I’m willing to admit that maybe I write too much about zombies, and that if someone didn’t know me very well, someone might come to the conclusion that I’ve jumped on the zombie bandwagon because…well, they’re zombies.  They’re popular and its convenient and I have no shortage of guy friends who are very willing to comment about survival tips.

But dudes, seriously, I swear, I can’t help it.  I’m not trying to be cool and I’m not doing this to get more views.  I write a lot about zombies because they are one of the few things that scare the shit out of me, and because they scare the shit out of me, I think about them all the time.

Now that I don’t work on weekends anymore, I can sleep as late as I want.  This is usually no later than 9am because a) I get up at 5:30am on weekdays and am conditioned for a somewhat earlier waking time, and b) I go to the farmer’s market on Saturday mornings and if I arrive any later than 10am, it’s hard to find a parking spot and the place is full of slow-moving morons.  Yesterday, though, I was awake at 7:30am.  My first thought that my room was cold, and then I remembered that the windows in the back of the apartment were open.  I got up to close them and figured that while I was up, I should feed the cats.  The cat food is in the kitchen, and if I look out of my kitchen windows, past the trees and to the left, I can see a fairly busy street.  Well, normally it’s busy.  Yesterday morning it was totally, eerily quiet, and although I stood there for at least a minute, I didn’t see any cars.  Not even the bus.  No car sounds, either, and no one walking.

Any normal person would assume that because it was 7:30am on a Saturday, everyone else in the world was asleep and hey, doesn’t that sound like a great idea?  Let’s go back to bed, shall we?  Right, well, clearly I’m not normal anyway, but I definitely wasn’t yesterday morning, because although I got back into bed and buried myself in the down comforter, I couldn’t get back to sleep because I assumed the quiet and the stillness and the general creepiness of a gray weekend morning meant the zombie apocalypse could be underway.

I AM NOT JOKING.

I actually thought this, and I became so concerned with the possibility that I checked my phone.  I assumed that if the zombie apocalypse were happening, my father would have tried to call me (he calls to tell me when a high school in the exurbs is having a meningitis scare, because you never know, I could somehow catch their germs and die or something).  No calls, no texts.  Well, fine, I thought, but I should really turn on the news or check the Internet or something.  So I got up again.  I turned on my laptop and waited for those green bars.  A scan of my homepage, which is choked with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, New York Times, CNN, and BBC feeds, yielded no zombie news.

“Well, that’s a relief,” I thought.

Then I thought, “You really are an asshole, you know that?”

I was standing over my laptop in my freezing cold apartment at 7:30 on a Saturday morning searching very seriously for news of a zombie attack.  I was doing this when I could have been sleeping, which, I mean, sorry to anyone who has ever had sex with me, but sleeping is my favorite activity ever, and I was missing it because I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about getting eaten by zombies.  And then the rest of the day, I thought about what, since I don’t own a gun, I would use to kill myself if the invasion got particularly bad, because (as I’ve said before) I have no expectation that I’ll survive that sort of thing.

Jesus christ.  I exhaust myself sometimes.

(Believe it or not, yesterday morning’s episode was far saner than the time I woke up in the middle of the night, convinced there were zombies staggering around outside.  This thought came to me while I was sitting on the toilet and even after I finished peeing, I remained frozen there for about 10 whole minutes, terrified that if I moved, the zombies outside would somehow see my shadow and be triggered to attack.  I live on the second floor, by the way.)