Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

I consider myself a rationalist.

God plays a limited role in my affairs, except when we hold our occasional powwows, which tend commence at around hour 40 of wakefulness. I wear a hamsa, but less to ward off the evil eye and more to bestow ethnic pride on my chest hair like an airbrushed Virgin Mary on a hydraulic ‘64 Impala. I knock other people, not wood. I find spitting distasteful under any circumstance, and combing it with the nonsense syllable “tfu” probably carries the death penalty in those small, economically overachieving Asian nations where failure to keep one’s anus tightly clenched results in an immediate visit from a surprisingly diffident unit of brownshirts.

But despite all that, I remain firmly convinced that it’s only a matter of time before the flesh-eating dead descend upon our cities and chew up thousands of years of human civilization until it bursts from their grossly distended abdomens. I use garlic as a seasoning, not a deterrent, and even if I had a gun, it would be empty of silver bullets - but I have prepared multiple contingency plans of action for the inevitable moment the ghouls’ moans reach my window (remember: if your home lacks any implements which can swiftly destroy a brain, you may as well begin to accustom yourself to the taste of human flesh now).

Optimism may be a luxury in the face of undead hordes, but I allow myself enough to hope that when the zombies arise - and they will arise - they remain slow of both motion and wit à la Dawn of the Dead, not athletic like 28 Days Later, not shambling proof of extremely fucking punctuated equilibrium à la the execrable Land of the Dead, and not possessed of an insatiable taste for poofy-haired, heavily-armed cheerleaders as in Night of the Comet.

But the ever-growing library of zombie movies and agreed-upon meeting points with similarly farsighted compatriots in the event of an outbreak of the living dead has begun to have a profound effect on the workings of my subconscious. I dream intensely and incessantly, and zombies have begun to converge on my somnolent mind as if it were the attractive but loose blond who receives a bloody comeuppance for baring her tits about an hour into every traditional zombie flick. My dreams not only feature zombies, they feature cinematic structure - they increasingly start out by introducing characters and building suspense before the first rotting hand grips the first unfortunate ankle.

I can only assume this means that locked somewhere deep in my psyche is the definitive zombie movie, a Citizen Kane where Orson Welles rips out Dorothy Comingore’s vocal cords instead of inflicting them upon an opera house, a Seven Samurai where seven ronin protect a village from the undead hordes, a Godfather where cannoli is eschewed for cannibalism. I reckon the movie - I’ll call it The Shawshank Reanimation for now - will continue to be revealed in prophetic bits and pieces snatched from dreams until I finally wake up one morning and devote my life, with epic singularity of purpose, to the creation of the cinematic pinnacle of the genre, a movie that makes Night of the Living Dead look like Saturday Night Live.

I just hope I do it before the dead arise.

And they will arise.

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