Corner of Bourbon & Division

So the metro got closed for emergency reasons today, forcing me to walk much of the way to work.

My first thought? ZOMBIES!

Good thing I'm writing the sequel to the zombie novel this year, eh?

My colleague Excitable!Puppy lent me Resident Evil 4, and I decided to put it into the PS2 tonight when I got home from work.

After chasing after my AV cable, and then puzzling through the friendly manual, I decided to have a go at it. After all, I figured, I might get used to the game play just by bopping around.

HAH!

The game starts off with the main character, Leon Kennedy, being dropped off right outside an old abandoned shack in the middle of the woods in a remote location. My immediate thought? OMGZOMBIESI'MGONNADIEAAAAAAH!

Yeah.

So I manage to get him to the door, and I'm still having difficulty with the controls (they're not the same as the other two games I've played on the PS2), and oh God I just know there's a zombie RIGHTBEHINDTHEDOOR and I haven't even started the game and my heart is currently residing in my mouth. Okay. No zombies. There's a live person who instead attacks me with an axe. I likely use too many bullets dispatching him, and realize that I can't aim for sh*t (how am I supposed to go for the head if I can't aim? The zombies are GONNA EAT ME!).

Then I get "instructions" from my "contact" to go into the rest of the totally abandoned village.

Uh, yeah. Screw that noise. I'm not doing this at midnight. Nuh-uh. My zombie street cred is ruined forever, but I'm willing to live with the shame, just so long as I don't end up freaking myself out for the rest of my ever-lovin' life.

Yes, I'm a wuss.

I had a very vivid dream the other night (these have become increasingly rare for me, which is sad) that actually involved zombies. I was living in a remote-ish area in a small town not too far from the sea, and had already been doing my preparedness thing for quite some time. I don't know how I knew that there were zombies coming (I couldn't see any), but I remember being quite anxious and starting to board up windows and generally getting ready for the onslaught.

The nifty part of my dream was that I got to be an omniscient observer. This happens a lot in my dreams: I get flashes of "Meanwhile, in a totally different location..." a lot like in a movie. So I the dreamer (not the actor in my dream) knew that there was indeed a real zombie infestation starting in the town. They were coming up out of the ocean, only one or two to begin with, all covered in seaweed and slime, their flesh grey and rotting.

Back at "my" house, my parents had unexpectedly shown up, having been convinced that I was not a loony and that my concerns about zombies were more than legitimate. They pitched in to help me barricade the place, and I was just beginning to feel as though we might get through the initial infestation unscathed, when my mother left the house to go rescue a neighbour she recognized (I'm a little fuzzy on this part of the dream), leaving one of the doors to the house wide open behind her. Before I knew it, the zombies were upon us, and I remember having a moment of clarity, of knowing that there really was no point in trying to hold off the undead hordes, because there would always be that *one* mistake that would undo months and years of work. I remember also realizing that maybe being one of the undead wouldn't be so bad.

That's when the dream took a turn for the surreal (yeah, yeah, moreso than zombies). I once again became an omniscient observer, and returned to the seashore, where I could see Jesus Christ summoning the zombies from the salt water. He waded into the water, and submerged for a few moments, only to re-emerge borne upon a veritable tidal wave of ambulatory corpses (all of them swimming, oddly enough, rather than walking). It's interesting to note that the zombies in my dreams were at least partially sentient and able to talk enough to communicate that they were not unhappy with what had happened, and viewed it as a kind of salvation (tying in with the image of Christ held aloft by zombies, I guess).

As I said, the dream was particularly vivid, and I was quite unsettled by it for the first few hours of the day after awakening. Nice to know that my brain is still being consumed by zombies, two years after the writing of my NaNo novel.

I think that, maybe, the computer may have resurrected. So far so good, anyway.

*knocks on wood*

Updates as events warrant.

The zombie icon seems appropriate for this occasion.

I now have a zombie icon. I figured it was about time. Also, it reflects my current state of being. I was planning on making an early night of it, but the Paternal Unit had other ideas, and so I've only been home for about 15 minutes. Going to go pass out now. No writing today. Writing tomorrow. Yes.

G'night.

:::keels over:::