The Zombie Apocalypse is Here.

 

Photo Credit: eMMe

Zombie Apocalypse movies are prophecies and people behave like scavengers during a global pandemic. 

Yeah, I know, not all people...though on days like today, there's a great deal of evidence that implies otherwise.

Most readers don't know me. It's one of the reasons I write on this blog and Twitter....snark-filled anonymity. But right now, I'm almost longing for Facebook. Not enough to go back, it's just with this story I wish Bloggerville knew me well enough to know I am not a bull-shitter.

This happened.

And unfortunately, it's not accompanied with a video.

Backstory: I'm a mask-wearer. I closed a manual therapy practice in March 2020 so as not to harm clients. I reopened for a few sessions that summer and closed again as soon as fall hit. I believe in science...and facts. I spend most of my emptied calendar wishing for daylight and the better times I believe most of us wish for. I want all people to live in good health—mentally, situationally, and physically. This morning, I faced a whole lot of people who don't have the same want, they actually have the opposite want for others and for themselves. The experience was what it might've been like to be a rescuer arriving in Jonestown and unable to stop those cultists from drinking the poisoned Kool-Aide. A witness to a level of insanity that generally, pre-Covid-19, seemed to be a rare collective-occurrence.

This morning, I need to collect a wine order....you know....lockdown survival necessaries. This store usually has curbside pick-up available, but not today. It is early, the order is pre-paid and waiting for me right inside the entry, so I figure, why not? 

When I enter through the automated door, I lose time or it stops all-together. Or perhaps it is a black hole—the kind in movies used as a plot twist but in this case an alien isn't popping out of a bottle of rotgut tequila. Other than my heartbeat, which fills my ears along with an inside-the-head-silent-screaming omgomgomgomgomg litany, all sound fades as I unintentionally become performance art.

Of the lengthy line at the store register and the dozens in the connected restaurant sitting at tables, playing slot machines, and wandering to pay, leave, or go to the bathroom, I spot one lone wide-eyed stranger staring at me, mirroring my shock and horror. Masked, the person looks as though they have belatedly realized where they are and are trapped, surrounded by the walking dead. 

In the freeze state between fight and flight, my side-vision detects the door I entered has in the short interim nearly finished closing. At that moment, one of the unmasked mutants completes his purchase and moves in my direction. I snap out of my shocked stupor. My mouth, hanging open under my mask begins to form words as I shove my foot in the narrow gap left by the door, blocking it from closing entirely.

    "Are you kidding me....only one mask in this place?!...."

My knee wedges in to force the door open wider as horrified-me stares back over my shoulder at the other mutants.

    "....You're all crazy as shit!...."

In uber-slow-motion, me-eyeballs the silent mutant as he continues on past through the true-exit door while my wide hip presses the entry-opening further. Full-blown horror activates the rest of my words as I gazelle-leap through the doorway and in three gigantic leaps reach my car.

    "....Fuck!....Fuck!....Fuck!"

A postscript answer to an assumed reader-question:

    "What did the unmasked mutants do in response to me calling them crazy?"

The answer is more shocking than the event itself—the walking dead confirmed their status. They resumed conversation, continued standing in line, eating, drinking, and playing slots as though nothing had happened.

I don't know if there is an antidote to this level of dysfunctional un-living. It may be that humanity has reached a devastating point. One in which a large swath of us will continue to be a suicidal threat to others as the rest attempts to build a better country. Either way 2021 is likely to go very much as 2020 is right now....

Days of shocking enlightenment, horror, and gazelle-leaps to safety and nights sipping wine while chanting "There but for the grace of my resilient mind and belief in science, go I."

The Opossum Solstice.

 

Opossum is an intriguing word. For those thinking it should be spelled “possum”— that's only in Australia where that species of animal lives. Here in America, it is the opossum.

An opossum wandered by on my walk yesterday as if it had decided it was time to toss a rope into my swamp-wallowing. Could be it was a sage-offering, the opossum a new recruit to my tribe of spirit animals. It has all the markings of eMMe-truth, especially when entwined with this particular solstice.

 

A well-known fact of the opossum is that when it perceives danger, it often topples over in a grand death moment, the breath of the animal even perfumed with the stench of a corpse. What is lesser-known, is that occasionally an opossum forgets it is still alive, the slowing of its breath and heartbeat stealthily removing the idea it is play-acting. Apparently, the stellar performance fools even the actor and the animal never moves again.

 

In terms of the 2020 solstice and my swamp-wallowing, I wonder if I and many in our nation, have lost the knowing that we are not yet dead. Our breath though barely perceptible is still there, bodies waiting for minds to catch up to what is true. 2020 has felt excruciating. Loss of health and or loved ones to Covid-19, loss of income, loss of routine, loss of normalcy. While 2020 has been horrific, so were the three years previous as one-by-one, opossums toppled over after encountering predators unleashed to annihilate good governance and a semi-functioning society.

 

My story is complicated by a history of predatory encounters, each toppling me into corpse pose. Over time, corpse pose became normalized, not fully-living or fully-dying, walking as though I lived while living as though I had died.

 

The Opossum Solstice is a reminder that we do indeed still breathe. Though predators exist, they are not close enough to smell our breath. It is time to move.

 
Tonight, I will set a bonfire with the intention that my opossum awakens so she and I may live as though we are indeed, still breathing.

This Indifferent Country: The Devastating Price of Ignorance

Between Here & There By eMMe Lecos 

Ignorance is the lack of access to, an unwillingness to accept, and the willful denial of wisdom that is entrenched in submissive indifference.

It is also the definition for this self-provoked hellscape of 2020. I liken it to a cultural micro—an abusive family refusing to acknowledge, address, or heal a collective trauma experience.

Journalists decreeing empathy for a president who has refused science and endangered himself and others is a product of our enablement of ignorance. We cannot structurally resist an authoritarian who has left our country open to a deadly virus, unless we deal with and end our submissive coddling of bullies.

We cannot move forward until we walk backward with an awareness of what has been done.

Our country holds belligerent fools in higher esteem than science and facts. The loud and flamboyant are considered titillating and entertaining. We’ve reached an apocalyptic level of uncritical thinking largely due to a severe indifference to the importance of intelligent, social responsibility. The Senate, religious institutions, and the excitement-malleable press have given credence to a governing-platform built upon lies, propaganda, and bullying tactics that shove resistors and truth out of the mainstream. This has led to a recent “good people should” instruction: mass atrocities must be overlooked for a president who has been felled by a virus…even if due to his own inaction and venal disregard.

First walk backward, collect an awareness of what has been done, and then firmly hold onto that knowledge as enablers and propagandists relentlessly attempt to shut down critical thinking.

We are in the middle of a cold civil war—a war between wisdom and intentional stupidity. A war pitting reason; boring, logical reason against an addictive, suicidal level of ignorance. Wisdom stands between our humane selves and the entrance to our unevolved, pre-frontal lobe selves abusing each other for scraps discarded by tyrants. To protect that dividing line between thoughtfulness and unrelenting crudeness, there is only one option. Fight back. Turning the other cheek and maintaining superficial politeness enables bullies. We have no cheeks left to turn. Our battered cheeks carry collective trauma that’s actively eviscerating our future.

I have been bullied by several different individuals. Family members, kids at school, teachers, co-workers, bosses, and even friends. Many times, I fought back and many times I didn’t. Even when I resisted, my body trembled, my voice cracked, and tears threatened to lay me bare. Fighting back is the antithesis of how I was modeled, the clay of me tucked and nipped until I succumbed more often than I want to remember.

2016, pre-election, I shouted warnings on every medium available to me, my historical wounds deep, wisdom streaming like blood sent to warn of impending doom. I often relish being right, coveting the tragic lessons tattooed into heart and brain as a warrior displaying battle scars announcing my survival. I have no enjoyment of this ugly mess my wisdom foretold; a wisdom garnered from living with a poor man’s Donald Trump.

A seer is someone who foretells the future, extrapolating from available information what is the most-likely outcome of a situation. Wall Street is littered with self-proclaimed versions relying on win-loss ratios as banners for successfully guessing market trends. A seer does not self-proclaim, they instead advise while understanding that the end result, regardless of their accuracy, is out of their hands.

Bullies are prolific in this societal landscape, our soil lacking sustained pushback and consequences severe enough to matter. Bullies and tyrants sown in families, businesses, and government, kudzu swallowing thoughtfulness whole. I wrote about this in August 2016 in an article on the Huffington Post platform: The Real Authoritarian Deal—America Under Donald Trump’s Boot.

I am not a prophet. I’m a see-r. I see how the past impacts the present and how it inspires or diminishes our future.

This is a vital, pivotal time in our collective lives. Either we careen off a cliff, carried along with disturbed lemmings blindly following their leader or we put a stop to this suicidal stupidity and fight back.

Do not doubt your own earned-wisdom. Trust it. Inform others. Gather. We are between here and there. The future will be written with what we do next.

Vote early in-person or deliver mail-in ballots to the office of the county clerk. Go with friends or family. If lemmings attempt to bully you at the polls, call the county clerk’s office with the number programmed into your phone. Video their behavior and post it online. Write about your experience with bullies to remind others we don’t have to live this way. Bullies are not the majority, humanity is.

Fight back.

Birdseed

Photo by eMMe

As a kid I knew no one would rescue me. I didn’t know it in a complex “someone might help and they haven’t or won't.” I understood I was on my own since that’s simply how it had most-always been.

One time, someone stepped in and stopped my brain from extreme damage. Even then it wasn’t to offer comfort or provide support, it was to stop the person who was shaking me, snapping my head back and forth, the sound of a whooshing train filling my ears until it went silent.

Other than that single instance, my childhood was left alone to create a brokenness resistant to healing. A pane of glass shattered in big and tiny taps until the pieces are so small they aren’t a jigsaw puzzle requiring a long weekend, rather a bag of birdseed scattered and eaten by a flock of swallows on a layover before heading to San Juan Capistrano.

I offer this analogy after seeing photos of people in Huntington Beach protesting against being protected, protesting over someone caring enough about their health and the health of others to stand up for them. Those photos have risen my despair so that it swamps my broken parts...the elements of me that needed that kind of selfless concern. Those folks protesting in Huntington Beach and across the country are throwing away care as though care comes to everyone. To them, care is so prevalent or unimportant, its value is worthless and the opportunity for it ought to be destroyed.

I don’t know if I believe in God the way others do. Perhaps that’s a product of what happened to me.

What I believe in is a collective be-ing from within all life that is either cultivated into care and concern, thoughtfulness and awareness, beneficence and value or it is turned over to dread and harm, hate and putridness, and a rigid meanness and uncaring that breaks things and people, scattering them to hungry birds on a layover.

It is no longer whether or not there are “someones” who will rescue us from harm—that has been answered. We must save ourselves.

Rainbows & Lightning Bolts A Story Series Part 2

Photo by eMMe

I probably could’ve dog paddled above my Great Sea of Nothing for the rest of my life and not ever fully-realized how hard my body was working to hide what I didn’t want to remember. That might’ve been a minuscule amount of time given that a couple of organs had already skedaddled and a lightning bolt had stripped my brain of memories, however briefly, at that party five years ago…

If you missed the last newsletter describing this event, you may read the beginning of the story HERE.

…It’s true that all the blood can drain out of people’s faces when they are shocked. My partner’s hair literally stands on end and his voice squeaks as he gathers our coats from the pile on the couch at the mummering party. He asks if we should call a taxi (Uber wouldn’t establish in our area for a couple more years) since I am the designated driver and he and the other guests have imbibed enough to be the fool to perform for their supper on this frigid and typically boring February night.

Again, I trot myself through the stroke course, tongue to left and right, ABCs now said out loud, mapping the turns that will lead us home—though I do not mention I have no idea what our address is even if I know how to get us there. I watch him anxiously root through the pile of coats for a missing glove, now fully comprehending that my brain is malfunctioning. From the mysterious stroke filing cabinet, data continues to spew forth…Can I recall the names of my kids? Do I have kids? Oh yeah, I think I do. I easily count toward a hundred as my partner alerts the couple we’d driven with that we need to head home.

The car fob seems oddly familiar, the interior of the dash apparatus a bit strange, the parking brake is in the wrong place, and the knowledge for if it is engaged doesn’t arrive. My partner watches me intently when after a few stumbles, I start the car. As we begin moving, the rest returns as rote, a repetitive action like blinking or breathing and as long as I don’t try to think it through my body does what is necessary to get us all safely home.

Inside a house we have lived in for twenty-plus years, I am mildly surprised we have dogs, though the surroundings are strangely not strange. By the time pajamas are on and my partner has asked and been answered “no” several times to a question about an emergency room visit, I know there are two children, what their names are, and that the man I refer to as “my partner” is my husband. I work as a manual therapist, regularly see a mental health professional, and clearly, this is not a stroke.

When morning arrives, I wake knowing what and where Great America is and something had happened beyond anything I’d ever experienced before and that it would likely upend whatever I thought normal was. Even without a diagnosis, pragmatism and decades of dealing with trauma and mayhem have educated my spidey senses to understand when lightning bolts strike, plan on being electrocuted.

Visiting my regular doctor a few days later, she and I discuss my physical status.

     “Your blood pressure is a little high.”
     I laugh.
     “Wouldn’t yours be if you’d forgotten what and where Great America is?”
     She grins.
     “I’d like to forget…but stop trying to make me laugh. This is serious.”
     Her face strips itself of mirth, mine remains empty of participating in this drama.
     “I don’t think it’s a stroke.”
     The doctor softens her tone.
     “I don’t either, but I recommend doing all the tests anyway so we have them as a baseline.”
     “And what would those tests be?”
     “An MRI and bloodwork.”

I agree to go through the motions while also decreasing hormone replacement therapy I've been dabbling in, in case it is causing weird side-effects. The MRI is scheduled for the next morning.

At a 6 AM appointment, I close my eyes sleepily as a young female technician slides me into the machine. Her last words before leaving the room are that she’ll be able to hear me from an overhead microphone once she reaches the command booth. In my hand rests a squeeze-for-help mechanism if I need to contact her. I’m not overly concerned about the twenty-minute test, figuring with my eyes closed I’d pretend I’m meditating, bashing the illusion when my snores are picked up on the sound feed.

Imagining myself seated on an empty beach, I take a long relaxed breath and release it, the expelled air bouncing off the nearby tube wall back into my face. Panic prods a burr in my psyche into alertness. Ancient shrieks of terror vibrate through my eardrums, faces bob behind my eyelids, and suddenly I cannot breathe.

Repeatedly pressing S.O.S brings no response from the technician. I chant a stream of words to calm my surprising hysteria.

Oh no. It’s okay. Just think of the beach. Breathe. I can do this. Where is that tech? Oh God, I’m gonna die.

My body pulsates as I resist the urge to open my eyes.

Don’t open them. Don’t scream. Don’t move. Don’t, don’t, don’t!

My brain is exploding, stroke concerns now seemingly true. Straps encasing my skull make it impossible to shimmy out. Warm, moist, cloying breath surrounds me, and suddenly, terrifyingly, I’m completely encased in a wool blanket, with the fibers scratching relentlessly.

Smoke Man has returned and won’t let me go.

The MRI tube tosses me into the Great Sea of Nothing to retrieve what I have forgotten, it sends me straight back to that house. It is the 1960s on a charming cul-de-sac in a sunny beach community, the Gidget horror story that was my childhood.

But at least my heart is breathing again, right?

Rainbows & Lightning Bolts—A Story Series

Photo by eMMe

Lightning bolts change things. They are an electric current. And when an electric current enters a human body it can kill or restart the heart if it has stopped. And if the person is A Me walking around with a heart that hasn’t emotionally breathed in decades, a lightning bolt will toss the life into the sky and no one knows if it’ll ever land to live semi-normally again.
          But at least the heart is breathing again, right? At least the heart is breathing again **[INSERT EYEROLL]**

It all started on a cold winter’s eve five years ago, in a room full of strangers with a few friends telling stories for their supper. This event had been modeled after a Newfoundland tradition called "mummering." Townspeople in Newfoundland communities dress in costume, perform the fool door-to-door and are served food and drinks for the effort.

In the frigid, boring extremes of the Midwest, we work to come up with things to do that don't involve expanding our bums or re-binging Longmeyer on Netflix for the fourth time. On these many, many cold nights, we could stay home having glorious sex, the kind we tend not to remember from our youth, but instead cabin fever sets in and we either stumble out of our comfy zones or take long winter's naps aided by vats of chamomile tea.
          At this February juncture, I’m in full-throttle zombie-mode, most days lost in very efficient to-do lists filled with tasks designed to make me appear as though all is very well in my neighborhood, conveying I’m one of the “good ones” and not a “bad one.” Taxes are paid on time, the leaves are meticulously collected from the lawn each fall, and when there’s laundry I wash it in private, drowning my dirty linens in memory bleach so as to never show my ass in public.

I am unintentionally-non-aware this zombie-state is killing me one organ at a time, my heart the choir director instructing each not-vital-to-existence member to suffocate right along with her. I misplace my uterus and gallbladder during this process, both holding hands until the end as the Great Sea of Nothing absorbs them along with their importance. The Great Sea of Nothing is what I call the place that takes what was once oh-so-very-important—hopes, dreams, fluid limbs, glorious sex, dancing for no reason at all—and hides them so they don't occupy thoughts that need to be engaged in perfecting a "To Do List Life."

Glug-glug.

My hair thins, I am perpetually tired, my skin dry, and a mysterious shudder can be felt deep in my core when I lie in bed at night. I tear the house apart searching for what is creating this vibration. It has to be the furnace, the washing machine, the refrigerator, the well pump, a dehumidifier…When these are found not to be the cause, I decide someone is illegally fracking in the area and my house will one day join my gallbladder and uterus in that Great Sea of Nothing via aquifer rapids eroding glacier deposits beneath my feet.

Swooooooshhhhh...

I am terrified nearly every moment of every day, the persistent vibration following me out of the house and into my car, to work, and showing up as I check items off my to-do list and good-person smile through my every day.

And so there I am, lounging on a pile of coats during another dreary February night, listening to life stories, poems, music, and comedy, performed by friends and mostly strangers when a lightning bolt soundlessly strikes—a vibrant rainbow jagger-splitting the woman speaking at an angle left-to-right.

I watch this curious event unfold as it slow-motion changes my life instantly. It is gorgeous and terrifying. My tongue reflexively moves back and forth in my mouth, I whisper the ABCs under my breath, my name...what is my name??? Some part of my brain has managed to remember the signs for stroke, though my name wanders in the Great Sea with my uterus. I stand up as inconspicuously as possible to move my arms and legs. Nothing aside from my old lady tits droops and everything works with regular-ancient creakiness. I sit back down as inconspicuously as before and resume watching the odd rainbow-hued lightning bolt.

The woman telling her story I have known since my twentieth year, back when my heart was still emotionally breathing and I believed there were eons of life road that would carry me off to many splendid things, most of them on sunny beaches and nowhere near a plain or prairie. The story she has been sharing is one I had known about, it having occurred around the time we met.

The lightning bolt sashays to a finish, all at once clearing me of the rest of what I know, the volt of electricity zapping what was before as though it a leaf on my meticulous lawn incinerated to ash.

The room full of guests applauds while I query my partner of nearly-thirty years about the friend (now stranger's) story.

“What’s Great America?”
He laughs.
“I have no idea…was America ever great?”
“No. I’m asking about the story…What’s Great America?”
The laughter ebbs as he realizes I'm not joking.
“You know, up in Gurnee, just north of here. Didn’t you take the kids there at some point? That amusement park.”
“What’s an amusement park?”

Those questions erupting from that one random lightning bolt moment on a pile of coats five years ago evaporated my To Do List Life. The old life didn't fall into that Great Sea of Nothing, that old life no longer exists. And at the same time, that rainbow-hued lightning bolt split open and illuminated my Great Sea of Nothing and I've been seeking and sorting through what's been quivering on the bottom ever since.

But at least my heart is breathing again, right?