Dema Keltner-Anderson

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

An you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You’ll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

In the dark places of yourself, thinking machines you never get near enough to see are constantly building things and running their own secretive programmes all of their own. Maybe you get a snippet of what’s going on back there, like this fragment of a song drifting its way into the light, or a phrase, or an image, or maybe just a mood, a wash of content of a bleak draining of colour that floods your chest and your stomach more than it ever finds its way into the bight halogen chrome of your mind…

Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his ass to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down. You dig? Farting out the words. It was unlike anything I had ever heard.

This ass talk had sort of a gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell.

This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventri- liquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called The Better Ole that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, “Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?”

“Nah I had to go relieve myself.”

After a while the ass start talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.

Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in- curving hooks and start eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him Its you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we don’t need you around here any more. I can talk and eat AND shit.
After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpoles tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous- except for the EYES you dig. Thats one thing the asshole COULDNT do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldnt give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffer- ing of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes WENT OUT, and there was no more feeling in them than a crabs eyes on the end of a stalk.

    Okay. So, I’m a Timothy Olyphant fan. I know about his show, Justified on FX, but I’ve never watched it before. I figured that if I started watching it now, then I would be totally lost, and not understand anything that’s going on. Well my sister watches it all the time, and told me that If I’m a fan of Timothy Olyphant, I really should start watching. She’s been telling me that for a while now. So, I’m watching it tonight. Hopefully I can learn enough in the next few episodes to kind of get the gist. We’ll see…

Imagine someone infected with a disease, and acting differently. Different than they were before this infection. The disease would fuck up the brain, and could be spread. Does it sound like a horror movie? Well, my friend think again. There are plenty of chemicals, parasites, fungus, and chemicals in the world that affect the brain and could cause someone to become a Zombie. In real life, this “Zombie” wouldn’t eat brains or ant gross shit like that but it could spread the virus. We all know that a virus CAN mutate into something really fucking bad. 

Let’s talk about the walking dead.

The origin of Zombies began in Haiti as some sort of voodoo slave labor. This is what would happen: the chosen man or woman would be force fed a mixture of the skin of toads and puffer fish. Sometimes, they would even be rubbed with it. The skin of toads can actually kill people but interestingly enough,it also works as a kind of pain killer. The puffer fish is really fucking poisonous. It puts you in a coma in a near “death” state. The poisoned “dead” person would then be buried, and would be in the ground for about eight hours. They would then be dug up, and fed Datura, a plant with crazy ass side effects. Datura fucks with your reality, and then destroys your memories, so you don’t know what day it is, where you are, and can make you forget who you are. These “zombies” are in a state of induced psychotic delirium.” The brainwashed and once “dead” people, would then be sold into slavery and do what they were told without thinking about it. They couldn’t think for themselves. Symptoms of Hatian Voodoo work: delirium or dementia, blurred vision, changes in the way you walk, hallucinations, lack of coordination (stumbling and falling), muscle twitching, muscle stiffness, myoclonic jerks or seizures, jumpy feelings, Personality changes, super confusion, disorientation, sleepiness, and major speech impairment. Don’t let any creepy people feed you, or rub anything on you if you’re ever in Haiti. And that’s my story of the first Zombies.