Last Sunday night, after spending serious quality time in the cozy little world of Elephant and Piggie, I tucked the toddler into bed and sprinted downstairs faster than Usain Bolt.
Aflutter with anticipation, I nestled into the couch with a little chilled white wine in one hand and my iPhone in the other, all the better to tweet inanities about “The Walking Dead” with my fellow gore hounds. But as I engaged in online debate over the relative merits of being a walker (too much cumbersome rotting flesh makeup) versus being a survivor (you might get eaten) during a zombie obstacle course, I began to experience a gnawing sense of uncertainty about my love affair with the post-apocalyptic oeuvre. Why does doomsday ring my bell so hard?
I’m a bit of a horror aficionado, so it’s no surprise I relish a show that makes me triple-check the latch on the front door before I go to sleep. But it’s really only since I became mother that I’ve found myself so inescapably drawn to the realm of dystopian drama.
They say having a baby changes who you are and how you see the world, but nobody mentioned anything about becoming deeply addicted to flesh-eating corpses. But for me, that’s how it feels. These days, I can’t get enough of the end of the world as we know it, and I suspect my passion for the apocalypse may be my way of working through my occasionally overwhelming maternal anxiety about the precarious state of the world. Things I used to brush off now hit me hard.
To be honest, before I had my daughter, I was only mildly bothered about issues such as global warming, animal extinction, mutating pandemics and the erosion of the public safety net. Don’t get me wrong: I have always recycled and toted around canvas bags and reused plastic water bottles until they get grungy. But I never truly sweated the fracking boom or the Great Pacific garbage patch or any of the other looming planetary disasters because I figured the really bad stuff wouldn’t hit until after I had already shuffled off this mortal coil. Survival seemed like a numbers game that I could easily win.
Selfish of me, I know. But true.
That lovely little denial system went out the window when Miss Daphne arrived.
Nowadays, every time I glance at the headlines, I cringe a little. I find myself clicking away from documentaries about the bleak state of the ecosystem. I avoid the constant drumbeat of bad news that used to fill my Twitter feed by scrolling until I hit the unmitigated escapism of cat videos, selfies or food porn.
Sometimes, reality gets in the way of my maternal need for stability. I want to be certain that my little one will have a thriving planet to inherit, but I’m not. Not. At. All. And that’s profoundly disturbing.
Nobody wants to sound like Chicken Little, but sometimes it feels like the sky just may be falling a wee bit.
It doesn’t help matters that we log a massive number of hours at the zoo with its handy displays about various and sundry endangered species, so I find myself having to explain the concept of extinction a little too often. Daphne has a hard time grasping the idea that we would let a whole species of animal disappear from the universe. Also, did I mention she’s 3? Which means “why?” is pretty much her go-to expression. The trouble is I really have no idea how to explain why the environment has gotten to the edge of collapse.
On the other hand, I’m certainly not the only one who has a yen for total annihilation. Post-apocalypses dominate pop culture right now. From “Ender’s Game” and “World War Z” to “The Hunger Games,” the end is nigh just about everywhere you look in movies, TV and video games. The rapture is all the rage.
On some level, I think this apocalypse addiction might be a way of warding off a jinx. When I was little and terrified of sharks, I was convinced that watching “Jaws” (which caused my fear to begin with) every time it was on TV would actually prevent my being chomped on by a Great White. Since I never got bitten, my strategy was quite effective.
This same magical thinking has led me to stockpile food, water and candles because somehow if I am prepared for the Big One, it seems unlikely we will ever have an earthquake. It’s kind of like how it never rains when you remember your umbrella.
Faced with existential dread, there’s something weirdly comforting about confronting my worst nightmares. They are fairy tales for adults, cautionary tales for a scary world. While brain-eating legions aren’t literally on my radar of things to be afraid of, they do evoke our collective fear that civilization is beginning to fray around the edges. That society feels less safe than it did when I was 3. That the future may be darker than the present.
That’s the subtext swirling in all of our heads as we watch the ragtag survivors of “The Walking Dead” fight for their lives. There but for the grace of God go all of us.
Now pass the pinot gris.
Contact Karen D’Souza at 408-271-3772. Read her at www.mercurynews.com/karen-dsouza and follow her at Twitter.com/KarenDSouza4.
