Negotiable Sanity, Street Version

You guys sick of the zombie bigfeet yet?

My partner asked me, So how come you only see these things at home, never when we're out? And I thought, hell, that's actually a pretty good question from a sane person. So I looked a little more carefully, and unless the supermarket has a really aggressive diversity hiring program, I am seeing them while I'm not at home. I'm just not noticing because I don't look at people, being a confirmed misanthrope. So now I see them everywhere, and thanks for that, honey. Shopping has suddenly been transformed into an exciting personal version of Dead Rising except that I don't kill anyone and they don't seem to do much, just stand around. I suppose it's possible they've been hired as greeters, but to be honest they kind of suck at it, what with the not-talking and all.

Meanwhile, I still can't figure out why they all hang out in the kitchen, and worse, why that's not helping my diet. If they were actually doing something to scare me, maybe I'd stay the hell out of there, but they're not. They just stand around like the Burger King in those commercials. I haven't really even seen them running up behind me since that one night, certainly I haven't heard them doing anything, which comes as a relief since, as I've said, things that make noise are usually real.

And having the voice in my head that sounds like Rod Serling tell me what's real has turned out to be not very effective at all. He seems to take long lunch breaks, and he's late for work, and to be honest there were a couple of days there where I think he just talked the voice in my head that sounds exactly like Bob Bakker to clock in for him while he stayed home on the couch watching game shows. And that voice is practically useless on the subject of zombies, I don't think he sees any of them at all.

So instead I'm just wandering around with a wooden spoon and poking it at them. If it meets resistance, that probably means there really is something there. So far it hasn't.

The housemate thinks this is all exceptionally stupid, and I'm having a hard time disagreeing with that, but what the hell. I think I'm probably doing okay with the whole thing, but I may be inherently better set up to deal with hallucinations than most people. It's often easier for me to sort out the rules of non-reality and apply logic to how things are rather than to keep insisting on the logic that would pertain if reality was how it's supposed to be. At that point, you stop yelling at the zombies not to sneak up behind you which is, after all, their job, and instead just start telling them just to stay out of dark rooms, and then you stop turning around with breakable objects in your hands because that startle reflex will have you cleaning up a lot of glass otherwise.

So, this is what rationality looks like when it's cobbled together out of small bits of dysfunctional logic. I can't say it hasn't been interesting, but I may have gone long enough without so many of the migraines that I'm willing to go back to that for a while. Of course, there's no guarantee that the hallucinations will go away now anyway now that my screwed-up psyche is used to them, and for that matter may well be using them in the same way people who, you know, sleep use dreams.

And of course there's no good reason for me to be explaining all of this to anyone except that if I'm going to have to put up with it, I'm by god going to get some decent funny stories out of it. What really sucks is that if I didn't still have this stupid headache all the time, I might actually be able to concentrate well enough to get some decent fiction out of it, too. Because, really, all of this would be hilarious if it was happening to someone who wasn't real.