Geeks logo

Up With Aliens and Down with Zombies

Not sure why one of them is playing hockey, oh well.

By KJ ThomasPublished 6 years ago 3 min read
Like

I still remember how hard I believed in UFOs back in the 90’s. In retrospect it’s actually unclear how much of this was caused by my mid-pubescent slavering over Mulder and Scully, but that hardly matters. I plastered my walls and study notebooks with images of aliens and flying saucers, not all of which were explicitly X-Files branded. I dreamed of being abducted. It became like a little religion I made up for myself, staring into my lava lamp and listening to Dreamland with Art Bell. Once in a while I branched off into the loch ness monster or whatever. This was an innocent time for me, before I got into Wicca. I found plenty of reinforcement around me. Contact came out, and then Men in Black. One of the first ever stories I wrote for myself was a blatant ripoff of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I integrated The Rocky Horror Picture Show into this aspect of my identity. It made perfect sense at the time. It has aliens.

Like any person, my interests expanded as I got older. I went through my Wicca phase. In about 2010 I was walking home from work in Seattle and I saw a VW bus with an alien decal sticker on the back window and I remembered how much those decal stickers used to mean to me. For a while I thought about how long ago the 90’s was, and I mourned a little bit. How could the 90’s be over? It’s not easy for me to accept.

I still remember my dork friends getting excited about zombies. It’s a similar thing. A few movies came out about zombies, it’s true. But what really happened was that zombies became a fashion statement. Non-branded zombie t-shirts and backpacks. Posters of Barack Obama as a zombie in his iconic red, white, and blue “hope” image. Obama never appeared in any UFO movies like Bill Clinton in Contact. I miss those days.

Zombies are people who aren’t really people. The entire 2000’s decade is full of them. Zombies and vampires are the same to me in this way, and where it really started was during the Bush era. Zombies and Vampires teach us that people who are different from us are monsters who want to suck our blood and eat our brains. No one during the Bush era of American culture was dreaming about making contact with an extra-terrestrial intelligence.

Alien love teaches us to look up, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, and look outwards. It teaches us to put our lawn chair out during meteor showers and look for visions. It teaches us to be interested in the differences of the other people around us, realizing that aliens are among us always.

Not long ago I was walking in the Height in San Francisco and stumbled into a dusty old rock shop that seemed to not have updated their inventory since the 90's. It was like heaven. I bought a pile of old alien stickers that would make the teenage me roll my eyes. It filled me with happiness.

I’ve gone back to looking for alien pop-culture stuff all the time now, just like I did when I was a kid back in the 90’s. Zombies are gross. I’m sorry but they just are. I don’t need to be afraid of any monsters coming after my brains. I need to think about the future of the human race traveling among the stars, and considering the integration of diverse beings. This isn’t just about looking for aliens but about accepting the strangeness of the human race. I want to feel like the differences between me and other people are trivial and easy to move past, like meeting a person with an extra finger or a birth mark. I want to dream of a future that is like Star Trek and nothing like Walking Dead. Is that so much to ask? I’d take Orville over Walking Dead. Seriously.

pop culture
Like

About the Creator

KJ Thomas

I'm chasing after whatever this whole thing is building to. You can talk back to me here: https://agnostic.com/member/KJThomas and my profile artwork was made by my good friend Tabitha: https://www.instagram.com/tabithaslander/

Reader insights

Be the first to share your insights about this piece.

How does it work?

Add your insights

Comments

There are no comments for this story

Be the first to respond and start the conversation.

Sign in to comment

    Find us on social media

    Miscellaneous links

    • Explore
    • Contact
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of Use
    • Support

    © 2024 Creatd, Inc. All Rights Reserved.