COLUMN: Days of the Living Dead

By Tobin Barnes
My father-in-law was a mortician.

Said he’d be the last one to let me down. Har!

Didn’t work out that way, but the image has stuck. I see him pushing the button, the motor kicks in, and soon I’m six feet under.

A goner.

But sometimes, even while we’re alive, we have to die a little to stay vital.

You’ve been there.

Every once in a while—to merely survive the day-to-day rat race—a guy’s got to turn into a zombie.

Know what I mean?

Yeah...that’s right...kinda become undead.

Doesn’t mean he’s got to stop functioning, just that he has to take it down a couple notches from maybe prime operating performance.

Ironically enough, it’s actually a survival technique.

Oh, the guy’s still functioning when he’s in his zombie mode, still going through the motions—just not completely there. Numb might be a better description.

And numb can be good.

That way, in the undead state, time passes during unpleasant periods without the pain of being truly present.

You’ve seen the movies about the undead. We guys get just like them sometimes.

The zombies stumble and bumble and mumble across the screen. They grab at things, but miss. They chase after things, but stagger along, stumble and fall. They try to communicate, but it’s just stupid cave man talk. Aargh! Urpp!

And who can blame them? Heck, they just climbed out of a grave, for crying out loud. It’s been a bad couple decades. They aren’t what they used to be. They can’t even put their arms down.

But, after a fashion, zombies still go about their business, though admittedly not very effectively—only victims they ever catch are their cousins, the brain dead—but nonetheless their awkward gallumphiness has a certain impact on others.

After all, zombies are hard to miss. They meander into the local bar or stop-and-rob, people are bound to scream.

And so we guys do the zombie routine during our rough patches, like during a rainy weekend with no golf or midway through an endless project at work. Or like Dilbert during a meeting.

Also helps when a guy’s short on cash. Turns into a zombie, he doesn’t care. (After all, real zombies don’t carry around much cash. Heck, the undertaker took it.)

Like I said, a guy feels less pain when he’s like a zombie—makes things more bearable, if not necessarily pleasant.

Time enters a fog, and when he resurrects, he’s on the other side of an obligation.

I was in zombie mode for a time last week. Uh huh, I was undead.

I was in the nether state of there and not there.

Oh, I was breathing. I was talking, kinda. And I was functioning at a minimal level, I suppose.

But people probably looked at me and thought, “Guy’s a zombie!”

Didn’t bother me, though.

Nice thing about being a zombie, you don’t care what people think.

Besides, now I feel a lot better. Almost alive.