Zombie Dreams and other things

- This Old Zombie House.

A steady diet of the Zombie Survival guide, watching Song of the Dead (the zombie musical), and reading the 3rd volume of The Walking Dead made me have a zombie dream the other night. In case you didn’t know, I LOVE the zombie dreams. I love the running and hiding and trying to find guns. And I love being scared shitless when I wake up.

Weird, huh? Can’t explain it but I love dreams where I have to run. So the prospect of having a good ole zombie dream is A-Ok with me.

However, this was not one of those dreams. This was a boring dream. A dream where all I was doing was preparing for zombies to attack. Yep, I was nailing up boards to the windows, barricading the doorways, putting my car in a good spot incase I had to run for it. I’m surprised I wasn’t filling out spread sheets about zombies. In short, I was just doing chores around the house. Zombie chores.

Maybe all my hard work would have been Ok had there been an actual attack, but instead I just spent hours dreaming about work. That’d be like watching Star Wars and just watching Luke fuel up the X-Wing, checking his flaps and sitting around looking at maps for hours. And in the morning, I was tired. Tired from the zombie chores.

Maybe the zombies were like that swarm of killer bees that’s been on tour across North America for the last 20 years. Where are those dang bees at?? I know bees don’t fly very fast, but 20 or 30 years, I think I could probably jog across the continent. Isn’t that what Forrest Gump did? Wow, how interesting would that movie have been had he encountered the killer bees.

I digress.

-Good news: it’s not fatal!

I read the lead singer/writer dude from the Shins (I’m a big enough nerd that I listen to them but not a big enough nerd as to know his name) talking about the significance of calling their most recent album “Wincing the night away”. He said that he’d spend whole nights cringing thinking about the stupid things he said and did, being unable to sleep.

This has always plagued me as well. I developed (at an early age) the mutant ability to think of a particular event and conjure the exact same feeling that I had at that moment (why Professor X hasn’t come after me for this talent is beyond me, I means, come on, a mutant who can break codes but no Emotional Recall Lad?). It’s good for fun events (remembering the EXACT feeling I had when I got the Millennium Falcon as a kid for Christmas), but bad for particularly unhappy events (every horrible thing anyone has ever said to me or any horrible thing I’ve ever said). It was bad when I was younger because I’d keep myself up all night obsessing about something that happened and carrying that feeling around with me for days. And I have a pretty long shelf life on these things. I’ll often remember some long forgotten event and walk around with whatever feeling it gave me for the whole day. Psycho, I know.

The actor side of me has always found this talent helpful in that I can ‘emotionally recall’ an event pretty easily if I was having problems getting where I needed to be emotionally in a scene. I’ve always thought it was a little mentally dangerous to do that kind of stuff too much because it crosses wires and makes a very confusing line between real and imaginary and wears out events that are probably best left traumatic. This approach to acting has always bothered me about child actors as well, as often directors will use emotional recall as a way to get kids to cry or be upset about things. There’s a long, blow-hard version I could go into but needless to say, I think it’s dangerous for adults but much more so for the tikes.

More digression.

Anyway, the good news is that Alzheimer’s disease runs in my family, and maybe in small ways it’s already working its tiny effect on me as I don’t wince the night away nearly as often as I once did. So while some may think that this is my mutant power going away, I welcome the prospect of being blissfully ignorant of the millions of little idiotic things I’ve said and done through my life. Every cloud has a silver lining.

The downside will probably be when I rewrite this blog later on and can’t remember that I wrote it in the first place. So anyone who reads my ramblings or speaks to me will have to endure the reiteration of stuff they already know. Heck, some may think that this is my mutant power going away, but I welcome the prospect of being blissfully ignorant of the millions of little idiotic things I’ve said and done through my life. Every cloud has a silver lining.

-Dog Neurosis-fest 2008!

So for the last 6 nights, my pal Yoshi, dog wonder, has decided to get up at 2 to 3 in the morning and climb on my head. Literally, when he’s scared, he tries to climb on my face or my wife’s face if we’re lying down. And he weighs 80 lbs. So in the middle of the night, in the dark, 80 lbs attempts to sit on my face. The first night I thought someone was trying to kill me. That’s a draw back from all those zombie dreams. Daddy wakes up with fight or flight in full effect.

So last night, the misses was do her late night obsessive house work and I was sleeping with the lamp on so she’d find her way in when she finally went to bed. And at 2 o’clock, Yoshi attempted to be a hat. So I could see what he was looking at and afraid of. And it was…the closet. Or something around the closet. Maybe a ghost. No idea. But he was terrified of it.

6 nights in a row. See, besides my horrible allergy, this is why I don’t have cats. Cats are crazy. They see things. They freak out for no reason. They climb on your head. Now I have an 80 lbs cat that barks. I’m pretty anxious for a return to normalcy in my sleep habits and no more ghosty visions for the boy. Some may think that this would signal the end of Yoshi’s mutant power but I welcome the prospect of being blissfully ignorant of the millions of little idiotic things (ghosts) in my house. Every cloud has a silver lining.