COMING SOON!...and Welcome.

Hello, welcome, greetings, salutations, hola, nei hou. By way of introduction, I am the American Zombie, although maybe it would be more correct to say I am just another survivor of the mindless apocalypse around us all. And if you have found me, I must assume you are a sympathetic reader of such things as this.

Officially, this blog will be kicking off 1 February 2010. What can you expect?
*Armchair ECONOMICS!!!
*Social CRITICISM!!!
*Superhero PHILOSOPHY!!!
*Arts & ENTERTAINMENT!!!
*Political COMMENTARY!!!

...and of course, ZOMBIES!!!!!

Why am I blogging this way, other than an outlet for my flacid Creative Writing skills? Well...by way of confession, I was once just an average mook getting by in the good old USA, and having socked enough shekels under my mattress, went to reunite with my child and marry my love in Paraguay. What should have been a simple two-connection flight soon spiraled into a colossal comedy of errors. Trapped in my Dante's Road Movie, my 6-week odyssey finally brought me to my goal, the heart of South America. Uncertainty in INS...oops, sorry, Homeland Security rules and regulations meant that I would be living down here a while, so I'd better make the most of it.

And what have I learned, other than a mediocre pidgin Spanish?

Only this: being an average mook getting by in the good old USA doesn't cut it. Raising a family, maintaining a marriage, starting a business to put food in our mouths, and attempting it in a Third World Latin American economy really realigns a person's thinking.

My folks always accused me of learning things the hard way. Guilty as charged, but sometimes those are the only things worth learning.

So, for better or worse, I'm going to share those things with you. They'll probably fall under one of the following headings:

ZOMBINOMICS: I teach Business English in Asuncion, Paraguay's capital. I've also discovered that, even with my craptacular math abilities, I really like Economics. Once the numbers are stripped away, economics can be a looking glass (or funhouse mirror, depending on your POV) reflecting how the world works. The emperor Claudius used to ask "Cui Bono?" Who benefits? And as I'm discovering, incentives matter, especially here!

POP CULTURE MOMENT: Being that I do not possess a single athletic bone in my body, my brothers and I were movie/TV/music junkies. Two of us took the music route, the third is a successful artist in the Big Apple (he did my portrait for this blog; so I'll be hyping his; check out pw!). So I'll be ranting on all three, plus books and comics besides. Speaking of which...

COMIC BOOK PHILOSOPHY: I grew up on these things, I never stopped loving them, and not being able to get them down here makes me want them more. They also informed my worldview as much as CCE classes at church. Underneath that gaudy, 4-color power fantasy are some interesting ways of looking at our world, and commenting on it, and helping us figure out where we stand. Plus, there's capes!

DINNER TABLE CONVERSATION: Family dinner at my house growing up. Mom has prepared a delicious meal. My brothers and I recount our day at school. We tell sophmoric but clever jokes. Then Dad, refilling his plate, says, "So boys, what do you think of the controversial..." So, amongst this very innocent, if not haphazard blog, controversial topics (such as Paraguay's president, who, when he was a priest, fathered 5 children) will be open for comment and debate. To quote Bill Hicks, "Let the party begin!"

WPL?: What's Paraguay Like? When my wife was my girlfriend, I would tell people who asked that she was from Paraguay. And they would all say, "Wow...where is that?" The only way I know how to explain it is to compare it to the United States somehow and draw a conclusion. Which leads us to...

WIMAA: What I Miss About America. You don't know what you got until your government says you can't go back to it until you fill out the following government forms.

ZOMBIE SPECIAL REPORT!: Thanks to my artist brother, I am now obsessed with the zombie in popular culture. So I'll share any special moments I have had with the living dead.

WANK: I am still trying to fine-tune my writing skills, so I'll be posting an open document in the future with a semi-autobiographical fictional account of my travels through the lens of the zombie apocalypse. It's mostly an exercise for me, but I would like some honest feedback from anyone who stumbles upon it. Appreciated in advance.

So if I am a Z.A.S. (Zombie Apocalypse Survivor), why am I calling myself a Zombie? To be blunt, my old self was nothing to be too proud of. To be a husband, a father, an entrepreneur, hell, to get out of the Panamanian jungle, I had to admit that my old way of living was flawed. Horribly. I had to declare the old me dead, bury it, and rise again as something more than I was. Relentless. Unstoppable. The irony is, in this "developing" part of the world, I'm surrounded by people who think like the old me. And they make me angry (a "rage zombie"?) and they repeat the tired conventional wisdom the talking heads repeated the night before and I am split between a need to argue in the most brutal fashion I can pre-censor, and blathering them about with a baseball bat. Seeing myself in them is a hard pill to swallow. And you know the type: the mindless victim.

And so here I am. The American Zombie, shambling across the globe in search of brains.

Join me, won't you? You can share my canned tuna.

RAW