Oct
24
On Happening on the Zombie Walk
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Why do people like zombies? I mean, the Zombie Walk is funny, okay, I get that. Zombies en masse. Lurching down the street. “Brains!”
It’s like pop culture zombies, Night of the Living Dead zombies (as distinct from “real” zombies, voudou zombies, who seem unfairly slighted), instantly filled a void that nobody knew was there. But what is it? There’s a laughing at death in zombies. A laughing at the gruesome. And you can’t blame zombies. There’s no malevolence there. Only programming. So maybe it’s a laughing at this other fear: that we have become or will become only a product of programming (”Buy things!” Lurch, lurch. “Buy things!”). Brainless, helpless, violent but emotionless, chawing on arms, neither recoiling nor relishing. I don’t know. I just know that the movie Fido wasn’t funny, except maybe to 12 year-old boys. And that Zombie Walks get bigger and bigger. 3000 in Toronto this year. There was even a Zombie Walk in Kelowna. I kept thinking, What if you were a paranoid schizophrenic and happened upon the Zombie Walk. Wouldn’t that freak you out in the worst way? Maybe I have to use that in a story.
Oct
3
Found
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When we moved in last year, the house a block up on the corner had a big, saggy overstuffed chair on the back stoop and wooden crates and ashtrays and miscellaneous junk. Cat-tattered curtains on the basement windows. Old man lives here, the house said. I saw him once, leaning on the porch rail, talking to someone in the yard below.
Then one week a pile of junk in the back yard and then a gradual diminution of the junk and then new piles.
Today I walked by and it was all gone. The curtains, the chair, the crates, all of it. And on the curb something that looked like a hockey puck. Even as I was picking it up I was thinking, “Why am I picking this up?”
It’s the top of a cardboard tube or film canister, leathery-looking, with the end stitched on with thread. There’s a label. It says,
1871
The Golden Wedding
Vaudeville Sketch
Ada Jones and Len Spencer
Edison Blue Amberol Records
Dang. More cool stuff gone to the dump. I guess you can’t keep everything, but it’s my urge to want to. Of course, youtube obliges by offering up several Ada Jones recordings, though not this one. But wikipedia directs me to “The Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project” where lo and behold: The Golden Wedding.
In honour of found things, I include two found poems from ad copy in BC Bookworld:
I Will Ask For Birds
an old jacket, her dog
quiet unlike
a Bhuddist
polished over time
who welcomes
loss
The Garden That You Are
Who we where we
our our the our
all the daily
land that you are who of each in other
some as
beautiful is with and even recipes everyone
who
they
or