It's almost time to become zombies. And I don't mean on Goddamn Facebook, I mean for really reals.

Look, I'm not scared to admit that I've been alive on this wretched planet a long-ass time. My first computer was a room full of Roosevelt's New Deal people that did the calculations, in real time, for me to play Pac-Man. I'm an old bastard. I look fantastic, but don't let that fool you: it takes me two days to poop my ancient, rock-hard turds. I have to start during lunch-break and precisely time the anal egress for the evening of the next day. That's what happens when you get old. But what else happens is that you gain the aggregate of a lifetime of horrible experiences, and eventually feel an unnatural urge to pass this knowledge on to the younger generations, in the hopes it will help you lousy venereal-diseased hooligans.

Zombification. Get ready to take the plunge.

The first lie that needs to be eradicated is that zombies are fictional. As if people would be so hopelessly fixated on something that doesn't exist that they'd make movies, comic-books, action-figures, and time-wasting social networking apps based on a figment of George Romero's imagination. Poppycocks!

Haitian Voodoo zombies are total bullshit, I'll grant you that. But that's just racism, thinking that black people can raise the dead. If that were true there wouldn't be so many dead rappers, would there? Or, um, maybe that's racist. Let's move on.

The next lie is that zombies are a condition, the result of a space-probe covered in zombie radiation or a biblical curse or a government experiment or a monkey-enraging whatever-the-fuck-that-was or some sort of messed-up Hentai thing. Nope.

What you have to understand is that becoming a zombie is a choice.

The first time people went zombie was in the fart-smelling sepia days of the Great Depression. Out of work, homeless and starving -- what would you do? Be a Hobo? Shit no! It became rapidly apparent to many of the impoverished, disenfranchised citizens of the United States that their only recourse was to gather together in large, loping masses and gorge on the flesh of their fellow man.

You have to understand the level of desperation going on back then. You'll understand soon enough. These things move in cycles. Most of you are too young to remember back to the late 60's, when culture-clash, the Vietnam War, Yoko Ono, a struggling economy, a few dozen political assassinations, and a fake moon-landing combined to make people go zombie. Mostly in rural Pennsylvania. There might have been some kind of agricultural crisis going on too, I'm not sure. But there wasn't a farmhouse in that state that wasn't besieged by slack-faced, penniless and sometimes naked members of the proletariat, looking for human nosh and hoping their boarded-in victims fought amongst each other until their divisiveness became a greater danger than the zombies themselves, creating vulnerabilities that then made the zombies the greater danger again, and uh ... so on and so forth.

The next zombie invasion was in 1977, during yet another economic crisis, not to mention several ugly presidencies, oil shortages, aerosol hairspray, the birth of disco, and how everything just looked kind of grainy and washed-out. Mall invasions were the cannabilistic attack du jour. I am not ashamed to say that I joined a few of those blue-faced, moaning gatherings. I was youngish and it seemed like fun. Unfortunately, at the time I was juggling the decision of whether to go Vegan or not, so I was quite conflicted. I chewed and spat-out a lot.

And now here we are, 2000-whatever-it-is. Zombie interest has increased exponentially since the beginning of this latest century. There have been false starts, of course: during the dot-com crash great numbers of unemployed graphic designers mulled over their zombie options. Since then, George Romero keeps tricking us by making shitty zombie movies rather than seminal super-sweet ones. But now we have a new economic crisis, a new misguided war, a new environmental nightmare, and a new gathering of inspirational leaders lining up to get shot. It's almost time.

Despite these clear signs, don't just rush into zombieness. You'll know the moment when it comes.There's nothing more embarrassing than mauling someone on the bus, rearing up with a mouthful of blood and intestine, and everyone else is just looking at you. And you freaks can organize as many zombie flash mobs as you like, but it'll bring on the real thing as effectively as the last Harmonic Convergence brought us all universal hippie-love and peace. Just be patient. One of these days you're gonna be waiting in a bread-line, and it's just gonna kick-in.

I'll be there, staggering right alongside you.

Just don't be a running zombie, because you'll look like a total dick.