How Zombies Were Invented

How Zombies Were Invented

I’ve had a headache my whole life…as a kid, as a teen and on and on…. 

At that time, I had a good head on my shoulders until after lunch.  After that, it was headache city. I think my dislike to math is because Arithmetic was after lunch.

My theory is that English was taught at school in the morning sans headache so I did better.

Thereby, I am a writer and not a great mathematician who was a janitor and did stringently hard word problems on the board after hours.   

But now…I can tell what kind of day it’s gonna be when I first wake up.  First, I squint, to see if the sun is shining.  Oops, that means I might have a migraine today. 

Or if I squint and see if it’s raining or overcast, I could also have a migraine that day.

Today, my squint told me that I had major head trauma.  It’s probably because I dreamed about having an aneurism.

When I awoke, my vein was bulging out of my forehead.  I had Lance look at it to confirm if I was dead.  Lance did not concur.  He said it looked like a bug bite.

I knew it wasn’t a bug bite, because it was elongated.  Bugs bite circularly, I stated, trying to get Lance to understand the severity of my having an aneurism in my sleep.

Lance’s basic range of emotion connected with me is, “You are not dying, it’s a bug bite!”

Then I realized that spring was approaching.  That’s when blooms burst forth, color identifies itself, larvae hatch, photosynthesis happens and nature explodes.

That’s also when my head poofs into grey matter.  That’s when my sinuses are so tight that I feel like I’ve had a facelift inside my face. That is when the beauty of creation plays havoc in my head.

I believe this is how zombies and the whole “Walking Dead” series started.  Zombies did not just wake up from the dead.  They were actually migraine suffers. They woke on the first day of spring and they just felt like they were dead. 

No wonder zombies hair is not combed; their heads hurt.  Undead people who suffer post nasal drip, cannot stand the thought of something bristly wafting through their locks.

And the whole ripped shirt with blood stains on it is decipherable too.  I can put on a shirt in my bedraggled state, but when I try to brush my teeth, my head pounds and then I drop toothpaste on my shirt.  Then my nose bleeds and I cannot get the effort to clean it up so it drips on my shirt.

Later, when I see the blood, I try to clean it.  Of course, I don’t want to take the time to change shirts so I dab and stab and pull and yank while spraying a prewash.

My shirt tears a little here and there and my head is pounding so much, I cannot stand it.  That’s when I go outside and roll in the dirt to make the pain subside.

At the end, I usually stab my constant headache with a knife. This brings in the whole “zombie with a knife in head” picture that most people associate with the cult of the dead walkers.

At about 2 pm, my headache subsides for a nano-second and that’s when I declare that it is errand time.

I realize that I’m now out of spray pre-wash.  As I’m headed out the door, I notice that I have on a stained, torn-to-shreds shirt , crazy hair and a knife in my head.  I wonder if I should change into something more appropriate.

Nah, I say to myself, I’m just going to Walmart.  Who will even notice?