Zombies Vs. the iPhone

People all over the world think Florida is a synonymous for both life and death. It's the retirement location that most of the United States citizens dream about, and nowhere else do you think of when someone says 'Neon Graveyard'. I find it funny that the fashion population of South Beach, Miami hasn't made this connection, since the disco queens  have invented, upgraded, and financed the ability to stay looking as young as possible under an unforgiving fluorescent light that is the sun. Vampires do exist, and they come out of the closet once but by their fifties only at night, sunlight is the enemy. This tends to hide the scars, wrinkles, and flaws of what once was a picture of youth. Anyone who looks past the surface can see a look of history past in someone's eyes, and convincing someone you're younger than you actually are is supposed to be the goal of both middle aged men and women. I know this isn't exclusive to Florida, but it's more obvious than even in Las Vegas where a fifty year old 'dancer' will compulsively tell you she's 29 because she's convinced herself that the reason she's stopped menstruating was due to her eating disorder rather than menopause. Age is something we all have to deal with, whether we do it in gradual steps or fight it every inch of the way til the steps become a cliff that you fall off of one night and wake up appearing 70 as if it had occurred overnight. I quote Andy Warhol's Bad - "Look's aren't everything."

I can't even begin to recreate the events that led up to quite unsavory fodder for tabloids this week. A man who's been called everything from a sweetheart to a person with real anger issues eating someone's face? I've been around for nearly 45 years and I don't think I've heard anything quite like it. Who knows what goes through someone's head that would deem this action worthy or thought in the first place. Turning the thought into action is a real stretch of what has to be psychosis, and to hear this escalation could be caused by bubble bath, or 'bath salts' is an indicator that the world has taken a most radical turn. It pains me to think that a Mother drowning all her children in a bathtub can be one upped so easily these days, and that the tabloids raced to one up the zombie apocalypse in Florida. Someone pulled their intestines out and threw them at the police? Really?

When the fear of death starts to dissolve in the heart, when someone's life has reached either it's zenith or nadir and your conscious thought has you convinced that you've seen and done all there is to do, the rational person sits and weighs his options and will generally find any direction to make forward progress in this spiritual realm, maybe by learning a musical instrument or making a career change. These can be seen as erratic or eccentric changes but who's to judge how one gets from point a to point b in their path to a complete person.

A zombie story has the ability to make the common man prefer death to a front row seat in an altercation like this and it's this trait that makes it such a dangerous event. It's one more image added to the unwritten list in people's minds in a subconscious game of "I'd rather die than..." that we play around the campfire, laying awake at night before sleep overcomes us, or while we're walking back to our cars from horror movies that have evolved from a man stitched together from spare parts of the dead.

Is it the public media that has us convinced that we should be trying to look far younger than we should lest we be unhappy or is it our decision? Is it the movies that make us think that our death has to to be a historically grotesque event lest it be remembered or are we simply bored with common passing? I like to think the world isn't that much different than when I first came into it. The desire for things I didn't need flashing on television, at the movies, and in the music I listened to didn't overcome my common sense to possess them. What more can we be convinced we need whether invented or discovered to make life worth living? 

I just want to wake up and live and laugh, know that I love and am loved by someone, and when I feel full and tired? I want a goodnight kiss before I doze off to sleep and dream of doing it again.... and maybe again and again.