I really, REALLY need to stop watching zombie movies right before bed. Mind you, it’s not that the movies themselves are grippingly scary, but they do tend to set the mind awander. Inevitably after watching John Q. Public become John Q. NomNom, I can’t help but lie awake for far too long planning my zombie apocalypse “survival” strategy. How to survive the first assault. Siege tactics. Resource acquisition. It is as if the long-dormant engineering degree is, much like a zombie, not completely dead and buried in my brain and longs to claw to the surface of the conscious mind and start …. planning. Dun dun DUNNN!

Sadly, though I’d like to admit this hasn’t ever happened before, it does occur with some frequency. (No, not, y’know, zombie apocalypses, but rather staying up a little too late and then getting ‘pulled in’ to a cinematic fright fest of the fearfully undead.) To wit, what to do? Just ignore it on the 99.98% probability there won’t be a World War Z in my lifetime? Well, that just sounds too logical. So the engineering mind staggers to the fore, thinking of home integrity, ways to board windows, sawing the steps off the deck, avenues of retreat and where to place ladders and weighing wether or not my wife would leave me were I to pack an emergency “Go!” bag, you know, just in case. I could always pass it off as disaster preparedness. Hmm…

So, as you can see, it sets the brain aflutter with possibilities and potential. Yes, I said potential. As in, what a perfect opportunity to loot a Walmart. I mean, I think if anyone looks deep enough within, we’ll all find that we secretly would like to ransack that place, right? And it’s the perfect one-stop shop for all your end-of-world needs, too. Food? Check. Guns? Check. Ammo? Check. Camo? Check. Fertilizer for blowing shit up? Check. Seeds for all the optimists? Check. And Twinkies, too (for all you “Zombieland”/Woody Harrelson fans).

But, terribly, what this all leaves me with is something perhaps more terrifying than undead moans in the night. And that is this: Once upon a time a few millennia ago we humans used our brains and ability to plan to rise up. We made plans to run game into traps, to kick the bear’s ass from afar with stones and spears, to cultivate our own food rather than roam about searching for it. The ability of the mind to plan is simply stunning. That we now use our minds for little more than trivia, video games or, for the truly “leading” minds, thinking of nothing more than the next fiscal quarter numbers or the turn of the next election cycle … well that is simply stunningly sad.

So, maybe we could use a zombie apocalypse? I sure hope not. But even that might not get those that remain to really start thinking–like we used to do. For a moment there, I thought, or hoped, that after 9/11 we’d take a chance on change, on bettering humanity. But we’re still in that same shit show, sliding down a tightening spiral. Years ago people actually wrote. They wrote letters pages long during wars, books of beauty while travelling the road, and sonnets, sweet sonnets that made me love the words of the English language.

And years from now, our ancestors will only be able to learn of us from 140 character tweets.

Well, if they’re not caught by zombies, that is.

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