The Emotional Roller Coaster that is The Walking Dead…

… The internet is simply a buzz with talk of modesty, Beyonce, Mahony oh my. This post has absolutely nothing to do with either. You’re welcome.

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I don’t care for football, the bastard sissy cousin of rugby, so when the super bowl comes around each year I’m desperate to watch anything on TV unrelated to the game. Enter the Walking Dead marathon.

Some friends of mine are nuts over this show and claim it’s absolutely terrifying. Naturally, given my pathological fear of dead things coming back to life to eat me and my intensely overactive imagination, I thought it wise and prudent to spend an entire Sunday engrossed in apocalyptic zombie television.

At first I was all …

which quickly morphed into …

What is this junk?! Carnage and badly decomposed bodies everywhere; clearly signs that Mr. Sheriff has been unconscious in the hospital for weeks, possibly months. Yet he’s managed to survive in an abandoned hospital with no staff to change his IV’s and didn’t die of dehydration and starvation? Judging from the manly five o’clock shadow, I’d say he’s been in that hospital two days tops. My bull shit detector is going off. And who is cutting the grass? My shriveled dead lawn looks more apocalyptic then the set of this show.

But wait… what’s this…

And just when I was about to hyperventilate into a bag, suddenly it was all…

What proceeded next was episode after episode of sheer horror interlaced with tension and moments of touching sadness punctuated by utter confusion. And did that zombie just pick up a rock to smash through that storefront window? Can the un-dead jump fences? Wait. What? Did those two walkers just split up to corner Sophia in the woods. Do zombies do that… think and calculate? And why does it look like Morgan’s walker wife remembers where she died? Is that a hint of humanity flickering behind those newly reanimated eyes? Soylent Green is people!?!

If someone could have watched me watching that show they would have seen me bugged eye at 4am unable to look away and holding my breath so the fake zombies living inside my television wouldn’t hear me scream only to bawl uncontrollably into a pillow two seconds later over the death of one of the characters.

What happens to the psyche after it’s crammed three years of Walking Dead into three nights of emotional schizophrenia…

And when I’m not behaving certifiably insane I do perfectly normal things like spend hours online in forums and on facebook talking Dead with anyone who will humor me while a wildly hypothesize grand conspiracies around where all the people went and how everyone got infected with the virus, convinced Wildfire was a global government extinction plan. We talk about why walkers, long dead, bleed so much when you re-kill them. Wouldn’t their blood coagulate in their veins and organs? They should be bleeding motor oil. And Merle. I know Merle is responsible for that walker horde that invaded camp. He stole their truck and loaded it up with the un-dead and released them on the campers. And that helicopter… it belongs to the political and intellectual elite that are hiding out in underground bunkers. Or maybe a walker got it’s pilot’s license. They do seem eerily human in an inhuman way. And so help me God, if they kill Daryl I will lose my mind and smash shit. Oh, and did I mention the show is scary as hell?

Wanna ride on my mood swing, catch the first two seasons on Netflix and then watch season three on AMC this Sunday followed by the season premier at 9pm/8C. Welcome to my hell.