To Thine Own Self Be True
I’d like to return briefly to the zombie theme I touched yesterday. I was a little disappointed in myself for being unable to participate in any way but denying the premise. But, once past the project, and no longer afraid that reading other entries would somehow prejudice my own, I went and read some of them, and felt a lot better, for several reasons.
First, a significant portion of the participants didn’t participate at all. Apparently, they signed up, but didn’t deliver. One particularly inactive fellow hadn’t posted a blog entry since last November. Compared to that admittedly low bar, I did quite well. Doubly so if I get credit for involvement in a project I didn’t learn about until it was almost over.
Second, most of the participating zombie blogs were really boring. The first few that I read, ignoring the no-shows, were dirt-standard refrains of how the writers were holed up in some corner, maybe with a bit of food, running out of ammunition, and worrying about the increasingly painful bite mark. So were the next few. And the next few after that. There was no variation at all in language or tone, and hardly any in details of content. The nitpicker in me began to wonder how nearly every poster had acquired a gun of some kind. Sure, bloggers from West Bumble, Nebraska, could easily have a gun rack in their house, or car, but what about the bloggers from New York City, and similar havens of gun control advocacy? People weren’t so much writing their zombie experience as inserting themselves into somebody else’s well-documented zombie experience. An honorable mention for originality of tone goes to the entry which read only, “ohgoddon’tturnoffthelightdon’tturnoffthelightdon’tturnoffthelightdon’ttu” (or close enough). Still, I couldn’t help wondering who would have the presence of mind to blog, but not to punctuate. Maybe her space key had broken off as she gave a zombie a quick blow to the temple with her laptop. But the clichés were merely dull; it was harder to take the blogs that didn’t simply recreate Dawn of the Dead, and sought to add themselves in a personal way, because…
Third, those who did sounded pretty silly. The blogosphere is heavily populated by educated liberals, and gosh darn if, in the middle of a zombie crisis, several posters didn’t pause to find reasons to criticize Bush. A large portion of our National Guard may be off in Iraq, but we’ve still got a large portion of them here, with arms; if the remainder couldn’t stop a zombie outbreak, I doubt any number could. One fellow even implied that the whole zombie thing had somehow started in Iraq, though he did not go into details about the causal connection between invading Iraq and causing the living dead to rise from American graves.
Still, these last went far towards making me feel better about my own effort. They were following the accepted maxim: “Write what you know,” and they may not know zombies, but they know they hate Bush. And devoted bloggers do blog by reflex. Given twenty minutes to rest between dashes for safety, I suppose many of them would sit down and blog, instead of staying focused on getting to safety. To thine own self be true. It was in that vein that I failed to write my own zombie story; I don’t know zombies, but I know I go coldly logical in a crisis, cold enough not to waste time sharing my unstructured feelings (“oh god oh god oh god”) with the general world. And I definitely wouldn’t stop thinking lots of activities are stupid just because the end of the world was at hand.