Preface zombies today

Abstract

I was supposed to be in Berlin. But there was something about “severe weather” in the Midwest (in May?! What is that but a harbinger of the climate crisis?), and an airport control tower on fire in Chicago, and a vision of the kind of chaos that ensues when society breaks down. At the airport, there was a two-hour long line to wait in, full of irritable would-be passengers, and at the front, barely an apology from the overworked airline employees, tasked with the unenviable job of informing all those booked on cancelled flights that delays were on the order of days, not hours because (and here’s our old friend capitalism rearing his ugly mug), the airlines had all, according to common procedure these days, overbooked their flights. Sure, they could get me to Europe, but not for several days, and by that time, I would have missed my reason for going: to see German zombies run.