Marc Barnes on zombies and the personal apocalypse.  On the eve of the Mayan apocalypse and with the weather changing here, it seems quite apropos!

"The fact of the Zombie Apocalypse has the tremendous effect of stripping away our obsession with comfort and convenience, forcing us to value life and the living of it. All that we truly want to discard, but in our weakness cannot, is happily discarded for us: Our stupid arguments with our siblings pale when the first window breaks. Our constant desire to just get a little more money, a little more pleasure, or a little more status is blown up with the zombie heads. Our constant, nagging questions — does life matter? Am I truly living? — are answered when life is threatened.
This is simultaneously the awesomeness and the sadness contained within our obsession over the zombie apocalypse. It is a dream of something being done for us, that in reality, we alone can do. We will not — in our weakness — shake the tyranny of convenience. We will not love passionately, forgive faults, see the world as beautiful, value human life and personal existence with profound reverence, live courageously, face death without whimpers, and otherwise rip ourselves from the state of boredom. Not unless we are forced to.
So have my prediction for the coming age: The more bored we become, the more convenient our lives, and the further we remove ourselves from suffering, the more zombie movies we’ll make, the more apocalypses we’ll predict, and the more we’ll speak — with happy smiles — of the destruction of all human existence. But if a man could live as if he knew not the day nor the hour; if he could, against all odds, live what human existence truly is — A Personal Apocalypse — then perhaps he could truly live.
Until then, we’ll be the walking dead."