Braaaiiins....

I have fond memories of zombies.

Zombies are a sort of bonding/sorting agent for me. If I am in a room full of strangers, and I start talking about zombies--the ones who perk up and join in are people I know. The ones who have thought about and seriously considered what to do in case of zombie attack are my people.

On top of that, they are inherently funny. Between the shambling walk and the groan and the occasional "braaains" zombies, as a general topic makes me laugh.

Zombies are a ridiculous, terrifying threat. I think many of us identify as "geek" or "nerd" like these sort of terrifying, yet ultimately absurd threats of annihilation--they are just relevant enough to make us feel like were actually accomplishing something, but ultimatly we can treat it like a game. We like games.

Zombies occupy the same space that the hypothetical city-sized sundae falling from the sky does.

This sentence probably confuses you. I once spent a very enjoyable afternoon debating what, exactly, would happen if a sundae, the size of the city fell from the sky. What changed if there were nuts, how to deal with the molten chocolate sauce, and the fact that if a bowl was included, we were all fucked. The nuts would be the size of cars, and the ice-cream would freeze you if it didn't crush you. the cherry, once you ate your way inside would be a good place to wait out the melt--as the center would be hollow.

This is the space zombies occupy.

Hypothetical situations and passing time and conversation games. My friends group has a Plan. We even have a website devoted to zombie survival (http://ww2.zombieinitiative.org/). We postulate about how long the power will last, and whether or not the zombie virus can survive a Minnesota winter. I have argued passionately against the idea that it is a virus--and have decided that the zombie infection is prion related--partly because of the extreme changes that the body and mind go through to become a zombie, and partly based on how difficult it is to kill off a prion disease (extremely).

We sincerely hope that the hypothetical zombie apocalypse is not an airborne infection--as that would kill off everybody. We have a 5 and 10 year plan in case of Zombies.

We know this is ridiculous.

We just like the idea of a completely absurd threat, that we can in fact do something about.