Zombie Love

I am watching Shaun of the Dead for the 501st time after seeing Jim kiss Pam on The Office. Unrequited love is an odd thing that only makes me think of awkward teenage emotions and how glad I am to be a bitter single old man who owns too many cats.

So Shaun of the Dead is on in the background and I am feeling a bit bitter. In the first 15 minutes of the movie we see our hero Shaun muddling through a dying romance in a dead end job that is slowly sucking the life from him. Life is repetition. In the background of most scenes there is an escalating tension in the world he is obliviously living in. There are sick people, getting sicker, and slowly becoming the “undead.” Yep, it’s a Zombie movie if you couldn’t tell from the title. I think Zombie movies are the best in horror because they scare the shit out of me.

Case in point – I am one of those people “they” poll when you hear the phrase “in a recent Zogby Poll.” And while I don’t think Zogby is as accurate as Rasumssen, which is neither here nor there, I was filling out my survey this morning and the topic was bird flu. Earlier this week ABC had the bird flu pandemic movie and Zogby was hired to sample public opinion on who watched, how worried they are about the bird flu, and what their activities might be in certain scenarios.

From the same person who wipes down a hotel room in Purel, won’t touch the door knob in the bathroom with his bare skin, and has to wash his hands every hour, I answered as honestly as I possibly could. When the bird flu mutates to a human carrier virus, your old buddy Psquared is making one final trip to the grocery store wearing his medical mask, latex gloves (which now come in packs of 150) and not leaving the apartment until the cure is found.

Zombie movies are the most realistic in all of the horror subgenres. My optimism might not be shining through on this little rant, but yeah, plague, pestilent, disease, the apocalypse – you are reading the writings of a man brought up in a fundamentalist Christian church preaching that Revelations should be taken literally. Those news reports that feed off the fears built over years that the end is around the corner can get to you sometimes.
So I can see why a Jim would tell a Pam he loved her, and that he needed her to hear it just once before transferring to Scranton. I understand why that one kiss would mean so much – you never know when the end will pop up from around the corner in the form of a virus saturated bird poop landing on your head, the plague on the men’s bathroom door knob, or a blood thirsty Zombie with a craving for your warm and meaty brains. If you have the chance to kiss the girl you kiss the girl. As the wise and talented Steve Winwood wrote, “If you see a chance, take it.”