Death stalks

Driving in to work today, I passed some middle-aged jogger mid-warmup or cooldown. From the telltale sheen on his bald pate, I guessed the latter. But beyond mild Monday-morning contempt and a vague instinct to jerk my wheel and swerve over his healthy-for-his-age body without slowing, I wasn't preoccupied with him or anything. I did notice, though, that his regimen involved raising his hands to the sky in worshipful obeisance to the false god of exercise. (It really wasn't that pious. His stretching merely made him look like some kind of official or referee acknowledging some kind of score or goal in some kind of sport or pastime. Then again, if we are to believe professional ballplayers and the like, maybe there's little difference between the two activities: God's active involvement in the play and outcome of such games, not to mention the Grammys and, of late, reality TV, no longer seems a legitimate subject of debate.) It's not that I'm some anti-jogger fascist, and these sentiments aren't quite as callous as my former hope that cell phones actually do cause brain cancer. (I had to moderate my opinion in light of my own begrudging acquisition of a mobile.) I just don't understand the chosen activity of running and find it unattractive in any form. Like many boys my age (29ish), I love zombies, an evergreen topic as far as I'm concerned, but was disheartened to see the titular characters of the Dawn of the Dead remake (2004) giving vigorous chase like a pack of wild dogs after their human quarry. Zombies, for the most part, are part of the prestigious tradition of the lumbering but single-minded movie monster, a tradition that includes, for instance, Halloween's masked Michael Myers and extends at least as far back as Karloff's mummy. (Willing suspension of disbelief permits me to accept that the dead could be reanimated, but not without some resultant loss of motor functioning, skills and speed. I forgive 28 Days Later and its clever gloss on zombie lore. Its "zombies" weren't strictly undead but had contracted a disease that had immediately manifested itself in hyperaggression, no doubt making neocons in the Pentagon salivate with envy.) These slow yet deliberate villains are, like death itself, an implacable force. The stories in which they appear often have added resonance because it is only through royally fucking up that we, the stupid and petty living, whether individually or as part of some band of survivors, fall prey to these monsters' patient persistence. With or without zombies or some other bugaboo, the risk of death is a constant presence from the moment we are born. Death stalks, and no amount of jogging or other exercise will alter his endgame. Run all you want; he'll wait.
Happy Monday, and thanks, A & L, for your own version of persistence.