Heads up: I’m not thinking clearly.

I woke up with a tickle in my throat, but still braved the gym, hoping to “brute force” the disease out of me. After hardly moving faster than a crawl on the treadmill, I came home and felt a nap was in order. That was 9:30AM. It’s now 2:30PM. I don’t think I can write an intelligible blog right now, but if you’re reading this at home, it means that in between bouts of napping and making bad decisions, it got written anyway.

Before I found myself mainlining tea like it was the elixir of life, I planned to use today’s blog post to talk about our new characters. I wanted to provide insight, creator commentary on the process of writing and creating the world of Unlife. How Zack and I want to parallel the trials of growing up with the well-worn tropes of zombie lore. But my head is too fuzzy to explain all that right now.

The thing about being sick is that, at first, you don’t think you’re sick. It’s just a sniffle. Just a little fatigue. Nothing a hot coffee and a few social interactions can’t cure. You blame the weather. Blame stress. Blame it on the a-a-a-a-a-a-alcohol. It’s all a foreign element plaguing your otherwise perfect system. But the excuses run out faster than your box of tissues, at which point you face up to the fact that the call is coming from inside the house. You’re sick. So now, you gotta deal.

For sane people, sickness means taking time off. Recuperating and rebuilding their immune system. Sometimes in private, sometimes with the aid of someone who knows better like a doctor, or a sorcerer (if they are covered by your health plan). But sometimes, we can’t, or really won’t, take the time for self healing. Sometimes we continue to tell ourselves that we’re fine, and that the problem is everyone else. And then it becomes everyone else’s problem.

Violence – especially of the ganged-up, gun-toting type represented by our zombie hunters, or Mercy’s Kill, as you’ll come to know them – often appears, to me, as a move of desperation. A reaction to a feeling that there’s no way out, that life as you know it is slipping away, and the overwhelming need to take it back. The compulsion to let everyone know you are fine, better than fine, and that it’s the rest of the world that is sick. That it’s not your problem, but theirs. And with that attitude, it really does become their problem. You become their problem. You are spreading the sickness.

Blame it on movies, the failing mental health system, the gun laws, on the a-a-a-a-a-a-alcohol (did I make that joke already?) or the politicians. If argued correctly, all those answers apply.

But after a certain point, you can’t deny that the call is still coming from inside the house.