Viral

William S. Burroughs started it, then Laurie Anderson picked it up and sang about it. I chant it sometimes: "Language is a virus."

Solid writing infects you. Feverish flashbacks to, say, Melville's Moby-Dick or Kafka's In the Penal Colony can be distressing, especially when they occur oh, at work or behind the wheel.

Basic imagery is even more unpredictable. I found Christopher Lockett's Untitled Newfoundland Zombie Project yesterday, took a gander. It's an in-progress screenplay, a zombie movie set in St. John's, NL. (Hell, why not? We've got Wal-Mart, Montana's Steakhouse and CNN. Zombies are a plausible next step.)

Diss the zombie genre all you like. I got infected. Dreamt about, yep, zombies all night. Tossed and moaned and tried to remember medieval siege techniques, calorie counts on food and just where I'd put my tire iron last. My dreams had baby zombies, and they floated, just like fetuses. Best way to defeat the baby zombies was to spray them in the face with Lysol.

Mother of two here, spraying Lysol at floating baby zombies.

Zombies are money worries for me. The Visa bill staggers up the back yard. The telephone bill strides over my parked car. The electric bill grabs me from behind.

Not sure about the baby zombies yet.

Humbling, to be infected by an image.

http://newfoundlandzombies.blogspot.com/