Apocalyptic scenarios have been certainly been prevalent lately. Its hard to pick up a book, watch a movie, thumb through a graphic novel or play a video game without stumbling into some depiction of the End of everything on Earth. How strange it is that they we seem so intent on imagining our own demise.

This weekend I participated in the Annapolis Book Festival where I joined authors Diana Peterfreund and Larry Doyle in opining, only partially tongue in cheek, about zombies, mutants and even unicorns determined to destroy the known world. The kids in the audience took all of this quite seriously and asked really probing questions. They were wide eyed, like they thought an end, some kind of imminent end, was a done deal, something for which they ought to prepare. In fact, they asked their questions with the excited resignation particular to children and early adolescents; young enough to discern prevailing world views, and old enough to want to react and take action to what they were discerning.

“Couldn’t the zombies reproduce?” one asked.

“Do unicorns always want to kill you?” asked another.

“Can I get credit at school for reading this?” (This question was my favorite. It seemed both practical and simultaneously laudatory.)

As I flew back from Maryland, I thought about the popular and growing obsession with the End. This must be on my mind as well, I realized, noting that I just found myself watching the original Mad Max movies via Netflix streaming video. Weirdly, as a kind of penance I guess, I then went and watched the 1963 version of Lord of the Flies. The similarities to Mad Max’s challenges to the primal pecking order among the boys in Lord of the Flies were uncomfortably present. I even wrote a novel about a zombie apocalypse, in which I imagine 2/3 of humanity gone and the once mighty UN sitting proudly and secure on a tiny guarded island in the South Pacific. You know what? I think, sometimes, I’d like a bunker of my own.

So, what's going on?

Well, let’s first do a reality check. The seeming allure of "the End of Days" is all over popular fiction, but it might not be all that great. Consider those frightening moments when our fiction becomes reality. Any compunction we might indulge in wishing for the simplification that the End would afford quickly loses its fictional whimsy as we watch Japan, one of the most technologically advanced nations on Earth, struggle when the Earth itself literally begins to shake.

And yet, I will always remember the quiet, almost sheepish comment from a soft-spoken physician who was brave enough to offer his opinion on these matters last year at a national gathering of psychiatrists. This physician was part of the audience at an American Psychiatric Association meeting in which film director and producer George Romero and myself were discussing, among other things, the allure of apocalyptic scenarios in movies. This is of course something for which Mr. Romero is well known to have depicted with sardonic realism on the big screen.

The doc who voiced his views had stayed behind in New Orleans when Katrina took her toll. Almost sheepishly he raised his hand and admitted, as if in confession, that sitting there trapped on the porch of his house, the hurricane and later its aftermath raging, there was something simple and straightforward about the gun he kept at his side. The buck really did stop with him, and though he was terrified, he knew at least exactly where he stood. Anyone who feels this kind of thinking doesn't make sense needs to go back and watch Shane. When there's no one to tell you what's what, when the law is a three day ride from home, there is a freedom afforded by taking matters into your own hands. As one of my patients recently told me after watching I Am Legend:

"Dude - a zombie apocalypse would be so cool. No homework, no girls, no SAT's. Just make it through the night, man...make it through the night."

So, in our modern world (and here I am aware that I refer more to the so-called "developed" nations), a world where we are fed data that feels miles long but only millimeters thick, perhaps the allure of destruction is the simplicity that it procures. But, let's be careful what we wish for...I can't believe that the good doctor on his porch wanted to stay there for too much longer.

I had this dream last night that went something like this:

It's been a long day at work. I've seen all sorts of patients, and I'm thinking I need a cup of coffee and maybe a cookie or a banana, but I want to write my notes into the medical record first. I've just finished walking a new patient to the waiting area and now I'm heading back to my office to think about what to do next.

Without really looking, I absently mindedly sit down at my desk and then get that feeling one gets when there's someone else in the room. In fact, I think there's more than one person, because in my computer monitor I can see the dim reflection of three distinct individuals sitting directly behind me. I slowly spin around in my chair and am somewhat floored to find that staring right back at me are Steven Tyler, Jennifer Lopez, and Randy Jackson.

Suddenly, I'm panting, as if I just finished singing and performing a broadway tune. There's the dim noise of a crowd in the background, and I am aware that my shirt is perhaps frayed at the collar. I would have dressed nicer if I knew they were coming.

"Yo, dog," Randy begins. "I mean, I dunno, but what were you thinking? I mean, this is, like, crunch time, you know, and you just send them out the door to schedule another appointment?"

"But I can do better," I plead. I seem to know my lines.

"Of course you can honey," J-Lo says, and I'm so tickled that she calls me "honey" that I can't really make out the rest of her comments. I hear a sort of muffled feminine sexiness but I am unable to re-focus.

"Schloz, you're beautiful," Mr. Tyler says. He sounds nothing like J-Lo, so I hear his words clearly. He also looks nothing like J-Lo, and for a moment I am transfixed by the odd and genuinely sincere way this guy is making eye contact. Even before he says more, I notice that his expression feels paternal, even mentoring. Steven Tyler is going to tell me that it's going to be OK. He's going to make me feel better.

"You just gotta take it easy and swim with it, you know. When you asked him about the video game...well, hell, that was a homerun...but go easy on his parents. It's hard being a parent..."

J-Lo is quick to chime in, but again I am lost in her eyes. I think she says something nice, even encouraging.

"Yo, Schloz, yo," Randy says. "It's just that you're raw, dude. You're... tired."

"He's right," I think. I'm am tired.

"Thanks for noticing, Randy," I say, "But you see, I got stuff to do."

"Well that's good," Tyler says, "Cuz were sendin' YOU to Hollywood!"

I start jumping up and down just as the Three Benevolent Judges fade from the room like wise visitors in an old Kung Fu movie.

And then I realize the truth of their assessment. I've been walking my dog, spending time with my family, working my butt off, really. Burning both ends of the proverbial candle, and all the while waiting for my first ever novel to hit the shelves. (Today's the day!)

I'm beat.

But as long as I have Steven Tyler and J-Lo and Randy on my side, then its all gonna be OK, right? I wonder what song I'll do next week...

These are dangerous waters into which I reluctantly wade. Some may disagree, even vehemently, with what follows. Remember, this is just my opinion, but spiced up a bit with a tincture of neuroscience.

Here’s the issue, as I understand it. Public institutions are suffering because local, state and federal budgets have been on life support. As with a very sick patient, we are watching the slow multi-organ failure of many facets of life which we happen to cherish and paradoxically also happen to take for granted. In short, things like our schools and our libraries and the very fabric of publically supported communities are being subjected (appropriately) to a painful triaging process. If we continue this medical metaphor, we are as a society working hardest to preserve that which confers the greatest chance of survival.

But, with these public institutions, as with patients, things are rarely straightforward. The difficult art of triage requires careful consideration of both long and short-term goals. In the crudest sense, one might favor perfusion of the heart over oxygenation of the brain, but then one must reckon honestly with what exactly it is that one is attempting to preserve and salvage.

So, if we think about our schools, arguably the most fundamental and important of our publically funded endeavors, I urge all of us to consider carefully the short and long term consequences of current decisions. It seems every day I read a new article, hear a new story, listen to a sad parent lament with frustration the loss of services at their valued public schools. I don’t argue for a second that everyone involved in these debates has what he or she believes is best for our children absolutely central to the proposed changes to what our schools offer. Nevertheless, the decisions we make can be informed more, I think, by neurobiological advances that have only recently made empirically clear what we have intuitively long understood.

Take music, for example, or art. Both subjects often find themselves on budgetary chopping blocks when times get tough. The extent to which we are all tightening our belts means that many schools are considering what would have been seen as drastic, even draconian cuts in these previous stalwarts of our curricular endeavors. I would like to make the case, based very much on what is known about the needs and wants of the rapidly developing brain of a child, that these cuts are short sighted at best and at worse potentially downright dangerous.

Here’s what we know:

1. The brain craves creative challenges, especially during the phases of rapid development characteristic of childhood and adolescence. This has been shown in rats through somewhat nasty experiments involving blenders and brains, and with humans more humanely using outcomes measurements and functional MRI. Mammalian brains grow more when they are given free reign to create and explore. A rat in a maze will have a bigger brain than a comparable rat in an empty cage; the biggest rat brain, however, comes from the rodent lucky enough to “play” in a cage full of novel and cool stuff.

2. The National Academy of Science recently hosted a Science Education Summit that I was lucky enough to attend. Innovative educators from across the country and the world made their collective cases for preserving science education via preserving larger and more complete education as a whole. It is mighty difficult in our culture to teach math and science in a relative vacuum devoid of art and music. Every science teacher at the summit was adamant regarding this assertion.

3. Kids do not, in fact, separate their educational experiences by subject. We have good educational evidence that students take what they learn in one setting, and then imbibe, observe or intuit in “specialty” courses such as art and music, and subsequently apply this newly derived set of skills to math and science. In other words, subjects compliment one another, and that’s the way our brains want it.

4. It is true that we “lag” behind many other countries in technology education, and I am not at all suggesting that music and art hold hegemony over math and science, or vice versa, for that matter. I am arguing that our national tradition of enviable innovation stems directly from the nuanced intermingling that art and science enjoy in a classical curriculum. We owe our kids this experience.

5. Finally, there exists very cool data showing that supple facility with music, agile manipulation of art, “playing” with ideas themselves, creates exactly the neurobiological environment for optimal learning in all spheres and for a future in which young brains grow to literally “want” more cool ideas well into adulthood

I suppose the most worrisome part of these proposed changes, therefore, is the way their effects might ironically propel forward exactly the mile wide and millimeter thick ways that people today tend to figure things out. Anyone can “Google” a fact. My students check what I am saying in real time in the classroom using laptops that seem increasingly like organic appendages, and that’s fine. However, the ability to play with those facts, to break through to new ideas, to discover: that’s the stuff of both sides of the brain.

If we get rid of literally what half of each brain craves, then we’re going to produce a generation of young adults who have the misfortune of experiencing literally half of what they need to enjoy and relish the good fortune of being whole.

Christopher Plummer was born on December 13, 1929, and years later, on a cold winter night, he made me cry.

In fact, he made me cry a couple of days ago.

And, moreover, making me cry was his expressed intention.

He looked me straight in the eyes and he pulled directly, quite personally really, for my own precious tears. This all took place in Toronto’s beautiful Elgin Theatre where Mr. Plummer is currently performing as John Barrymore, a part for which he was awarded a Tony “way back” in 1997.

So, here I am in my mid 40’s, creaking, grumbling, lamenting my sore feet on the subway, surrendering myself to the occasional compulsion that I must pluck an errant eyebrow that stubbornly sits high like a schnauzer’s whiskers above my wrinkled eyes, and I find myself tearing up with pleasure at the energy I can draw from a man twice my age.

“Why cry at Barrymore”, a friend asked? He was perplexed. “How can you watch Bruce Campbell in those Evil Dead movies and not even bat an eye, and then find yourself crying at Barrymore? You’re a zombie dude, dude. Man up.”

Well…I have my reasons:

I could cry at hearing Shakespeare’s prose mixed with the cleverest of Limericks throughout the play. The Bard was always bawdy, and the limericks enhance rather than detract from the deceptively melancholic script.

I could cry at the conceit of the play itself, Mr. Barrymore’s predicament, the familiar pathos, the reenactment of those who struggle to put down their gauntlets, to rest, to stop what they’ve done for so long and so well.

I could cry at the agonies of alcohol, the pain of addictive romance, the targeted spoils of fame, or the equally precise sharp stabs of being forgotten.

For me, though, the tears did not flow until Plummer’s character broke from his drunken stupor and burst the boozy ramblings with Hamlet’s famous soliloquy.

“What a Piece of Work is Man,” he exclaims, owning those lines with a precious delicate mixture of sarcasm, solipsism, and celebration. “How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties…”

And I lost it. Christopher Plummer, for God’s sake! Celebrating and decrying the strengths and fallacies of humanity. I’ve loved poetry since Shel Silvestein. I’ve loved Shakespeare since I was nine.

I view language as the most powerful of all our inventions.

And because of all this, a man in his 80’s can make me weep as I reckon with the relentless nuance, the timeless beauty, the undeniable prowess of words, words, words.

Today, while dropping off my 5 year-old at school, a person driving a large construction truck became frustrated with the 20 second delay that was created when the person in the car in front of the truck slowed down enough to offer a clearly uncomfortably cold family walking on the sidewalk a ride to school.

I don’t know who was driving the truck, so I can’t say “he did this” or “she did that” but whoever was in control of the truck, lost, at least temporarily, his or her sense of decorum and drove the truck out across the solid yellow line into opposing traffic in order to pass the car that was blocking the way. This required a healthy acceleration, the truck’s back wheels sending little shards of dirt-covered ice onto the sidewalk, and the truck swerved first left to pass and then right again to rejoin the proper lane.

About 15 yards ahead, obscured at first by the stopped car that the truck was passing, was the crossing guard for my daughter’s school standing in the middle of the street. My daughter and I watched all of this like a slow motion film, one of those cautionary tales from an insurance company or maybe an after school special. The crossing guard, a nice woman who somehow manages to remember many of our names, was wide eyed in terror with what looked like more of a visceral than cognitive recognition that her life and the lives of the children crossing the street were now entirely dependent on the reaction time of the truck driver and the efficacy of the truck’s brakes.

Tires screeched, the truck ground to halt, and the children crossed with their parents, unscathed but shaken.

I tried to imagine what was going on in the mind of the truck driver. I can imagine being angry at the traffic and late for wherever I’m going, and there have been times as well where I have done things a lot like what the driver of the truck did. This is not meant to be an indictment of the driver (thank goodness if doesn’t have to be), and I can imagine the driver feeling awful after screeching to a stop just shy of an elementary school crosswalk.

“Why’d he do that?” my daughter asked. (I guess she assumed the driver was male, but that assumption is the subject of a different blog)

I stumbled through a cobbled explanation - “maybe the driver was angry but that doesn’t make it OK” and “Sometimes people lose their tempers” and some other clichés that I’ve now forgotten – but I found myself thinking instead and unexpectedly about that strange moment now more than a year ago when a congressman yelled “You lie!” at the President of the United States during a national address on health care reform. I suppose my mind went there in part because of tonight’s State of the Union Address.

After the “You lie!” episode, my older daughter asked me why the congressman yelled what he did. Regardless of one’s politics, it certainly seemed to her a retreat from the decorum we’d like to teach our children.

I decided to remind myself of this incident when I arrived at work, and I came across the news stories on the internet that noted that during today’s State of the Union Address the very congressman will be sitting, like the rest of the chamber, with members of the opposing political party. That’s good, I thought. Gestures carry meaning. (The person in the truck today did not, after all, stop to apologize, which I guess would have been nice.)

And then, as I started toying with how I got from witnessing a near tragic episode of apparent road rage to a fairly egregious political transgression of national and civil decorum, I started wondering about how we can know, neurobiologically, why these things happen, and whether this neurobiological insight can offer as well any pointers on how we can better behave ourselves.

We know, for example, that when people are angry, or happy, or just deeply moved with pretty much any emotional experience, they act “impulsively.” On the internet today I read that the congressman who yelled “You lie!” reported the next day on national news that his outburst was “spontaneous.” In this case, I think we can read “spontaneous” as the chronological description of an impulsive act. Neurobiologically, it is well documented that spontaneous acts that appear to lack forethought or judgment are in fact the result of “hot cognitions,” moments when the primitive regions of the brain cannot talk quickly enough to the executive regions of the brain in order to create a response that one can later understand to have benefitted from a balanced neurobiological consideration.

For example, flipping someone “the bird” in heavy traffic is most often impulsive. Recognizing that you are about to flip someone “the bird”, and then considering all the reasons it might be or might not be the best of ideas, stops being impulsive and starts being thoughtful.

So, here is my concern: What if we are increasingly reacting with our most important decisions like the person in the truck did today? I don’t think the truck driver had a pre-formed thought that planned “if that car in front of me slows down I’m gonna pass that car illegally, spray people with dirty slush, and then almost hit a bunch of kids in a crosswalk.” I think it was an impulsive act, and things turned out mostly OK this time. There is in fact a body of literature that shows that with politics, much like with road rage, constituents often fail to engage the more cognitively skilled regions of the brain.

But what does it mean if these hot cognitions are rewarded? I think the congressman raised a great deal of money following his accusation at the President’s speech. Even if he would have raised that money anyhow, it’s hard not at least to postulate that some people will read that increase in fundraising as support for this kind of spontaneous behavior. As the congressman said his remarks were “spontaneous”, I am inclined at least for the purposes of this essay to believe him. That said, what does one do when this kind of behavior is rewarded, or even appears to be rewarded?

We acknowledge what has happened. That’s the best I can do with this issue. We acknowledge that we’re human, that we screw up, that we’re not perfect, but we do not absolve ourselves of the responsibility to examine our behavior later, to apologize if needed, to make amends. And if we appear to be rewarded for our actions that are in fact spontaneous (after all, the truck driver did “safely” pass the car in front and did in fact get where ever he or she was going a little bit sooner) than we ought to acknowledge that as well. We ought to acknowledge that our impulsive, spontaneous acts sometimes work out, but that this does not mean they’re not impulsive. Mostly we ignore our higher cortical functions at our own peril. That’s not a bad thing to keep in mind as we wander into 2011.

“Dad…Doesn’t every team make the playoffs?”

This question, this innocently posed inquiry, infuriated me. It felt like goading, like a deliberate twisting in my aching back of the serrated knife that comes with being a fan. Alas, the question was not intended that way. It was an honestly posed issue from a wide-eyed special kid (my then 8 year-old daughter) who had, in her desire to understand my love of professional sports, made a gentle foray into a world that until that moment had been my own realm of personal suffering.

She was drawing a conclusion, of course, based on the Teams of New England. Her conclusion was in fact a reasonable and even scientifically derived one. We had been working for a few years on a very important part of her education as my daughter, and in this light she had heard much about the incredible, amazing, even deific performances of Boston's teams over the last decade or so.

We have watched on the internet clips of skinny Pedro Martinez somehow throwing 95 mph bullets. We marveled over and over at the snow covered 45 yard kick that Adam Vinatieri produced in 2001 to upend the dastardly Raiders. We have watched Brady (and his chin) challenge Joe Montana as perhaps the greatest quarterback of all time (I know there will be protests to this pronoucement, but you gotta admit Brady’s at least on the list).

I’ve even kept the now yearly tradition of dragging her to see my home team, the poor Kansas City Royals, every time they take a deep breath and face another day at Fenway. At those games, despite my proud wearing of the KC hat, young guys, guys barely old enough to shave (but old enough, it appears, to drink lots and lots of beer) always seem to refrain from pouring any of their spirits over my head as punishment for my support of the opposing team.

Instead, they shake their heads and recall stories that their parents have told them of the once great Royals of the 70’s and 80’s, and then they look at me, glassy eyed and curious, as if they are wondering whether they can in fact believe what they’ve heard. “Dude,” some kid told me “My grandpa says they were pretty good once.”

I sigh.

But, it all is different now. This could be my year. (Hope Spring Eternal)

My Chiefs, my beloved Red and Gold, are back in it. Though we former and current Kansas Citians might worry a bit about Sunday’s game, I will be my usual crazy self in front of the TV in the living room for one of those rare occasions where MY team is broadcast nationally somewhere outside a 100 mile radius of the Missouri River.

My daughter, now 10, is somewhat worried. She knows how much this means to me, and, to tell the truth, she’s even a bit hesitant to have friends over while I watch the game. I scream a lot, and I wear the same red sweatshirt that used to have a round Chiefs logo on it. (I tore the logo almost 20 years ago in response to a long forgotten dropped pass in the endzone of Arrowhead Stadium.)

And then, what do I read this morning? I log on to the internet and read that the Chiefs are sick.

Literally.

They are barfing or coughing or something, and their locker room is being washed in bleach the way those cruise ships where everyone gets sick are scrubbed down.

Now, I know that Boston can be a town with little sympathy. However, I also know it as a city of immense empathy and compassion under the right circumstances. For this Sunday, this one game, please, good people of New England, root for my team. I’ve spent the last 20 years adopting New England. For Sunday, how about all of New England joining me in hoping that the Chiefs at least stop barfing. I might even buy me a new Red and Gold Sweatshirt.

On Saturday, Rue died.

She also managed to die last week, and I think she passed away as well sometime during vacation in August. She was sweet, and nimble, and moved through the trees like a sprite, like an innocent creature trapped in a savage land. In the end, she took a spear to her belly, and Katniss sang to her as she gasped her final breath.

I would not so glibly describe the death of a child were she in fact “real”, and yet, to my my10 year-old daughter, enthralled as she is by all of the characters who people Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, losing Rue is something that must be experienced over and over, must be contemplated and wrestled with, must, inevitably, be questioned. “Why does she have to die, Dad?” That’s the question my child asks me, and it does no good to remind her that Rue is a character in a novel, because to my daughter, at the moment of Rue’s death, Rue is a real as our front door, and our front door, she knows, opens to a world full of some not-so-nice stuff.

My kid reads the The Hunger Games over and over. She adds this to her blossoming roster of a zillion other dystopian novels. There’s even a special section in the bookstore for “young readers” who can’t seem to get enough of this stuff. This year’s holiday reading list for kids has got to be among the most fascinating (and unsettling) to emerge in years.

What in the world is going on? What does my kid find so compelling? She read I think all of the Margaret Haddix’s books (children hiding from government authorities less they should be discovered to be the illegal extra child that the State has expressly forbidden). She read an eerie and beautiful fictional memoir called The Adoration of Jenna Fox. Here a girl is illegally saved from death by her father’s miscreant use of tissue engineering. Is Jenna the same girl now as before the accident that tried to claim her life? Was her father’s sacrifice worth the risk, worth the fact that the whole family is now endangered?

She even dove into what could have been an almost tawdry novel called Girl in the Arena. Here, the girl’s father fights to the death as a professional gladiator in a soon-to-be and uncomfortably recognizable Cambridge, Massachusetts. The girl soon finds herself drawn to similar life threatening battles.

In all of the stories, those who lead us are pretty awful. They are brutal, totalitarian, lying, and violent. Protagonists must make grave concessions, often sacrificing their very lives, or else face the prospect that the dystopian drudgery of existence will remain stubbornly fixed and unaltered. In other words, in all these stories the world seems pretty damn dismal. And yet, the books that tell of these worlds are being gobbled up in record numbers in the Young Adult section of your local library or bookstore.

(This is not, by the way, necessarily how I feel about our leaders. I am trying to see all this through the eyes of my daughter.)

Is it bad that kids love this stuff? I don’t think so. Stories are powerful means by which difficult topics can be safely addressed, and certainly our world if full of difficult topics. I was quite taken by The Hunger Games, and while I know that it is not everyone’s cup of tea, it felt real to me. It felt like it asked the right questions. What would YOU sacrifice to make the world better?

So, driving to buy high chocolate at the local Starbucks near my house, my daughter and I pass under a bridge that supports the commuter rail. The bridge rattles like a tired old man, helping the train to drag folks home or off to work, and people dismount at the station and pull their collars tight against the winter breeze.

As there have been for the past 10 or so years, there were banners again this holiday season hanging from the bridge, welcoming soldiers home for the holidays. And, as happens thankfully more rarely, there was a different looking banner this time as well, more solemn, not colorful, full of palpable sadness and pride. It thanked a brave man from my town for his sacrifice in the efforts over seas.

I asked my daughter what she thought of all this, all these banners and signs that mix with the lit up trees and the festive quest for Hot Cocoa.

“What do you mean?” she responds.

“The signs,” I say. “What are your thoughts? Did you notice them?”

“Dad,” she says calmly, too calmly I worry for her tender and innocent years. “We’ve been at war since I was born. There are always signs.”

Wow, I think, though I guess I knew this. It just sounds weird coming from her mouth.

Neither of my children has ever known a world when we are not at war.

And I have never fought in these wars, but she wonders, every now and then, when we see a soldier in an airport or when she catches me reading the paper, if I ever will.

“Will they call you to fight like they do in The Hunger Games?” She knows the answer for now, but still she finds the question necessary, and a little worrisome.

After staring more at the banners, she begins again to tell me about Rue. “I’m just not sure she had to die,” she continues, perseverative in her contemplation of this fictional character’s short but noble life.

We sit in silence as I wait for a car to vacate a spot that I plan to take.

“But I guess sometimes things have to happen a certain way…..”

OK, I am treading on seriously thin ice. Sometimes, I guess, to make a point, you gotta take a risk. I just hope it doesn’t hurt too much.

Here goes:

I am going to challenge one of my favorite writers, one of the very best commentators on popular culture. Prepare yourself, Mr. Chuck Klosterman, author of Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, prepare yourself despite your place on my bookshelf; prepare yourself precisely because you, through your wonderful musings, helped me to truly grasp the formidable power of funny-as-hell pessimism, even nihilism, especially when these sentiments are crooned with such folksy eloquence.

In the New York Times, on December 3, you, sir, characterized modernity as zombie-like, and wondered in a brilliant piece whether the current zombie craziness correlates with the extent to which “Modern Life Feels Rather Undead.”

I couldn’t agree with you more on that general theme. I thought in fact of those very sentiments just this morning as I shambled through the line at Starbucks, my great act of rebellious individuality expressed in my ongoing insistence to call my medium sized cup of coffee “a medium” rather than a “Grande” or whatever they call it. Doesn’t it seem, at this point, that I’ve already lost the battle? I mean if my rebellion is driven because the rest of the world has seemingly adopted these faux sizes of beverages, then really I am reiterating the dominance of Starbucks over any silly desire on my part to fight “the (Starbucks) Man.” But this is of course old territory. Go rent Role Models for the famed great coffee-ordering scene.

But, I digress.

At the end of your essay, Mr. Klosterman, you suggest, based on the crushing and deadening effects of modernity (the internet and voice mail are good examples of the heftiness of our technological surrender) that we are “living in the zombies’ world” and you note, in that patented Klosterman way in which the reader feels both understood and simultaneously scolded, that “we can do better.”

Well, I think we already do.

This is probably the Pollyanna in me, but I can’t be what I’m not, so if I am Pollyanna, I ought to at least explain how I got to such an optimistic place with regard to zombies.

I think the zombie construct has garnered such impressive momentum precisely because it generates a kind of cautious optimism. Zombie stories, like all folk tales (and anything that catches public attention with such strength and psychological resonance becomes to some extent a folk meme) are cautionary tales of what NOT to do. Can you think of a folk tale you heard and remembered in which the protagonists actually get it right? The shell of the zombie, the "nothingness" of the zombie himself, is in fact an opportunity to celebrate what makes we humans unique. I don't think that the internet, video games or even changed words for “medium” and “large” at Starbucks are taking away our capacity to be pretty cool creatures. In other words, I don't see the zombie craze as a sign of our lost humanity. I see the zombie craze as a challenge, an invitation even, to understand better how we define ourselves as both part of a pack and as uniquely separate. The dialectic of every zombie movie involves exactly this struggle: that is, can a motley crew of seemingly never-to-get-along humans behave in a good-enough fashion (not perfectly) for most of the time (not all of the time) so that they can be proud of how they handle a relatively easy crisis 5 years later when they are all hopefully there to look back on it?

This interpretation allows us as well to make sense of the subtle but slow merging of zombies with the apocalyptic scenario. In the first of the modern zombie flicks, the construct of the walking dead was not really tied to Armageddon. How’d we go from shambling corpses to the end of the world?

Well, for starters, we have a tendency as a species to forget how cool we are. Think of Battlestar Galactica, think of the brilliant movie Splice, think of Justin Cronin’s The Passage. If we forget how cool we are, then the world can go to hell awfully fast.

Let’s take it out of the zombie realm for a moment. Consider the story of John Henry, the “steel drivin’ man.” He accepts the challenge to take on the merits of a steam powered hammer, beats the damn machine in a race, but ultimately pushes himself so hard that he dies. When I was a kid, I loved this story exactly because I saw it not as a celebration of the silly machine, but as an example of John Henry forgetting what he already had and ought to have already known. At the end of the day, you shouldn't have to fight a machine to know that humans have things that machines just don’t. John Henry dies, in some ways, because he forgets in accepting the challenge that being uniquely human is way cooler than being a machine, especially since every steam powered hammer will be built more or less like every other steam powered hammer. (Sorta like a zombie.) Ultimately, John Henry surrendered his humanity and became that machine – and he did therefore exactly what machines do. He broke. Thus, our folk wisdom offers displaced caution so that we might avoid calamity in the world of the living.

I see every zombie story as an example of what not to do, and chief among the list of what not to do is to forget our ongoing, unique, and rarified tension between the drive to be pack animals and the drive to be something special. This balance is a dialectic, and always will be, and the living dead – hell, they’re script is already written. It never really changes.

note that a version of this essay appeared at www.psychologytoday.com.

Much has been written about the rule changes in the NFL designed to prevent brain damage. I thought the issue had been put to rest, but this weekend, all over internet fan sites, what I suspect were otherwise reasonable people were once again complaining that these adaptations will change the game to something akin to “flag football.” Some writers even implored those who agree with the rule changes and currently happen to be playing professional football to instead “take up golf.”

(As an aside, my daughter knocked me out cold with a wanton swing of a golf club last year. Perhaps absent minded fathers – I had turned my back – can learn something from the wise people at the NFL.)

I suggest we think of these rule changes as Darwinian. We could, by the way, also think of them in terms of “Intelligent Design.” I do not believe in the "intelligent design" theory. I just think that if we were to take the position of intelligent design theorists, at least on this issue we'd all agree. In other words, my point in brining up Darwin is explicitly not to start a debate about the merits of evolutionary theory. My point is that if we use either the theory of evolution or the theory of intelligent design, both schools of thought would call for a rule change. There is simply no way the game can continue to occupy its rarified and hallowed niche in American culture without changing those rules. The brain just matters too much.

I speak from limited albeit not entirely absent experience. I played football from 6th grade until I left for college, and I played in the Midwest, with big guys who had muscles where I don’t even have places. My poor mother felt compelled to damn near vomit at every game until I finally told her she wasn’t doing anyone any favors by attending. I also went to every Chiefs game until I left home, and I will watch football anywhere, anytime, anyplace, and always have fun. I am a fan, even a rabid fan, and I will remain a fan for as long as the game allows me to watch it being played.

But let’s talk a bit about the brain. Here, I have more experience and a bit more authority. My professional pursuits make me consider the marvels of that mess of tissue daily, and I remain in awe of both the incredible prowess and the frightening fragility of our neural circuitry. Think of all those twists and turns in our cranial cavities, highly vascularized gyrations of tissue packed tighter than a growing adolescent’s feet into last year’s sneakers. Our skulls are super-hard, and they evolved that way to protect all that gray matter from getting banged around too much.

However, the very complexity of the brain means that it can be injured in subtle and nuanced ways. The manifestations of these injuries are oddly in concert with what we’re learning about brain damage among our returning veterans, and I know, having seen some of those vets, that the NFL and the American people do not want to see this kind of damage while happily enjoying their turkey and cranberries this Thursday.

So, in short, give me a break. The game is still plenty rough, and I like it that way, but if we need to tweak the rules a bit to prevent what we now know is a form of intolerable barbarism (and promoting brain damage is without question barbaric), than I am all for it. I want my football, but more, as a fan, and as a doctor, I want the folks who play football to protect the very organ - their incredible brains - such that they can remember and revel in the glory and the privilege of playing this uniquely American game.

When my younger daughter was even younger, like somewhere between 2 and 3, she would ask in her broken toddler English whether we might watch “The Hairy Old Man” on YouTube.

These were moments of great exaltation for me. My older daughter was starting to eschew my musical tastes for more modern vocalists, and, like all parental clichés, rather than let her have her own music, I engaged in the scripted and therefore futile tired didactics of parenting. I tried of course to convince her, based on my years of experience and wisdom, that it was obvious that my music was just plain better.

“A band,” I patiently explained, “Has a someone on guitar, plus a bass player, a drummer, and vocals. You can’t call Lady Gaga a band. She doesn’t have these things.”

With the confidence that youth affords my older child would then go to the computer and show me pictures of the folks playing guitar and other instruments in the background of Lady Gaga’s performances. I suppose I had been paying more attention to Ms. Gaga herself and not enough to her band.

Still, I persisted. “But she’s not called ‘Lady Gaga and The Upper East Side Band,” I argued.

“So what was Bob Dylan’s band,” my daughter triumphantly countered.

And it was clear to me as it ought to have all along that we were going nowhere with this, just as my parents had gone nowhere with me when they tried to make their case that Harry Belafonte kicked butt when compared to The Who. (My folks did not use that particular phrase – ever, really – but that’s the general sentiment I recall in these debates.)

“But Townshend does this windmill thing,” I’d say to my parents. This mattered to me. They needed to know that Pete Townshend spun his arm like it existed on a swivel, like it might come lose at any moment and fly into the adoring crowd during “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

“And you should see how fast Mr. Belafonte plays those drums,” my Dad would say, smiling at my mom in a conspiratory way that of course conjured for me images of my parents courting each other and doing other stuff to tunes like “Day-O” and “Jamaican Farewell”. At that age I much preferred the image of Pete and his windmill guitar to my parents making out in a car somewhere while listening to Calypso music. In fact, unless I am particularly prepared for this kind of thing, I guess I still prefer to imagine Pete over my smooching parents. After all, I’m still their kid, for goodness sakes…

So, you’d think I’d have learned my lesson. But then you’d think every parent who ever liked music would have learned their lessons as well, and still there I was, reading from the script that has existed as long as there’s been music and bands and kids. “My music is better than yours and that is an objective fact and now let me tell you why.”

So, back to the “Hairy Old Man.” My then 3-year-old would ask if before we tuck her in we could watch this guy on YouTube croon a bit, and her favorite number was by far “Sugaree.” There we’d sit, she on my lap, rubbing my bald head like it was Buddha’s tummy, both of us watching and listening to Mr. Garcia’s slightly strained voice beg us to “forget you knew my name."

And why do I write this today? Because today I caught my youngest daughter humming Sugaree once again. She was happily playing with some plastic farm animals and she didn’t seem to recall the source of her musical reverie.

I knew better than to remind her about the "Hairy Old Man", because for now she thinks it comes from her way cooler big sister’s repertoire. And I am tempted to tell her (blasphemy!) that it is in fact by Katy Perry or perhaps, more likely, the Plain White T’s.

For now, though, I will relish the proof, literally music to my ears, that some of my stuff actually got through at those bedtime concerts when my little one was ensconced in the musical innocence of being 3.

You can’t really deny the zombie thing.

You can shake your head and you can wonder and you can ponder and you can act like none of it makes any sense to you, but you just can’t deny it. The evidence screams (or, more appropriately, moans) that zombies are definitely in.

Recently, I gather, zombies wandered around Time Square as part of a publicity stunt for the new series “The Walking Dead.” Similar occurrences took place all over the Globe. There are zombie walks for hunger (zombie humor has always been blunt), zombie-themed bars, zombie parties, zombie romances, zombie dolls, guides to surviving a zombie attack, and guides to surviving your reanimation should you become a spanking new zombie. The zombie hordes have in fact shambled with remarkable stealth into the very fabric of our culture.

Look at the news. The construct of the cinematic zombie has been increasingly co-opted as a potent metaphor for social and cultural events that appear at first glance entirely benign but end up being paradoxically lethargic and simultaneously horrifying. Terms such as zombie banks (banks that do nothing but sure look like banks), zombie loans (loans that are worth nothing but sure look like loans), zombie mortgages (mortgages that are worthless but sure look like they have worth) and so on and so forth are part of our every day lexicon. We’ve got zombie consumers, zombie bosses, zombie threats, and, at the end of the day, an odd sort of zombie egalitarianism. Zombies can be anything, because zombies really aren’t anything at all. I mean, I know they’re fictional (here I refer to the movie zombies - not the Haitian or West African Zombies), but zombies represent certain fundamental truths of modernity.

Consider the necessary and classic scenario that is characteristic of any good zombie flick:

“He’s already gone!” some poor guy yells, imploring his friend to more aggressively dispatch the approaching, deadly corpse. But the buddy, the one who needs to fight, just stands there, his weapon slack at his side, his eyes wide with disbelief. He’s just not ready to take action; the guy who needs to attack is transfixed, mesmerized, trying his best to discern whether there is even an ounce of humanity left in the approaching, stumbling, blank eyed figure that sure looks like the girlfriend he’d been dating for the last few months. And, boom. Another zombie wins.

Or loses.

You see, it doesn’t matter to the zombies. They’re shells, taking the place of something that once was. They’re like the ruins in Percy’s Ozymandias, broken things that are beyond needing or wanting our respect.

They’re just hungry.

So, why? Why the craze? I am going to speak this weekend at the largest gathering of zombie enthusiasts probably ever assembled. The event is called ZomBcon, and it takes place in Seattle. There will be literally thousands of people there. I wrote an entire novel – The Zombie Autopsies - that is coming out in March, and when my friends hear about this literary endeavor, they raise their eyebrows and look at me funny. “A zombie novel?” one friend asked. “I always thought your first story would be a children’s book.”

And there’s the answer, I’d hazard, or at least one of the answers. Zombies, or, more accurately, our responses to zombies, are, ultimately, childlike. Zombie stories are without question the primitive stuff of children’s literature taken one gory step further.

When Neil Gaiman has Coraline meet her “other mother” (for me, that scene is still among the most masterfully written and scary as hell passages I’ve ever read), he’s riffing off the childhood fear that we all share when things are not as they seem they ought to be. My “real” mom wouldn’t make me turn off the TV. My “real” dad wouldn’t make me pick up the sticks in the front yard before he mows it. These “parents” must be imposters, people taking the place of others that they say that they are not.

In the zombie genre, it all just gets a bit worse. Zombies aren’t, in fact, imposing anything at all. Imposition, the very act of being an imposter, is an act of deliberate will.

Zombies don’t have any desire to impose. My goodness, they can’t even open a window. Their motivations are totally mindless and thus lacking in conscience purpose. A zombie wanting to eat you is not at all personal. At least Coraline knew that the “other mother” had it in especially for her. At least for Coraline, the challenge was, by definition, uniquely personal.

But zombies just don’t care. Can you think of a better metaphor for waiting on hold to talk to your health insurance representative, or sitting in an airport staring at the bars on your computer in the hopes that they’ll signal a functional internet, or for the deadened way you feel staring into the tired, blank eyes of the clerk at The Registry of Motor Vehicles as you shamble forward and are given a number that represents you in the most impersonal of ways for the next two or three hours that you are trapped under the auspices of fluorescent lights and low ceilings.

Wouldn’t it be strangely better if all these battles were in fact personal? What if everyone got on the phone with their health insurance representative and got exactly what they needed except you? What if no one but you got stuck in traffic? At least then you would have a better defined gripe. At least then you could, like Coraline, take uniquely personal action.

But any schmo can be a zombie. So any schmo can also be attacked by a zombie. It’s not personal, and to that end, zombies represent the mindless lack of humanity that increasingly characterizes modern life. And, as a species, we have a long and productive history of laughing at the messes we’ve wandered into, so maybe that’s why we smile at all this gore.

Zombies are here to stay, and they’ve amply made their point. But don’t get me wrong. I’ll still love the zombie genre even if things get better when I have to call my health insurer.

When I was 22 years old, my best friend and I decided to seek our summertime fortunes wandering the Northern Rockies. We drove my car, which required me to teach my buddy to drive a standard. If anyone has seen any movie where a guy tries to teach someone else how to drive a standard, then you know that the someone else is almost always a girl, and that the driving instruction is almost always a proxy for some kind of covert and soon-to-be overt flirtation. (Go rent Say Anything and watch John Cusack’s character teach his friend to drive) This was not the case, by the way, with Eric and me, and as were both versed in the enactment of pedagogy as a potential flirtation, we dispensed with our discomfort by using lots of obscenities and damn near wrecking the car. Still, whenever, Eric took over the driver’s seat, the car jerked forward like a drunken sailor until it found its groove into third gear on the high ways of Middle America.

It was on this trip that Eric and I began the “What if” game. We had long swatches of open country to cover, and long times in the mountains with a week’s worth of supplies in our backpacks weighing us down as we rounded the inclining switchbacks. When we tired of singing Neil Young songs, we would resort to “what if” scenarios. The ranger at the park headquarters had advised us to make plenty of noise in the woods lest we should startle a grumpy grizzly, and taking the ranger’s warning to heart, we probably sounded downright manic and incongruous in those dark, quiet forests.

“What if,” Eric asked, “Sarah had never met Wade. Do you think you’d still be dating her?”

“Pass,” I said, frowning. “My turn.”

“What if,” I asked, “Reagan had lost to Carter?” I was left of center politically and Eric was more to the right, so if I needed to direct attention away from past heartbreaks, I could count on politics.

Eric smiled at that one. “Not going there,” he said. “And I’m glad I don’t have to.”

More songs then, a setting sun, the air growing cold at 11,000 feet and soon a campfire around which to huddle. Something caught my eye, something bright, probably a shooting star made preternaturally noticeable in the unfiltered mountain air. It shot across the sky like it was alive, and it seemed to actually make landfall at some very distant place.

“What if,” I said, staring into the fire, “That light, that alleged shooting star, wasn’t really a shooting star? What if it were a ship, a space ship, and what if it crashed just over that hill, and what if the whole forest was lit up at a distance from whatever it is that crashed, and what if you and I saw the whole freakin’ thing? What if that happened?”

“I don’t get,” Eric said, more a fan of Depeche Mode than Star Trek.

“Would we go check it out?” I asked. “Would we get on board? Would we, like, go for a ride?”

This was before The X files, before Independence Day, before the cultural rebirth of any real possibility that we might someday board an alien spacecraft. Sure, we’d seen the cute frog-like thing croon about going home in ET, and we’d seen the sweet boy returned to his mother from the musical craft in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but a crashed ship, its intentions unclear, and we’re the first to get there? This was new imaginative ground for Eric and me in 1989.

Eric was an engineer (now a doctor), and gifted with impressive common sense. “Ain’t gonna happen,” he said, tossing a stick into the fire. “No way I’m gettin’ on any ship. I just met Melinda.”

And so I sat there all quiet and conflicted, because I really, really want there to be aliens, and, more, I really, really want them to be nice. I know that Stephen Hawkins recently suggested that aliens probably do exist and that we’d do best to stay the heck out of their way. Here’s a link to the article in the Times of London where he warns us that smart aliens probably won’t think too well of we humans: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article7107207.ece

But then, on Monday evening, I was staring at the Boston.com web page, and I watched a video link of the most extraordinary set of testimonies at the National Press Club in Washington. (Here’s one of the links to the videos: http://www.necn.com/09/27/10/Shocking-revelation-Former-Air-Force-per/landing.html?blockID=319245&feedID=4213) Former air force officers, who looked like they were straight from central casting for “former air force officers”, all testifying about recently revealed experiences in 1967 near the nuclear missile silos in Montana. I won’t give the story away because I need someone to watch these videos and comment, but the short version is that each officer reported some bright light hovering over their silos and taking each warhead off-line. Each “hovering craft” had deactivated the missiles.

Hello, The Day the Earthy Stood Still? (And I mean the original, though I had fun in the one with Keanu Reeves also.) Wouldn’t it be totally cool if super-advanced aliens thought of us as a nice but sometimes hot-tempered species, and wouldn’t it be great, if, like some kind of bug-eyed benign parental figures, they came down here and gave all of us a big ol’ fashion time out?

“What if really smart aliens gave us a time out?” That’s my question. Then, could we get our act together?

Three times recently I have had occasion to celebrate AC/DC’s "Back in Black."

Three times!

I haven’t really thought of the song in any sort of visceral way for quite a while, but recently two kids and one movie soundtrack (Iron Man 2) brought it rushing back to memory. Boy, I wish I could convey music in words.

Da. Da-da-da. Da-da-da…….dee-dee-dee-dee-deeeee. (repeat)

That must be one of the very best opening guitar riffs of all time. I’m not talking technically sophisticated riffs (though some will disagree) because I think technically difficult guitar riffs are all sorts of other places in music and that it would be insulting to musicians like Eric Clapton and to musicians like AC/DC if I referred to “Da. Da-da-da. Da-da-da…….dee-dee-dee-dee-deeeee. (repeat)” as technical. Listen to the beginning of Clapton’s "Layla." Tell me it’s not genius.

But the opening riff of "Back in Black" makes me want to parachute from a plane, to blithely enter a boxing ring, to brazenly go back and be 17 years old again and dial the last digit of every phone number that belongs to every girl that I ever almost called. It is a genuinely empowering riff.

But why I am writing this in a blog? Well, for one thing, it was the opening riff for two encounters this week. I can’t, for reasons of confidentiality, go into details, except to say that my business to some extent involves talking to kids who really would rather wait in line at something like the Department of Motor Vehicles or get dragged through TSA droves at airports than meet with me. (I got permission from the kids to write this) I gotta get them talking somehow, and in the cases to which I allude, each kid came in wearing an AC/DC shirt. “What’s this?” I thought. I recalled Angus Young’s long zig-zagged hair going back and forth on top of his head, the sweat flying off his face and chest in old MTV videos, the surprisingly complicated metaphors inherent in lines like “She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean.” Stack that verse next to the utter lack of ambiguity in Kesha’s (Ke$ha’s) lyric “Brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack,” and I’ll take imagination over literalism any day.

But, I’ve gotten so used to the tattoos of demons or flowers or Maori symbols, so accustomed to celebrating with my patients the genuine creative talents of Lady Gaga (I don’t have to like her music to know that she’s got talent) that I was unprepared for the welcome flood of nostalgia when those lightening bolted AC/DC emblems showed up on a couple of kids. (My first real concert was Foreigner, a show for which I wore my flannel shirt defiantly loose from my Husky jeans, a golden Mezuzah dangling in my imagined chest hairs, and a black, flat comb just barely visibly sticking out of my back pocket. My hair felt nearly greasy enough for the show, and I went with my buddy and his very attractive older sister, deciding to tolerate the music – I wasn’t much of fan – in order to sort of get my first concert out of the way the way one muscles through a first kiss. Mostly, I recall long lines at the bathroom and the smell of beer and other stuff in the air…)

But, I digress. Here’s the thing. When a kid comes in with an emblematic shirt, any shirt, but in this case an AC/DC shirt, it is a gift. I looked at the first kid, tried to size up his surly resistance, and, after the opening niceties with his folks, I asked if I could meet with the kid alone. As soon as the door closed I looked at the shirt again and smiled.

“Da. Da-da-da. Da-da-da….”

He grinned and grabbed the nearest air guitar (there is always one in the office) and finished the riff.

“…dee-dee-dee-dee-deeeee.” >(repeat)