I’m still in a turkey coma. My typing is slow and it’s going to be a long time before I host this laptop off my lap. But wait, what’s this! Everyone around me is shaken and moving! What is it they’re doing? And oh my! Something awful is happening on the TV! There seems to be some sort of riot and Wolf Blitzer caught in the midst of it! Where is he Mumbai? Thailand? Best Buy. Good God how could I have forgotten. Today is one of Americas favorite holidays —Black Friday, or as I like to call it Zombie day.
This morning Americans left their cozy homes at unspeakable hours to wait in lines at TJ Max and Wal-Mart all in the hope of grubbing a flashy bit of plastic. Middle-aged women frothed at the mouth in anticipation. Football fans and cribbage players wiped the crusty’s out of each other’s eyes and chewed on menthols. Capillaries blew. The shop-lust was palpable. The mall doors slid open at 4am. Chaos. People trampled one another. Someone was taking scalps. Screaming rang like sadistic church bells. It was a bloodbath. The big screen TVs were flying through the air. The end times seemed to be upon us.
This petty summary of this great American holiday-Black Friday- may sound like Anyday in Joetown USA, but that’s the point. Zombies are real. They’re my mother and father, brother and sister, Cindy and John, Sara and Peter, you and me. We as Americans have been Zombiefied.
The TV has told us it is time to shop and by god I’m going to kill my neighbor if they get in my way! Dawn of the dead is the most realistic Zombie movie ever made. It is set in a mega mall in – get this – the mid west! If you scrap some of the makeup off the Zombies in the movie it turns into a boring compilation of the mall’s security footage.
Back at Marshals or whatever other trendy hole the masses fancy these days they’re chanting, “Consume! Consume! Consume!” are they talking about brains? Who’s beating this mad drum? No one trusts the government anymore it’s not them. Let them have their wars and hope. The Internet’s not big enough for this kind of madness. Is it that noisy TV; the one that we choose to turn on and off? What about the games that those damned kids are playing? What has created this hive mind of consumption lust?
“Today is they only day for this!”
“The sales!”
” 50cents off a chiffon clad action figure!”
“Good goodness!”
” A Pet Rock with a built in jet pack!”
“Only 15 payments of 49.46!”
” Consume!”
“Brains!”
” Happy Zombie day!”
Something to consider in retaliation next year would be to organize a zombie walk through your local center of commerce with some willing participants. for anyone who dares come out before sunrise to consume should be made aware that 4am is still an hour which belongs to the undead.
maybe it was the dopamine. maybe it was something else.
but what has made american acts of gluttony in one respect precede gluttony in another?
begs the question if at this point an american (or perhaps any citizen of the first world) can consume in a soley conscious manner? is it really all unconscious consumption in one way or another?
and even if you consume soley for survival, bare in mind the fact that zombies do to.
is the post-turkey-havoc really then a zombie act? it’s apart of ‘civilization’. FUNNY because what these two-day american commerical-consumer traditions rooted from is the pilgrim’s guerilla tactics to collapse that they did not deem as ‘civilization’ and establish their own new order.
WHAT THE FUCK maybe zombies are doing the same at this mall at 4am?!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27955316/
“NEW YORK – A worker was killed in the crush Friday after a throng of shoppers eager for post-Thanksgiving bargains burst through the doors at a suburban Wal-Mart, authorities said.”
thaaaaat makes me vomit it’s so scary.
also tim check your email
“also tim check your email”
Does that count as a blog post?
PS I did.
Also to your comment—I think you’re right on; however, we need to be careful not to link all consumption to zombies. We consume air and food and we are not zombies.
At what point does gluttonous consumption become zombie consumption?
In my mind, at 4am in a Wal-Mart in Joetown USA where the masses want their TV so bad they kill a worker and trample a pregnant women until she miscarries.
Tim, maybe the difference between gluttonous consumption and zombie consumption lies betwween two ideas: whether the commodity being consumed is absolutely necessary, or our state of mind when we consume teh product.
Like your example of food and air. We gluttonously consume those two commodities because we need it for our survival. Or maybe we consume more than what we absolutely need for our survival.
Zombie consumption could be the consumption of products that we don’t necessarily need for survival, or maybe how our brains think we need it…like your Walmart example… The shoppers thinking ‘OMG OMG OMG I NEED THAT TICKLE ME ELMO TOY OR ELSE!’ could be a zombie commodity–the mass of shoppers movng as one, with only the commodity on their mind?
YAY 10th blog post!
Besides the employee being killed, a woman had a miscarriage because she was trampled by a stampede of people. Talk about acting inhumane and zombie-like. I absolutley agree with this being called a “zombie day” because the crowds are literally hypnotized by dropped prices.
There was also a store that had its door break off because of the crowds. Reminds me of the crowds in Metropolis and the zombies in Night of the Living Dead.
I agree with Tim that not all consumption is zombie consumption and I also agree with Alex that we need to then ask ourselves if we zombie consumtion is over consumption of things we don’t need or over consumption of things we just think we need? I even feel like zombie consumption could also defined as the over consumption of necessities like— running water for example. Americans are such water wasters, as if you didn’t know that already. But think about it, it is a necessity… I mean we do need to hydrate ourselves with enough water to survive, but do we really need to take 20 minute showers? Sure they may feel good after a long, hard day, but are you going to die without it? We just think that we need it. We figure water is water, I can use up this much water because it will always be around. I mean, after all it is a natural resource, right? I know I am talking about two completely different uses of water, but the bottom line is I feel like we are also zombies because we over consume our necessities as well.
Over consumption makes us ignorant as well as wasteful it does not however make us zombies (and it may well suggest monstrosity in other forms). In Tim’s original post he suggested that the TV was the culprit of zobification of the American public not the act of consumption. Personally I don’t believe that line of zombification lies in necessity vs. want. I think it would be easier to say that motivation can create zombification. It is easy to give in to the dangers of ‘group think’, gluttony, or greed regardless if you are desperate for a new North Face or your weekly water ration.