It was a dark and stormy afternoon on the Cape! The kind of doom is approaching, winter’s day in December that Paul Simon must have considered while writing, “I Am A Rock,” and a very strong reminder for me of the Decembers in Pittsburgh, usually occurring during the weekends, when nothing but fives shades of grey (not FIFTY) hissed, hemmed, and hawed, leaving one to wonder, if there was a horizon ahead, or maybe The End Days WERE actually fast approaching. Back in the day, (and at 72 those days seem to grow further away) a dark and stormy, wet, cold, dreary Dead Zone Day was ACTUALLY a kind of wonderful phenomenon for me, especially when, the rest of my family was out and about, and I had the entire house to myself. We had two sofa’s in our living room, one was especially for company, and the other was the general-purpose be as messy as you like a sofa. The company sofa had schmuties covering it, and somehow, my mother believed that those schmuties kept that sofa clean and void of any family cooties. Okay, my siblings and I agreed, but if my mother truly understood what COOTIES really was, she would have removed the schmuties, because back in the day only a cootie shot (a strong punch on your triceps’) could kill COOTIES). Black and white movies were the cure for a deep and dark December (thank you Paul Simon), those and an afghan knitted by my grandmother, with an ample amount of cookies.
So, the point of all this random memory is that on Sunday, December 19, 2021, the weather outside of my home was frightful, and inside it was so delightful (thank you Sammy Cahn for the lyrics to ‘Let It Snow,’) minus the snow, the grey was as intense as a Pittsburgh winter, and the browns and darker browns of the dead leaves fallen and those still clinging to even sparser branches, the gusts of winds, scattering the pigeons pecking for food in our backyard, made me yearn for a black and white movie…BUT instead, I longed for a good Zombie Movie and re-watched World War Z! The opening scenes of this movie, still send me on edge, making my adrenaline work overtime, and my WORRY ABOUT THE FUTURE, almost pushed to limits, like the led lid of a PRESSURE COOKER, when the steam wants to explode!
How fucking complacent we HUMANS become, how selfish, how ill-willed, how enormously arrogant, and FUCKING STUPID, we somehow achieve to become. COVID is still here, it never left us. Death, dying, delusion still hang over our heads as might the air pollution of China, and as if all we had to do is wish it away, we HUMANS get pissed off, when bad never leaves us but lingers on! The Zombies in World War Z are amazingly adept at acclimating to the environment; and yet the Non-Zombies, remain as ineffective, and irrelevant as ever. On this dark and stormy day, I wonder, worry, and ask the question WHY!
