30 Days of De-Objectification: Zombie Zoo

Zombie girl from wallpapersafari.com

30 Days of De-Objectification:

Zombie Zoo

While there’s no way to know who started the trend of objectifying aging and dead musicians, most of the people who do so are followers rather than the edgy trendsetters that they like to envision themselves to be. Having original thoughts takes effort. Taking responsibility for one’s thoughts and actions also takes effort. Most people can’t be bothered to expend the effort to do either.

Most of the so-called “classic rock fandom” on Tumblr are not innovators by any stretch of the imagination. They parrot what those they have deemed their leaders tell them to and don’t think about what they’re doing. They think they’re being “outrageous”. Really, they just look foolish and crass.

Most of them are going through a phase.

I had an unfortunate encounter a couple of years ago with one of the ringleaders. It was a disturbing experience the likes of which I do not care to repeat. I became convinced following this encounter that the person in question, whom we’ll call Angie after the song “Angie Baby,” is a literal sociopath. To be fair, I don’t think that she is a danger to society. I do, however, think that she is a master manipulator and that a lot of people have fallen under her spell, so to speak.

Angie is intelligent, obsessive, and excels at playing the victim. Many of the so-called “classic rock fans” of Tumblr are, as I said, nowhere even close to being “cool” and “unique.” They are under the thrall of the puppet master.

Angie started out by attacking me using various sock puppet accounts to make it appear that I had multiple detractors. Initially, it was extremely unsettling to be piled on as I thought was happening. However, on closer examination, I realized that all the derogatory comments were written by the same person.

The incident that led to the trolling stemmed from my expressing sympathy for the terminal illness of the person with whom Angie is obsessed. We’ll call the object of Angie’s infatuation “Arthur.” Arthur died a while ago, but Angie is still obsessed with him. I avoid her blog, but sometimes people I follow reblog stuff from people who are members of Angie’s Zombie Zoo.

One incident illustrates quite well the sway Angie has. One of Angie’s zombies, who strikes me as being about as smart as a jar of applesauce, gushed to Angie that Arthur would be crazy not to fall in love with her, never mind that he had children older than she is and some of his children have children. Also, there was that inconvenient factor of him being, you know, deathly ill.

The followers of people like Angie have no capacity for either forethought or afterthought. They don’t apply reason to their actions or the words they’re reading. They want to be “hardcore.” They fall in line and dance at the Zombie Zoo without pondering even for a moment why their behavior is unpleasant.

They don’t care because they have all the depth of a shallow puddle.

They’re a bother, but in the end, they’ll find something else to distract them. You can only be fifteen, stupid, and jobless for just so long. Hopefully, once the minions of the Zombie Zoo find something else to do with themselves, the obsessive sorts will be left to rattle about in a haunted house of their own making.

I foolishly tried to communicate with Angie once, and came away feeling like the blood had frozen in my veins. This is something I will never do again. Dealing with people like Angie leaves me very unsettled. For some reason she dropped her “sweet little girl so in love with a dying man” act, and her words chilled me to the bone.

I am not suffering. The knowledge of “Arthur’s” illness doesn't disrupt my life. I do feel a bit sad over what is happening to him. The way he is dying is grim, but he has his family to look after him.

Maybe she thought I was one of her zombies and was too arrogant to realize that she was exposing her true nature. Arrogance is often the weakness of the sociopath, since they feel they can do no wrong. However, she keeps up the “lovelorn girl” act on her blog.

I have long said that while there are no immortal, bloodsucking fiends from beyond the grave, there are vampires. Psychic vampires are very real. Angie and I are polar opposites. I felt chilled when I initially read her words, and I still feel drained reading them two years after the fact.

Arthur struck me as being an extremely sensitive person. I have no doubt that, unlike Angie’s minion postulated, he would have been repulsed by Angie the instant she revealed her true nature, never mind the fact that he wasn’t the sort given to having the kind of midlife crisis that involves an ill-advised tryst with someone young enough to be his granddaughter.

In some ways I wish that I hadn’t insisted that this project needed to last thirty days. I’m quite ready to be done with it here.

In some ways I wish I’d never taken the project on at all. At the moment, I feel like I’ve been wrung out like a dishrag, and I want to tell fucking Grammarly to go piss up a rope, as my dear old pappy used to say. I know I’m preaching to the choir and the words I’ve written aren’t going to change anyone’s mind. They’re going to go ahead and do the stupid stuff they’re doing and feel justified in doing it.

One day, some of them will get a clue and say to themselves “what the hell was I thinking?”

I won’t know about it when that happens.

In any case, I was a fucking idiot not to just do this as an “A to Z” blogging challenge, which involves 26 posts. I now must come up with four more.

I’m too tired to think of anything clever to say, so I’ll just go with DON’T FUCKING OBJECTIFY PEOPLE, MMMKAY? IT’S NOT COOL!

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~