an evening with mike, talk of zombies in our midst...

What’s Mike been thinking? How long has it been since he had a job? Over several pitchers of PBR in a dive we’ve always liked, he tells me he doesn’t leave his apartment much anymore. I asked him what he does all day. He answers, “Nothing, really.” He said he sleeps until the afternoon, then usually wakes up for a few minutes and falls asleep again. He said he’d become so bored that he was considering locking himself in the completely empty spare room of his apartment for twenty-four hours just to see what it would be like. I said, “You’re going to need a chamber pot. I have one you can borrow.”
“I thought you kicked it and it skidded off the roof.”
“Yeah, but it landed on a fire escape and it’s still there.”
When the bar purged us onto Ogden Street I went over to his place with him. He occupies what can only really be called a dungeon under an old apartment house on Capitol Hill. It’s the kind of place fitting for a suicide. No light could penetrate in there at any time of day.
In the kitchen I saw what Mike’s living on: a huge industrial-size box of frozen burritos large enough to nurse an entire Mexican family through a famine. He popped a couple of them in the microwave oven for me. Not bad.
He pitched an idea to me. He told me he thought we should publish a coffee table book. He’s sure we could do it because there are worthless books like this on every conceivable topic. I had to agree. I once saw a coffee table book about nothing but manhole covers. There was another one that was just a catalogue of thousands of “Boring Postcards.” While the irony of publish a book of the most boring postcards ever printed is amusing, I can’t imagine anyone throwing down twenty dollars for it.
Mike’s idea for a coffee table book topic was zombies. He said zombies are a gold mine just waiting to be tapped. I for one don’t care about zombies or zombie movies, but there’s a good possibility that you could use the zombie as a symbol of the common man. Actual zombies surround us every day. People who work in cubicles are zombies. People who kiss ass and pay on mortgages are often zombies. Hell, most of the people working downtown are walking dead who’ve had their brains sucked out by a life without any form of spiritual stimulation. The sense of individuality is terminally atrophied. They don’t gorge themselves on human flesh in public, but the subtlety of their deformed and stunted existence is terrifying enough.
I proposed we shoot a lot of photographs of Zombies wearing cheap suits and sitting at computer screens or flipping burgers or washing their cars or whatever. There could be a bank teller Zombie, and even zombies at church. Zombies in the midst of normality. Maybe even scenes of Zombies watching episodes of Melrose Place.
We’d be making a very heavy existential statement. It would be like spitting in the face of complacency. All the non-zombies would love it. I doubt this sort of socially offensive onslaught was Mike’s purpose, but he seemed open to it at least.
The rest of the conversation is lost to me, thus is the effect of alcohol on the brain’s fragile chemistry.

Baracuda's / Denver
4/21/09