It was all good just a week ago….
So please excuse my absence from the blogsphere as of late. It seems that when I’m stressed, I can’t write. Other emotions are fine, in fact they help. If I’m happy it helps and I write about zombies, if I’m mad it helps and I still write about them. It seems zombies are the one constant in my life; they aid me in articulating what it is I feel. Perhaps it’s the fact that they are misunderstood, or that they conjure up images of disgust, or that they probably suffer from self loathing like the rest of us.
But it all stops when I’m stressed and no amount of chicken soup for the soulless can help. Usually I live my life blog post by blog post, a simple idea, a funny encounter, immediately I try and formulate it into words. I suppose it’s a way of organizing my life, or trying to come to terms with it, or understand. But when I’m stressed it all breaks down. I even tried to fake it, I remember walking past a church, and again on the subway, thinking, trying to describe how I felt. How my lungs burned or how my eyes ached. I tried the most gracious application of pathos to daily living and still nothing inspired me. I tried to think of my life in slow motion, or set to music, and nothing, nothing but the same distracted and mundane shuffle. I stopped shaving, I stopped listening, I stopped seeing everything that usually means so much to me. Remember those alley ways that shocked and amazed me? Now boring and routine. Call lists seem enormous, and org charts are daunting. Roll outs and concept mapping now seem like a waste of time.
I remember standing on a beach in P.E.I. and wondering what it was that I was missing? I never had those thought before this year.
The shape of things to come part deux
So after diner I sure had a lot to think about. The conversation continued, and my date, for all her brilliance, didn't contribute much. So we marched to a park because I wanted to drink wine in a park and feel romantic while I still could (in case this alien took that away from me too). I also wanted to stand on snow, so the park had to have snow. So I stomped in circles in the snow and followed the little path that I had made, as wine sloshed over my hands and wrists and chilled in the wind. I stood back and looked at the imprints I had just created, I took pride in that accomplishment, at least not all acts seemed transitory.
The alien explained that "Love is an imaginative means of bestowing value that would not exist otherwise."
"So it is a figment of our imagination? A fabrication to help explain something that we do not fully comprehend?" I replied.
"Yes, and quite frankly us aliens are sick of how you are treating our souls."
His cruel words stung, a great affront to something we perhaps spend our whole lives (or their souls) chasing. I opened my mouth not sure of what to say, nothing came, so I continued to shuffle my feet in the snow.
"You see we aliens have already led perfect lives, therefore we have no need for an afterlife. Then you assume control of our souls, but only to behave in a manner unbecoming of a perfect being. To think, wasting our precious souls on others. The nerve."
"So what would you have us do with your souls then?"
"Nothing, we sent them here for quite rest. Or simple non-existence. We did not know at the time how you would abuse them."
"So why do you keep sending them? You said every time a baby is born, it is actual just receipt of yet another one of your discarded souls."
"Well, at the time of our initial departure we had slower transport than we do now. So some souls from the original transport are just now arriving. I was able to surpass them with our new technology and arrive before they did. Please remember we have sent them great distances, and since this discovery new shipment have surely ceased."
"So why don't you stop them?"
"That's precisely the point. We do not wish to disturb these souls, yet if we simply allow them to arrive in the same way, you just abuse them in a fashion that we deem undesirable. And if we disturb them by interrupting their voyage we are no better than you, or how ourselves will become, as the case may be"
As perplexing as this was I guess the humour of having an argument with an alien in the middle of a Montreal park wasn't lost on me. I startled to chuckle. Exasperated he continued.
"Love supplements the human search for value with a capacity for bestowing it gratuitously. See you love something then attach value to it because you love it. We would much rather you 'love' something that has previously been deemed valuable, such as our souls, and treated them accordingly."
I looked at my date. Her gigantic bag, bulging with the days acquisitions, my books, my blackberry. The bottle of white wine in her hand (we had drank the red at diner on my suggestion, despite her requestsfor the white.) Her sporting sleepy eyes from me having dragged her out of bed.
"Grant us peace, and stop loving"
I turned back to the alien, "I cannot agree with you" I said.
The shape of things to come
So as I mentioned yesterday I had spent the past two weeks or so in Montreal. For the second week I really only spoke to one person. I picked up the few French phrases that occurred repeatedly, like what to say when someone sneezes and stuff like that. Really the only notable discussion I had with someone else was during dinner at an Afghan restaurant. While my date picked through her dinner I struck up a conversation with a man beside me. He soon explained how he was an alien and had come from a distant solar system. He stated the nature of his journey was a pilgrimage to visit the graves of his ancestors. "Aliens used to live on Earth?" I questioned. "No", he replied. "You are our ancestors."
Turns out that Earth is used as a sepulchre to house the departed souls of aliens. And that Humans, including myself, my date and everyone in this restaurant were in fact dead aliens. "Why even your leader George Bush is one." he remarked. "Well actually that's Stephen Harper, but that still explains a lot" I replied.
All this happened while my unaware date drafted a plan with borrowed pen and paper to organize and mobilize young versions of dead aliens for political purposes. She didn't look up, unaware of this conversation. So this begs the question that if we're dead, why are we still alive. The answer lies within our proximity to the sun. On their distant planet(s) the sub atomic particles of the sun didn't reach them as intensely but due to our relative closeness they serve to animate our lifeless bodies. Its the same principle that allows superman to leap over tall buildings because gravity was stronger on his home planet. Still largely in disbelief I continued to questioned him.
"So assuming the sun animates us, what happens when we die?"
"Your sub atomic particles expire, thus ceasing you animation"
"So why is it that we can still think independently"
"Muscle memory, and pre formed cognitive pathways"
"So how can we interact with each other, I mean this all sounds so random, how can we have cogent conversations with other humans if we're just repeating previous random thoughts and movements?"
"Socialization is a stronger force than you have even considered."
Digesting these points I swirled my wine silently, smelt it took a deep gulp and held the glass to the light to look for streaks.
"You see, you are trying to send signals. Look at me I am accomplished, I am smart, I appreciate true value. All these are frivolous and vain, yet day after day all over the world people conduct the exact same exercise to try and project the fact that they are climbing or on top of your social hierarchy."
"Okay, so what about child birth?"
"That's how we transport our souls from our land to yours. We call it immaculate conception. I believe you've heard of this"
"So we're just derivatives of your soul? But how can we just be made of soul? We're solid matter?"
"Yes, just imagine what are bodies must be like then."
Then I paused to glance around as I tapped my solid fingers on the solid table in front of me.
"I can't" I said sheepishly
"I know you can't, you have no reference point."
"So what about love" Hoping to stump him.
"Just a perversion of the soul. You see you have such a limited 'life span' here on Earth that anything that detracts from what we considered natural, which is self-preservation is a perversion. You use your limited duration of animation to expel energy on someone else, therefore day by day sacrificing your own life for that of another. I supposed the saddest things from your inferior point of view is that in doing so you are also destroying the one that you love."
"So aliens don't love? You focus solely on yourselves and the continuation of your own existence?"
"Yes, how else would we become superior beings."
The Triumphant Return of El Chupacabra
I apologize for the extended absence, I have spent the better part of the past two weeks in a soul rendering exercise that has left me a bit shaken. And so I am, as never before, more humble, more vulnerable, more uncertain of my future. Yet I am also more satisfied, fulfilled and confident. It appears the last few weeks have yielded a dichotomy so unrelenting that I rarely know which way is up. I will tell you that I am peaceful, I can say that I'm relieved, I now know what the first snow fall in Montreal is like, and I know how it feels to hide inside from it. I peered from beneath my covers to watch stark branches scrape a purple sky. Snow fell silently, and I kissed the red wine stains from the crevices of cracked lips. Heavy eyelids stretched over expressive eyes, twitched as my breath fell as silent as the snow, and contained the dream that I so wished to be apart of.
It is because of this that I announce a new era in the writings of ghosts & admissions. I shall reintroduce the bombast that was so desperately lacking for these many months. Because of this there shall be more zombies than ever.
