Zombies were -- pardon the expression -- dead as a fucking doornail. 

Everyone made a zombie movie or a zombie game or a zombie novel. Always the same plots with a few variations. Sometimes the variation was better makeup, sometimes a different pseudo-scientific origin. Alien brainchips, voodoo magic, mutated fungus. But it was always the small group of survivors, always the gore, always the paranoia, always survivors turning on each other before the walking dead overran them. 

The only thing more played out than the zombie story was the found footage "Hey, we're from the Ghost Stalkers TV show, and we're going into this abandoned asylum! OMG, GHOSTS ARE REAL?!?" movie. 

And then -- AND THEN -- exactly like the bad set-up for a particularly bad movie, people start getting on the news and saying the dead actually are rising from the graves to feast on the living, complete with bloody video footage, cities on fire, anchormen weeping in terror. 

I don't believe…

Two weeks ago, in what might have been an improbable and random decision, I moved to Corvallis, Oregon. I have been spinning my gears, doing nothing useful, for quite a while, and so I decided to make a move. Despite the situation with the pandemic, I had to do something. What I am going to do, I don't know. 2020 is such a mess that any achievement or movement counts as a wild victory. From March until August, I had not had an in-person conversation with a person I knew of, except my…

the sound of

traffic,  as the night sky surrenders to day and commerce

overwhelms all 

the sound of 

sidewalk musicians,  a benign exchange of coins for

a few moments of heaven 

the sound of 

geese, flying overhead in precise formation

hundreds of wings,  all moving South  …