You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News Read online

  Before you go trying it …

  Fleischel, the friend who sent Freud on the path toward psychoanalysis, was also the friend the drug ended up killing.

  2. A COKE ADDICT MAKES A COKE-FLAVORED COLA AND CALLS IT COKE

  Coca-Cola is the biggest brand in the history of the world. Sure, it’s mostly just soda water and sugar, but they sell about 400 billion cans of the stuff a year, an average of more than sixty cans to every single human being on the planet.

  The drug: Coke has it right there in the name

  When Coca-Cola was invented in the summer of 1885, sodas were advertised for their health benefits. Dr. Pepper got its name from the Texas physician who marketed it as a cure for impotence. Coca-Cola was able to stand out in the crowded market because its purported side effects weren’t total and utter bullshit.

  John Pemberton, the Atlanta pharmacist who invented Coca-Cola, named it after the coca leaf, one of the ingredients he claimed cured everything from depression and nervousness to morphine addiction. If that sales pitch sounds familiar, congratulations, you could beat a chimpanzee in a game of memory. Coca is the leaf that produces cocaine, and like Freud, John Pemberton was a big fan.

  Why it makes sense

  Pemberton said he was convinced from “actual experiments that coca is the very best substitute for opium addicts.” Of course, he was speaking from personal experience, since he himself was a junky who used cocaine to kick the habit.

  In his book For God, Country, and Coca-Cola, Mark Pendergrast claims there were about 8.45 milligrams of cocaine in each serving, which is about one-quarter of what people put up their nose to get high these days. But fans of the drink were known to chug up to five at a sitting, or to drink the syrup instead of mixing it with water, both practices that would bring the high to right around street level.

  So how instrumental was the drug in making Coke the largest brand on earth? By the time they removed its magic ingredient, in the early twentieth century, addicts were ordering the wildly popular beverage by asking for “a dope.”

  Before you go trying it …

  Turns out Pemberton was wrong about cocaine’s ability to cure morphine addiction. According to Pendergrast, the year he died he was so “worried about where money would come from for his morphine” that “John Pemberton sold two-thirds of his Coca-Cola rights … for the grand sum of one dollar.” Of course, that’s one dollar in 1888 money. Today, that’d be worth not even one goddamned billionth of what you should leave your family after inventing the most successful product in the history of capitalism!

  1. DOCK ELLIS TRIPS HIS WAY TO A NO-HITTER

  In the hundreds of thousands of games in Major League Baseball history, there have been only 267 in which the starting pitcher completes a game without giving up a hit. Pedro Martinez, like most pitchers, has gone his entire career without throwing one. In fact, the New York Mets have been sending a pitcher out to the mound 162 times every season for forty-six years, and not a single one has pitched one. Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis did it on June 20, 1970, though he barely remembers being there.

  The drug: acid

  The day of his no-hitter, Dock Ellis woke up around noon on what he thought was Friday and ate three tabs of acid. When his girlfriend arrived carrying Saturday’s newspaper, Ellis realized that either his girlfriend was a time traveler or he’d slept through Friday. The sports page had more bad news—he was scheduled to pitch in San Diego in six hours. Not only had he woken up on the wrong day, but the city that was just starting to swim around him was Los Angeles.

  Unfazed, Ellis hopped a flight to San Diego and faced down a lineup that had woken up knowing what day it was and also had the upper hand in the “not on acid” category.

  Not a single one got a hit.

  Ellis remembers very little about the game, other than that sometimes the ball looked huge and other times tiny, and that at one point he dove out of the way of a line drive, only to look up and see that the ball hadn’t even reached the mound.

  Why it makes sense

  Writing in the New Yorker, Oliver Sacks describes a state of mind known among athletes as “the zone” in which, “A baseball … approaching at close to a hundred miles per hour … may seem to be almost immobile in the air, its very seams strikingly visible … in a suddenly enlarged and spacious timescape.” The zone is typically brought on by confidence, adrenaline, and being freaking awesome at baseball. Ellis was all of those things, and LSD’s effects include increased heart rate and the perception that time has slowed. So it’s conceivable that Ellis tripped his way into the zone.

  There’s also the mental component. A large part of throwing a no-hitter is getting over the fact that you’re doing it. As the game goes on and the lonely bastard in the middle of

  “Time to pitch at baseball! Watch it throw, today! Sports forever!”

  the diamond gets closer to immortality, the tension builds in the park and in the pitcher. Trying to throw a no-hitter is so mentally taxing that it’s considered the height of dickery for a teammate to acknowledge it until the final out is recorded.

  But baseball history was the last thing on Ellis’s mind that day. He was too busy trying to keep his shit together while a bunch of giant lizards had an orgy in the on-deck circle.

  Before you go trying it …

  Ellis never reached his potential because of drug addiction. Instead of being a household name, he’s just that guy who threw a no-hitter on acid.

  FOUR MYTHOLOGICAL BEASTS THAT ACTUALLY EXIST

  CRYPTOZOOLOGY, according to cryptozoologists, is the study of heretofore undiscovered species. According to everybody else, it’s what lunatics who prefer lying in the international language of science call the animals they make up. Bigfoot is the spawn of cryptozoologists, for instance. It’s pretty much a bullshit factory, but every so often real researchers discover that the terrified villagers were warning them about that monster because it’s right behind them. These are the terrifying myths that turned out to be terrifying realities.

  4. THE KRAKEN: MONSTER FROM THE DEEP

  The myth

  The word kraken is simply German for “octopus.” Kind of a letdown, right? An octopus isn’t very scary; it’s more like the physical manifestation of pubescent awkwardness—all flailing limbs and messy secretions—but as with many monsters, it’s really just a matter of scale. Nothing is cute when it’s big enough to eat your house, and the kraken is no exception.

  For years sailors have been returning to harbor with stories of a giant tentacled beast. Some said that it was more than a mile in diameter. Others claimed that it was the first animal made in all of creation and would only perish when the world ended. We tended to relegate tales of the kraken to the same bin of bullshit where we throw mermaids and the Loch Ness monster—or at least we did until a few years ago, when a bunch of New Zealand fisherman hauled one into their boat.

  The reality

  It’s called the colossal squid. Now, we tend to get a bit unnerved by anything that scientists decide to label colossal, because they’re a moderate bunch. In the realm of science, something only gets dubbed as colossal because the textbooks frown on classifying animals as being of the genus F**kmassive holyshitbricks.

  And the colossal squid is not just a name: It’s a thirty-foot-long flailing engine of nightmares. Scientists excitedly tell us of its oddities, such as tentacles lined with “sharp, swiveling, three-pointed hooks,” and how the 1,091-pound specimen on display in New Zealand is thought to be “much smaller than average.”

  It’s not like it’s a peaceful behemoth that we’re giving a hard time due to its appearance. Comparing the smaller-than-average specimen the fisherman hauled in to the largest squid thought possible prior to 1997, experts from Auckland University of Technology noted, “The Colossal Squid, with the hooks and the beak that it has, not only is colossal in size but is going to be a phenomenal predator,” before helpfully clarifying that this made it “something you are not going to
want to meet in the water.”

  So no, ancient mariners weren’t just being quaint when they marked the deep sea as “here there be monsters” on their maps; it was just shorter than writing “here there be thirty-foot-tall multilimbed, razor-hooked fury beasts that look like a giant, wet bag of violence, and you should probably just stay home until somebody invents faster boats.”

  3. IRKUIEM: THE GOD-BEAR

  The myth

  There could be all manner of bizarre creatures living in Siberia, the frigid wilderness that covers 10 percent of the earth’s land. Human beings didn’t really bother to set up proper civilizations out there. To this day, explorers come back from the Siberian hinterlands with tall tales about giant reptiles, living mammoths, and enough yetis to populate some kind of yeti academy. Mixed in with all that bullshit was the god-bear.

  The reality

  In 1936, a Swedish zoologist named Sten Bergman ventured into Siberia and started to hear stories about so-called monster bears. After Bergman mussed the hair of a few tribal elders while saying, “Sure, buddy. Did he come out from under your bed?” the natives showed him pelts, skulls, and paw prints larger than those of any known bear in the region. That’s when science collectively stopped rolling its eyes and making wanking motions, and began taking the god-bear seriously.

  It just so happens that the villagers’ description matched that of an immense prehistoric horror called the short-faced bear (Arctodus simus), one of the largest predatory mammals to ever exist. A Soviet zoologist named Dr. Nikolai Vereshchagin postulated that Arctodus, thought extinct for twelve thousand years, was actually alive and well in Siberia.

  Other scientists have theorized that the god-bear is actually a colony of enormous black polar bears that found their way too far south and found the villagers delicious enough to stick around. One way or another, Siberia sounds entirely too much like a frozen version of the island from Lost.

  Even if reports of a real, live god-bear are false, anthropologists agree that they probably didn’t die off that long ago. But why would there still be stories about the creatures if they no longer exist? In most cases, we’d go with “people are full of shit,” but when you’re talking about a giant man-eating bear, we’re willing to make allowances for post-traumatic stress disorder so severe it’s become hereditary.

  2. BUAJA DARAT: THE LAND CROCODILE

  The myth

  The East had always been a strange and mysterious place in the eyes of the West, and many tall tales emerged to keep whitey baffled and entertained while he butchered the locals. One of these legends was the Indonesian land crocodile, or buaja darat: A fearsome lizard-monster that lived on the nearby islands. The buaja darat could eat a man whole if necessary, but even a single bite from the creature was fatal. That’s why nobody survived to verify accounts firsthand.

  But then the tales started to come true: In 1912, a group of fisherman docked on a small Indonesian island called Komodo and came back half-eaten and raving about monsters. After a 1926 expedition by W. Douglas Burden yielded twelve preserved specimens science finally woke up and realized there are actually dragons. They are a thing that exists. They’re just over in Southeast Asia. And they hate you.

  The reality

  The Komodo dragon is not only the largest lizard in the world; it’s also one of the few animals that will just up and eat you. We’re not talking about incidents born out of self-defense; we’re talking about an animal that is a hard-core fan of murder and not such a hard-core fan of your uneaten face.

  That stuff about a single bite killing you? The dragon’s saliva has venom that will prevent your blood from clotting. Even if you escape, it can just follow you at a leisurely pace, eyeing you with that dickish, lizardy expression while you panic and bleed out into delicious human jerky.

  The only reason Komodo dragons haven’t eaten everyone you care about yet is because there are so few of them, and they all exist on the one island. But then again, we remember a movie about a bunch of giant carnivorous lizards contained on a small island, and that didn’t exactly end in hugs and milk shakes.

  1. POUAKAI: MAN-EATING EAGLE

  The myth

  The Maori people of New Zealand are basically a death-metal video in human packaging and have the most hard-core monster legends around. Like Pouakai the bird god. Or, as we prefer: the giant man-eating eagle (of death). The Maoris have many stories about this sky demon. They say it would perch out of sight of villages and swoop down to pick people off one by one until entire tribes were killed off. It was said that the last thing the victims heard was the deafening beating of its immense wings, possibly followed by whatever sound a skull collapsing makes, and then the mournful drizzle of fear urine. Surely such a monstrosity never existed under the same sun as human beings, for our God is a kind god and not prone to creating stealth bombers carved from flesh that think men are delicious, right?

  The reality

  Roughly one hundred thousand years ago, Australia was populated by megafauna, which basically means that all the cute and cuddly animals of today were huge and terrifying. New Zealand, probably overcompensating for millennia of being overshadowed by Australia, had something called Haast’s eagle: the largest bird of prey to ever exist.

  When human beings finally breezed in from the wider world to find most of New Zealand’s megafauna at the sizes we know of today, they were probably pretty stoked to find an island without lions and god-bears and whatever other massive predators thought it was hilarious that these soft pink monkeys tried to run away from them. Boy, were they in for a tragic, terrifying surprise!

  Researchers believe Haast’s eagle was almost certainly the origin of the Pouakai stories.

  So that would mean all the horrifying shit that flashed through your imagination a few paragraphs ago—the flapping wings, the fear urine, the entire tribes picked off one by one like slasher-flick victims—that all probably happened.

  Although, after a few generations of devouring humans for fun and profit, mankind did finally have the last laugh at Haast’s eagle: We drove it to extinction simply by eating everything else around it and then not providing enough nutrition with our doughy little bodies to sustain the notoriously ravenous diet of the bird gods.

  So, yeah … Suck it, enormous sky raptor of legend! We beat your ass by not having enough calories! Go humanity!

  FIVE WAYS YOUR BRAIN IS MESSING WITH YOUR HEAD

  SURE, our minds are being screwed with by advertisers, politicians, magicians, etc. But as it turns out, the ways in which your head is being truly and royally messed with the most are coming from inside your skull.

  5. CHANGE BLINDNESS

  Change blindness is the inability to notice changes that happen right in front of you as long as you don’t watch the actual change take place.

  Um, what?

  Focus on anyone around you. If their pants spontaneously changed color, you’d notice and probably soil your own. But if you looked away and focused on something else, then came back and found their jeans had turned to khakis, odds are you almost certainly would not notice, even if your attention was elsewhere for only a few seconds.

  If your brain processed everything in your visual spectrum you would go insane, so instead it picks and chooses what to focus on. If an image changes while your brain isn’t paying attention, your brain tells you the change was there all along.

  It’s like your brain is sitting in class, staring out the window at a cloud that sort of looks like a penis. When you call on your brain, it does the same thing you do when a teacher calls on you in those circumstances: starts bullshitting.

  Where it gets really weird …

  Working with psychologist Susan Greenfield, the BBC decided to take this idea to a ridiculous extreme. They filmed an experiment in which one man worked the counter at a university copy center while another hid below the counter. When a student walked up and requested a form, the first man would duck down behind the counter to get it, and the previously hidden m
an would pop up and say, “Ah, here it is.” Despite this previously hidden second person looking completely different, most of the students did not freaking notice that they were now talking to a totally different person.

  This is probably what made the producers of Bewitched think they could just switch Darrins on us.

  4. SACCADIC MASKING

  Saccadic masking is the forty or so minutes per day that you’re effectively blind.

  Um, what?

  Look at the wall to your left. When you flicked your eyes over there, for just a moment you were blind. And you didn’t even know it.

  Ever watch a movie that gave you motion sickness due to the camera whipping around too fast with that “shaky handheld camera” gimmick? Your brain doesn’t like those rapid changes in vision, which is why some folks ended up puking while watching Cloverfield.

  Your eye movements are even faster and shakier than that. If you were to look closely at someone else’s eye, you’d notice that it’s never steady for more than a third of a second. Even when you think you’re rolling your eyes, they’re actually moving in a series of rapid jerky movements known as saccades. To prevent your world from looking like you’re seeing it through a jerky camcorder all day, your brain shuts down your optic nerve during these tiny movements. That’s why we told you to look at your friend’s eyeball instead of looking at your own in a mirror. While it might have created less sexual tension, everyone’s own eyeball will look perfectly stationary to them because they’re blind during each and every jerky saccade. That’s saccadic masking.