Prep Work

 When my son was in high school, he and a group of friends began formulating their Zombie Apocalypse Plan. This afforded a group of young nerds the opportunity to try and regulate the unprecedented times in which they were living. They came of age during September 11, Katrina and a war in the Middle East that never quite ended. It is through this lens that my son and his gang of nerds set about preparing for ZAP. 

Among the features of his all-encompassing survival system was the need to be prepared at any moment to fight off a surging mass of undead. At a movie theater. In his back yard. On vacation. All of these contingencies were considered and variables such as available cover and weaponry became codified as they were written down. 

It is only now as my son crests the hill into adulthood that I realize how important these exercises were. This is the guy who has insisted to me time and again how much he would rather be living in precedented times. His parents are painfully aware of just how much heavy lifting we have left him and his generation. I believe the deep emotional scars we have gifted him thanks to climate change, global pandemics and the failure of democracy will generate an evolutionary change.

He and his buddies may never get a chance to hole up in an abandoned shopping center, or wander the wastelands searching for other survivors. That is fine. He will be able to stare down the ugly realities of his very real timeline. He has lived through a time when active shooter drills became as commonplace as fire drills and daily attendance in the schools he attended. 

As it turns out, his childhood fears of spending nights away from home were probably partly inspired by his genetic connection to his father who never managed to get that comfortable anywhere but the house he grew up in, but also because he was already considering how to be safe when the monsters showed up. 

The monsters didn't turn out to be the shambling, decayed corpses looking for brains to consume, but a series of horrible mistakes made by the world in which he found himself living. The legendary Marvel Comic book Howard the Duck was introduced with the line, "Trapped in a world he never made!" That pretty much sums up what I believe my son's motto might be. 

Except he probably kept the one he had when he was seventeen: "Don't be a snack."