In zombie country

 203rd day sober. Yesterday, my day off, my big accomplishment was reading Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut. 

There's a lot of reading in that book and it's also very depressing. In Slaughterhouse-Five he emphasizes how random life is, but it's easy to accept randomness when it's about a guy who time-travels and ends up in a zoo on a planet where the air is cyanide. 

This book, written about 30 years later, really drives it home. The protagonist is someone who might be Vonnegut himself. German-American, old Socialists in his family tree but gets into West Point because during Vietnam, they'd take almost anyone - even a DQ'd state Science Fair contestant. The guy bounces around like a pinball through life, like we all do. He becomes an almost certain war criminal, a teacher, a General, a prisoner, a ladies' man, a carillion (sp?) player, and in the end a defendant in a national Federal case, and there the book ends. 

All through this Vonnegut lambastes the America of the late-80s, which was on its way to becoming the America of now. It's all very bizarre, random, and depressing and no space aliens required. 

I woke up at about 9, depressed, and went back to semi-sleep until almost 2, thinking about it all. To deal with it, as humans do, I came up with a theory. Say you're looking at a painting, say a nice seascape. This is easy for me to imagine because I was "supposed" to become a great painter of seascapes. Say you're only able to look at a tiny bit of it, though. So all you see is a smear of one shade of blue, a smear of another shade of blue ... and it doesn't make any sense. So the little square of the painting you can see makes no sense and you'll never be able to see the whole, but the whole does make sense at a higher level you'll never see. It's stupid but it's comforting. 

Why wasn't I getting the horn out, at such a nice quiet time as I had, in the middle of the night? I heard a clattering outside a bit after 2AM, and looked at the video monitor and there was a zombie, with two trash cans and a shopping cart, loaded up with the kind of crap zombies collect. The zombie dragged these things around randomly, eventually leaving one of the trash cans of crap next to the trash enclosure here, dragging the other two to the other trash enclosure and doing something in there, then dragging them off around the corner. 

My point being that in zombie country, there's no time when the area can be assumed to be safe and zombie-free, and the zombies operate 24/7. They're a bit suppressed in the daytime (sun probably rots them faster) and regular working people are out and around and well, everyone normal hates zombies. So it's night-time when the undead feel the streets are theirs. And while there are several of us who live in our offices here, we're all pretty quiet about it. So the last thing I needed to do in the wee hours would have been to broadcast my presence here with trumpet sounds.