large crater near his home town of Ujjain, which exerted a peculiar
fascination on him.

A rare order form—rare because of the scarcity of paper at the time but presumably necessary due to its unusual nature—details Brahmagupta’s request for a “black bowl, the lip of which is a zero and which, when set upright, represents a fortune, and which when set downright, represents a debt.” The bowl has never been discovered and is presumed destroyed, but several artists’ renditions have been created. I regret that I have been unable to secure the permission to use these images on this blog; however I have attempted with my own hand (a hand not untried in illustration) to render them:

1) Fortune (in Positive Numbers):



2) Debt (in Negative Numbers):



3) A View from Above:



Not surpringly, six months after the date of the order slip, Brahmagupta completed his Brahmasphutasiddhinta, or “The Opening of the Universe.”

Cultivating a Social Life

Though it may seem like I spend all of my time working, I’ve actually been cultivating an active social life. What good is dwelling on the pain of past relationships? I’m certainly not so thin-skinned and pathetic as to be rattled by faux-commenters who might be trying to exploit a perceived weakness.

In FACT, I’m in a new relationship with a lovely co-worker named K. She’s so full of life, so very charming and good at her job. I feel like a whole new man, in case any of you were wondering. So you can stop with the taunting e-mails now. I am rubber and you are glue and anything you write to me simply goes one ear and out the other.

Zombies and the Adolescent Imagination

I was recently cited in an article in Sociological Review entitled “Zombies and the Adolescent Imagination.” I reprint a portion here for the benefit of some of our readers (you know who you are):

The zombie film, as a pop-culture artifact, reveals a great deal about the interior lives of male adolescents. If we look to De Walters’ study of marginalized male adolescents, (“The Lost Boys,” Journal of Pediatrics, Mar. 1971) we find abundant comments relating to sexual confusion and feelings of being unlovable or unloved. Often these comments take a turn towards subjects’ claiming to feel “disgusting” or “gross.” Yet these same adolescents claim an insatiable sexual drive, and therefore their nascent sexuality takes the form of a shambling, blind beast, which must “eat brains” no matter what the cost. The fact that zombies eat brains rather than genitals indicates that what these boys really crave is an emotional connection with a romantic partner, while simultaneously feeling unworthy of such a connection, because of their “gross,” mutating bodies. That these same boys obsessively fear a future in which they become mindless working-class drones highlights their abhorrence of and attraction to the zombie figure.