There's God in the mountains and the people living under the sea

After a long post-Thanksgiving, post-Thanksgiving-leftover-lunch nap this afternoon, I woke up in the disorienting gloom of an early fall evening to the sound of piano music drifting through the thin bedroom wall. As I slowly regained consciousness and listened more attentively, I realized, with some surprise, that the music was coming from an actual piano, not a recording or a TV. It was some kind of ethereal, slightly saccharine opus in the minor key, the kind that might accompany a particularly reflective scene of a B+ Hollywood melodrama -- a cold off-season beach, wind blowing through the skeletal scrub grass, a woman with a colorless face and an oversize knitted sweater sitting on a sand dune, staring reflectively at the droning surf while loose strands of hair whip across her face.

Whoever was playing the piano was competent but either rusty or uncertain, because the longer the melody continued, the more frequently a jarring misplaced note necessitated the restarting of each coda, breaking up the swell of emotion that might otherwise have led the audience to wipe away a sympathetic tear for the lady with the colorless face and the comfort sweater (perhaps there is also an incongruously cheerful dog at her side and a wedding ring or a small ringlet of a child's downy hair dancing nervously in her hands -- Meaningful Symbolism).

What amazed me, though, laying there in the encroaching darkness, was the inexplicable power of those notes, played not by a tiny system of pulsing electronic signals but by human fingers, which I envisioned with uncanny clarity as they fumbling over the polished ivory keys. It didn't matter that the melody was a little sappy, or that the anonymous player was less than a concert-grade performer. There was something infinitely relatable in that sound, in spite (or perhaps even because of) its faults. It was fragile and almost too painfully real, but protected from over-saturation of awkward too-human humanness by the darkness and the thin plaster wall.

The feeling I got from hearing that music made me remember something from the night before -- a quiet moment before the turkey came out of the oven, before the bottle of bourbon and the game of drunken charades. All it was was me, tipsy, happy, sipping wine in a dark warm living room with happy drunk friends hovering nearby, listening to an old record player lovingly work over some 70s hair metal, first an early T.Rex and then Led Zeppelin. It was the perfect distillation of distance and proximity, joy and melancholy, camaraderie and solitude, and all those other slightly banal antitheses that make life so amazing and dynamic and interesting. Those peaks and valleys that are worth savoring, before time smooths everything over like flat, colorless sand.

Walker: Zombie Ranger

The night before last, Ryan and I discovered that the season premier of The Walking Dead was available on Hulu. Consequently, I spent the rest of the night and early morning in a feverish dream delirium, watching my very own 7-hour original zombie series projected onto the unwitting twin movie screens of my inner eyelids.

You'd think I'd learn my lesson about going near anything zombie-related anywhere near bedtime (genre and quality are of no importance -- I had nightmares after both Shaun of the Dead and the terrible Aughts remake of Day of the Dead "starring" Mena Suvari and Ving Rhames -- but obviously I haven't, because we downloaded and watched episodes 2 and 3 last night, with the same nightmare-riffic result for me. Tossing and turning, awaking every couple of hours and punching down the damp cavern that my head had worn into the pillow, and, the minute my eyes were shut again, returning to an elaborate dream landscape of abandoned, boarded up houses and complex moral quandaries: to kill an infected person in order to preempt inevitable zombification? To put down a zombified loved one or leave them to their gleeful flesh-eating ways? To hunker down or keep moving?

I keep trying to think through why I both love and am utterly eviscerated (graaarrr... zombie pun want braaaiins) by this particular genre, and I keep coming back to the extreme loneliness at the heart of most zombie movies -- the feeling that you, as the audience, are watching what may very well be the last remnant of humanity pathetically trying to hold its own against an encroaching horde of mindless, bloodthirsty brutality. The fact that there's rarely a happy ending to these stories suggests we as a species are all too aware of our limited lifespan and our paltry hope of combating entropy. Perhaps there's some cathartic moment of peace that comes with knowing that we're all going to die anyway, so we might as well be glad that it probably won't be such a horrible death as the one reserved for those poor souls about to wear their intestinal tract as a squishy necktie.

Which is weird, because the two specific dream plots I can remember from the past two nights have started with all the expected gruesome zombie mayhem, but ended in uncharacteristically optimism... after a fashion. The first night's dream cast the zombie apocalypse in the appropriately moody post-Katrina New Orleans (of course), with me hiding in one half of a grimy pink double shotgun house through wave after wave of zombie onslaught. At the end of the dream, with order slowly returning to the city and black-clad national guardsmen silently patrolling the streets, I remember walking down a twilit block somewhere in the Touro vicinity and looking at all the FEMA markings scrawled on the ramshackle houses -- representing not the number of people who were dead in the house, but the number of undead still trapped inside. It was a weird moment because on some level both interpretations of the cryptic markings were active in my mind, and I felt a simultaneous swell of sadness for the (un)dead and a counteracting surge of hope for the rebuilding of society from the ground up, a utopian dream of a social tabula rasa that rarely appears in conventional zombie cinema... unless we're talking about terrible remakes starring Mena Suvari and Ving Rhames (srsly, do. not. watch).

The other dream, the one from last night, took place on the set of my Mississippi high school's production of Anne Frank. Conveniently, my mind had conflated "hiding in an attic" with zombie apocalypse, producing the Nazi/zombie amalgam that Hollywood has clearly been waiting for (Jerry Bruckheimer, call me). Again, the dream ended with a strangely hopeful liberation-cum-rebirth-of-man scene, with paratroopers swooping in like puffy angels and sniping at the undead from the sky. I believe there may even have been a Victory Day parade, though the lack of nail-biting tension in the dream also meant that I was more relaxed and, subsequently, uh, slept through some of it.

I suppose I should be happy that my subconscious finds positive ways of dealing with a topic that it obviously finds so terrifying, but that still doesn't explain to me why that grain of terror gets under my skin so easily to produce these kinds of pearls. Perhaps it's that strain of loneliness after all, reacting with my natural antisocial tendencies and literalizing a deep-seated fear of The Other...

... or maybe, in the immortal words of Arrested Development, I'm just a giant pussy.