Chapter Eighteen:     Zombies!

A day off in Atlanta, Georgia
VARIOUS reporting events of Sunday, 12th of July--

ADAM narrating

We took a day off in Atlanta, mostly spent walking around town with my girl friends (Magga, Masnia, Melly and Liss), as well as Pokey and Maki. We had no plan, except for wandering around in Piedemont Park just for a mini-injection of Nature.

Our other concert tour friends went other ways, It's good to have a little separation once in a while. One bunch went with Freddy to another town just south of here to visit sites where some popular zombie TV series were filmed, The hard drinking crowd went with Benny Joe and Marcie to do a pub crawl. To each his own.

Here in town most of the commercial tour busses or wheeled rides were not of much use for a group with three Nokhons; we are just too big and too heavy. Or at least that was our excuse for rejecting them. We were not interested in crowds, but couldn't avoid them because crowds were interested in us. Everywhere we went we picked up more friends until we were a swarm filling up streets and sidewalks. So we aimed for the nature trails and filled them up.

The people were always smiling and friendly, so we didn't mind that much. But I was still feeling badly offended by yesterday's evangelist asshole vehemently praying to God that I be condemned to eternal sexual impotence as punishment for being a male Bigfoot. Actually, that ended well, the offending evangelist shitting and pissing in his own pants and waddling home in shame of the stain.

But it affected me enough that I had a painfully realistic nightmare last night: I was indeed unable to make love with any of my girl friends-- or any female ever. Which was sad enough, but worse that I could never again partake in a kha-rat, thus cutting me off from the most significant Nokhon ceremony and social culture. It was nothing less than absolutely heartbraking. It also reminded me of all those bad years Melly and I had suffered under that shitty promise to her father. I'd definitely had enough of such cruelty, but it seemed that here we go again.

I was ecstatic when I woke up and realized that it was all just a bad dream. But still, it had been traumatic enough that I'm still processing it.

So I wasn't feeling especially receptive to crowds of people after having dreamed that one of their holy men had mistreated me so badly, and did so in the name of their stupid God. Made me feel that Atlanta is an EVIL city (just look at the news clips above the previous chapter). But today the folk in Atlanta were being jolly and smiling and open, nobody critical of the Big Bad Bigfeet, so I managed to mellow out. Just as I had forgiven Doug for having once been criminally mean to me, I forgave Atlanta for having an evil evangelist among their ranks. I had spoken with that nice journalist-- Jerri Poole, lovely lady-- who had also been wronged by that same preacher-man, back when she was young. She told me that Thrallson wasn't just my enemy, but Atlanta's as well.

The crowd was suggesting places for us to visit, so we ended up in what they call The Beltline, a work in progress, with 10 parks and 10 hiking trails. Kept us busy for the rest of the day.

Some of us (Pokey, Scott, Charlie, Don, Sunny and me) had been looking forward to visiting the area around Atlanta, not because this city is so fantastic for historical stuff like the Civil War or the Rights Movements, but because of zombies. Or rather, movies about.

I, Freddy Sessions, resident geek/nerd, just love zombie movies: Night of the Living Dead, Resident Evil, Re-Animator, and of course the fabulous TV show which ran on for 11 years, The Walking Dead. I was --and still am-- a devoted fanboy.

Atlanta has become the "Hollywood of the South", lots of TV series and movies are filmed here because of tax breaks and good weather. Shows like Stranger Things, Marvel Studios and a buncha big city cop series, including one of my own personal favorites, The Walking Dead. A lot of it was filmed in the Atlanta neighborhood. There are walking tours offered online, so I had made arrangements long before we ever got here.

Not everyone in the band is a hard-core TWD fan. Neither Adam, Melly nor Liss watch much TV at all except maybe for the news, and our two squatch chicks don't even watch that. But Scott and Charlie have binge-watched TWD along with me and we got Mike/Miguel hooked on it too. Some of the roadies are also into it, so we put together a private bus tour of ex-Pinewood Studios (now called Trilith) and visited some of the local towns where episodes were filmed.

So we visited TWD's fictional "Woodbury" and "Alexandria" film locations in the real-life town of Senoia, Georgia, about 45 miles south of Atlanta. We could easily recognize the main street of Alexandria, the water tower still strutting over the rooftops, but it looked quite different with all the happy traffic, people and politely parked cars instead of a junk yard of abandoned vehicles and dead bodies everywhere, gayly-colored shops open for business and not one shuffling zombie in sight. Of course it's been a couple years since they filmed the last scenes here, but spin-off TV series keep popping up, so they haven't yet torn down the long sheet metal wall at the edge of town, although the windmill has been gone for a while.

There's a "Welcome to Senoia" sign at the beginning of the main street that says "the perfect setting for life", which is pretty ironic, considering all the undead drama filmed here. Of course, other non-zombie movies have been made here, like "Fried Green Tomatoes" and "Driving Miss Daisy", Deep South movies instead of horror sci-fi. But in the center of that pretty little town is the "Official Walking Dead Museum" and the "Woodbury Shoppe". Man, they even have Dale's crossbow! Okay, guess I really do sound like a geek.

I may as well mention that Marvel Studios is here too, although there's really not many active tourist goodies. Hopefully, because they're too busy filming a new live-action Spider-man movie. I'm ready for that.

When we eventually got back to Atlanta nobody was up for going downtown to find a restaurant or live music, as we so often do. Maybe it's a reaction against all the deep-fried high-cholesterol Southern cuisine, which we all like a little too much. Some wanted to go out for drinks before leaving town at 10:00 pm, but we ended up just buying some six-packs and spending the evening in our caravan, each on our own bus or truck, and playing music together over the intercom, like we're all in the same vehicle as we drive through the night towards Florida.

I've been trying to learn to play guitar. It's going kinda slow, but there IS progress, I guess. You'd think it should be easy with all the expert teachers on this tour, but they're also kinda intimidating. I can't really jam with any of them, they're all too good and I'm crap. I'd keep trying to learn Sultans of Swing but just can't get that Mark Knopfler sound. But then, as Scott said to me, "how many can?"

That old Dire Straits number has always been a bane for me. I loved the music and could do a GREAT air guitar version of it, but a real guitar ruins it for me. Or I ruin it. Anyway, I never got better. Then I decided to give up, because it still sounded like shit.

Sometimes the other guitar players would take pity on me and show me some simple melodies, easy chords, easy songs, but the only music I really wanted to play was Sultans and I just couldn't. Kinda frustrating.

But about a month ago Adam tried out his Nokhon Orator magic on me to help me finally learn to play guitar. You know how he can make an unbreakable promise and transfer it to someone else? So "he personally" promised to practice Sultans for 15 minutes every night. Then we had a little ceremony and he SOLD that promise to me for a cookie I happened to have handy.

I didn't feel any different, there were no special effects, no sparks, but I did suddenly pick up an also-handy electric guitar and I did try to play for about a quarter of an hour every evening for at least a month, privately monitoring it over headphones so that I didn't drive everyone crazy.

Now we all want Adam's Sha-haka magic to be real, so you're expecting me to say that I found myself practicing guitar every night, even when I didn't feel like it, and that I started playing better as the month went on.

Well.... okay yeah, sort of. But it wasn't magic so much as all my fellow musicians going crazy just hearing me practice so badly every night, that they'd take pity on me and show me a little passage or a phrase to concentrate on, so I could learn it in small chunks. Which I've been doing, but I really can't yet say that I play it very well. That's going to take more practice.

Now as I'm writing this, it's almost midnight and we're heading south on Interstate 75, on our way to Disney World in Orlando. We left Atlanta 10:00 pm, it's a 407 mile trip, should take us 6 -7 hours if we drive non-stop, but we don't need to be there until noon, so we've got plenty of time.

We'll be doing a 5 day gig in Disney World, which I am all excited about; I mean, the heroic Disney franchises: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, both Tarzan and Mowgli, all the Marvel stuff. And we'll have free time and free passes to try everything for free. Whee! Oh, and there's a pool. Cool!

I hope Masnia will like Disney World, if we're gonna be there for most of a week. I can be her cultural guide, explain all the secret meanings. She's kinda ambivalent about American culture, although she does like some of it; more than Magga does anyway. Actually, for a squatch Masnia's pretty open minded, I mean she's still boinking ME just about every day. Yeah, I'm kinda in love.

But I know I can't control her, nor expect her to act romantically the way human girls do. I had hoped that she would come with me to Senoia, but she's much more dedicated to Adam than me, so she went walking around Atlanta with him instead. I mean, I understand, I guess. After all, she's not a fan of the Walking Dead.

I just wish...