Oh, Mr. Spurgeon... his fake echo was a nice touch. Lately I've been saying awkward things. To the boys one night over by the mall, "Oh no! The welder's descending!" (That doesn't make any sense, and wouldn't likely make sense even if I explained, but someone reading this will have to endure having it explained to him on a lovely audio cassette.) Yesterday, to James while passing a young woman scraping the snow off of her car windows with a copy of Vogue, "You know, she's going to render that illegible." Finally, to the young man from The Economist who invited me to see Dawn of the Dead, "Oh yeah, I'm keen on zombies." It's true, I am keen on zombies, and I probably wouldn't have felt awkward about that sentence at all if I hadn't immediately heard afterward from behind me, Falton repeating incredulously, "Keen on zombies? Ha!" (That would be so much better if you knew her and could imagine it in her voice. I love Falton.)

Speaking of zombies, Jackpot and I have been speaking of zombies a lot lately. It started a couple of weeks ago when he called me.

Me : "Hello?"
Jackpot : "Hey... so, tomorrow?" (He's better at sounding bored than anyone I know, which is saying a lot.)
Me : "Yeah, around eleven?"
Jackpot : "Okay, but can you call me around ten to make sure I'm awake?"
Me : "Okay."
Jackpot : "Hey, have you been out yet tonight? It's so foggy I can only see halfway down the block."
Me : "I know, and it's supposed to stay foggy all night! Are you going out again?"
Jackpot : "Yeah."
Me : "Well, watch out."
Jackpot : "For what?"
Me : " ... zombies..?"
Jackpot : "Zombies?"
Me : "Yeah, you know... fog... zombies..."
Jackpot : "Yeah, I guess so... so, I'll talk to you tomorrow?"
Me : "Okay, bye."

Thrilling, hmmm? I could now launch into a detailed description of this week's conversation about the ambulatory abilities of zombies, but I doubt any of us have it in us to get into that now. I'll just sum it up as quickly as I can. The zombies in the original Night of the Living Dead were hardly menacing at all! If those people had just kept walking at a steady pace they could have easily gotten away from those zombies! Instead, of course, they tuck themselves into a house and basically wait for those unbelievably slow zombies to get to them. Based on the commercials I've seen, the zombies in this new Dawn of the Dead make much more sense. They run like mad, which Jackpot and I thoroughly agreed is what zombies should do. They can't really feel pain or fatigue anymore, what with their dead bodies and all, so it stands to reason that their bodies would just go like there's no tomorrow until they literally fall apart. Was that really as quickly as I could sum that up? I don't know, I drank two cups of coffee yesterday, and it still feels like it just happened. And I just used the word zombies one thousand times, and I have a strong suspicion that this is its first visit to my diary. I also have a strong suspicion that it's not its last visit... Oh, I need to get out of here, I think.