Saturday, February 23, 2013

Night of the Walking Dead

My husband, Dan, just loves The Walking Dead. Dan is trying to convince me to watch The Walking Dead with him. Dan forgets that I will plague his sleep with bloodcurdling screams and strange sleepwalking episodes if I do, in fact, get hooked on this show.

"You know it's a soap opera . . . with zombies!" is Dan's strongest argument.

"You're watching a soap opera? That must be brilliant marketing."

Dan will indulge in mostly anything if it is connected to zombies. He has actually considered reading Jane Austen - well, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but close enough.

I am intrigued by zombies. Unlike other monsters, zombies are completely unaware of their former selves. They are void of any sort of seductive or even malicious qualities. They are just trying to survive, like animals. And anyone can be a zombie given the right circumstances, soul sucked out, no way of knowing right from wrong, just a shell of what was once human.

Zombies kind of remind me of me . . . during a night terror. This is why I cannot watch The Walking Dead with Dan, at least not at night and not during the work week. Even when Dan and I watch back-to-back Lost episodes, I end up trapped in a dream, being stranded on desert island, running away from smoke monsters.

Dan's The Walking Dead addiction began because he needed something to watch while running on the treadmill. Even the periodic growling sounds coming from the exercise room scared me.

Once he graduated to watching the series in the living room, I would emerge from the bedroom, singing at the top of my lungs, "LA LA LA - I can't hear it!"

The problem was Dan couldn't hear either.

Every once and a while, I would time it wrong. Then I would simply yell, "Are those zombies? Aggghhh!" and run screaming from the room.

If you are a Walking Dead fan, you know that the show returned to the air waves this month. Dan, who has now finished the first two seasons, recorded the season three marathon.

The evening that Dan embarked on season three is the evening I now refer to as "The Night of The Walking Dead." I hid in the bedroom.

"I'm going to take a shower. You can start your Walking Dead marathon."

Dan was so excited by this news that he limped around the house, chasing after me, his tongue sticking out of the side of his mouth.

Later, I came out of the bedroom and found Dan watching the show, with almost all of the lights off.

"Fun, huh?" Dan said. "I had all of the lights off, but I couldn't see well enough to eat my orange."

"You're not going to persuade me to watch this series if you're going to watch it in the dark right before bed."

The other night, after yet another zombie bender, Dan admitted that he had a dream about The Walking Dead.

"There were no zombies. I was just running around a prison by myself."

"Were you at least looking for zombies?"

"Yeah," he answered sheepishly.

So will Dan ever get me to jump on The Walking Dead bandwagon?

Maybe I'll pick it up in the summer . . . when I can watch it in the early afternoons.


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