Night of the Living Dead director George A. Romero once said “a zombie film is not fun without a bunch of stupid people running around and observing how they fail to handle the situation.”
This year showed us something about humanity that we didn’t expect: In the event of a zombie apocalypse, people will fight for their right to be eaten by zombies.
2020 has been…a lot.
We stayed home a lot. We played Animal Crossing a lot. We baked bread. We hoarded toilet paper. We collectively agreed Joe Exotic was right, Carol Baskin probably did murder her husband and feed him to her tigers.
We learned liquor stores are essential businesses.
We attended drive-through haunted houses and strip clubs. We burned 5G towers. We started 10,000-acre forest fires with gender reveal parties. We took virtual museum tours, strolled down Google Street View. We livestreamed weddings and funerals. Cardboard cutouts, inflatable sex dolls and even plants took our places in stadiums. Soap opera actors made out with mannequins.
We fretted over demon sperm and microchips in our vaccines.
And we discovered the health benefits of injecting disinfectant, which is that you shouldn’t, if the 121% increase in accidental poisonings from household disinfectants following a certain presidential press conference is any indication.
Old movies were back on the big screen and classic songs made it back on the charts.
Each successive day seemed like one step closer to the end of the world as we know it.
The idea was even suggested that the end we were expecting in 2012, as predicted by the Mayan calendar, was actually happening this year instead, according to the julian calendar.
Whether it’s the end of the world or the end of 2020, we’ve been ready for both since March.
Even Christmas was scarred by 2020. First, an angry little owl got his home chopped down for the annual Rockefeller Christmas tree. Then, Santa had to get vaccinated for COVID-19. Finally, a lizard people enthusiast blew himself up in an RV explosion that rocked Nashville on Christmas morning.
We were so exhausted by it all that the appearance of a gingerbread monolith in San Francisco on Christmas morning, inspired by the mysterious Utah monolith and subsequent wave of copycat sculptures, was just downright annoying.