pigeon

Fool! You cannot kill the dead!

This must be a pigeon with a broken wing. It’s not dead, because I definitely do remember it, but I can’t remember where it comes from. I can’t see it but I can see its shadow. I can’t hear it but I hear the echo of its coo.

And anything not dead risks being killed.

I’m picturing my bedroom at my dad’s house — so, a humble 1930s red brick craftsman on a neighborhood street in the old part of Cape Girardeau, quietness punctuated by slow-motion excitement, here and there a voice emanates from a shady porch. Second floor. If summer, then hot. Twin warped windows, double hung with painted ropes and pulleys. Metal screens. Windowsills and woodwork painted frog-swamp green. Hardwood covered by a thin green rug. My bed in one corner, dresser between the windows, shelves and attic door on one wall, door to the hallway on the other. These doors were solid wood, of course, varnished, with heavy duty loose-pin hinges, and corkboard glued into the recessed panels — when it got hot, the earthy, smoky smell of cork suffused my dreams.

I keep coming back to the record player, so this pigeon must have involved a record of some kind. And my brother was there — that’s the part I remember — him and me repeating this refrain and laughing: “Fool! You cannot kill the dead!”

Just now I texted to ask him if he remembered — enlisting aid to mend this pigeon’s wing — and here’s how that conversation went:

MD: Do you happen to remember what “Fool! You cannot kill the dead!” was from?

CJ: It wasn’t that George Hamilton Dracula movie?

MD: I don’t think so. I keep getting flashes of like GI Joe or something, and for some reason the record player in my room at dad’s house — so I’m thinking it was something older, something kid/cheezy but unironic. Unless memory is just being shifty like it sometimes is

CJ: There was a GI Joe mummy adventure

MD: YES! that must have been it!

And it was, I’m sure of it now. It was G.I. Joe: Secret of the Mummy’s Tomb. Peter Pan Records — now that’s a prestigious label. Reading along, word for word. The flat pinging sound when it’s time to turn the page. Well, now that that mystery’s solved, I’m not sure what else to say about it. But here’s a note I made a couple days ago while watching some Netflix murder thing:

how tv shows work now

• low-grade softcore cuck/bull energy
• they rope you in by making the things you get passionate about in real life seem square
• you think you’re smarter than the kayfabe — obviously — but that’s a decoy. another message is getting thru unnoticed, and you’re metabolizing it (while you’re distracted by your intellectual superiority, a hidden part of your brain is processing a secret subtext)
• if it’s not interesting unless you’re eating or drinking (or some equivalent) — then what the fuck else is it for, besides reprogramming your brain?

Maybe it’s just the shows I’ve been getting fed by the algo, but man, it seems like a lot of them follow this pattern. Let’s compare that to GI Joe.

NOW

Watching TV is the perfect conduit for endless potato chips, popcorn, poptarts and pop. It’s vivid on a big screen. Some people even have it piped directly into their eyeballs. If you’re like me, it sounds amazing too, and there’s a subwoofer that makes the basement rumble. The writing is slick, the characters sophisticated. One episode flows into the next; every story is hours and hours — days — weeks long. You sit slackjawed while it paints your consciousness with fascination. When you run out of snacks, you vaguely realize you’ve heard all this before. A thin, faint voice, no bigger than Charlotte’s¹, asks, “What would I rather be doing? What calls to me? What’s the weather in the arcane garden of my youth?” But you’re tired. If you muster the will to turn it off before “next episode,” a tinier screen swoops into your palm to take the reins. You begin to not exist. Again. Welcome back to tonight. How do they write this stuff? You could never overcome your ADHD long enough to make a plot like that. Do people live like this? Your life could never measure up. But it doesn’t have to — because you can sit here for $20 a month plus incidentals, and be sufficiently mesmerized. You can’t kill the dead — so if you’re already dead you’re invulnerable I guess.

THEN

Your knees are probably bruised or even scabbed from the day’s adventures, so the hard thin rug hurts; you reposition yourself. Your older brother, who taught you to read, hangs off the bed beside you and waits for you to put the floppy 45 on the spindle. The record player grinds to life. You hold the comic book and follow along, conjuring images out of words and sound. The flat yellow slightly misregistered ink of the mysterious tomb (wherein, we’ve been told, lurks the mummy) ignites your imagination. The next time you’re in the back seat of your dad’s station wagon, windows open full blast, careening down I-55 past FALLING ROCK, those limestone bluffs, almost the same color, will suggest a newfound hidden life. Everything does. Every place is at least two places — the words, the sound. The sound is scratchy and it pops. The words are corny and therein lies their power. What we make fun of becomes immortal. Give my brother and me 50¢ worth of kiddie schlock and we can generate a teeming universe, its inner workings too complex to be described in our lifetimes — or anyone’s. Learn to read and listen and BAM — you have a one to one scale model of infinity at your disposal.

I keep hearing that “no one reads anymore” even though it’s cheap and accessible, unlike so many things lately. I wonder if that’s true, and if so, why that would be. America’s last affordable luxury. I guess it’s deprecated. Unless there’s a way to sell the concept of “AI” along with it. Instead of a record with your comic book, you get a server farm with your Google search. It’s So Much More Efficient!

One thing I’ve noticed, you can’t go back to [previous decade of your choice] via material components alone. No matter how many typewriters I buy, even if one of them’s a blue and white Coronamatic 2200, I’m not going to recreate the energy of sitting at my shelf (before I even got a desk), passing sheet after sheet of snow-white copy paper through the rollers, banging away, writing The Grate Amer’cin Novel. (Which I did write, by the way, it really was grate — but I lost it — I think my mom might’ve thrown it out when I wasn’t looking, to be honest, I’ve long suspected this, because she thought it was silly and didn’t live up to her idea of my “potential” as a writer or something, well, I’m sure she meant well, but ah, to be grate is to be misunderstood!)

So yeah, I could buy a vintage record player, the kind where the speakers swing shut and form a cabinet around the whole thing, and I could get on collectors’ sites and find the original It’s Fun To Read As You Hear Book and Record, and give it a spin, but I wouldn’t get teleported into the mummy’s tomb, let alone my old room, hanging out with my brother making fun of second-rate paraliterature. No matter what I buy, it always turns out that phones still exist and I still know about genocides and suicides and cats don’t live forever and I can’t walk around my neighborhood without fearing I’ll get run over by some asshole driving 50 mph down what should be a neighborhood street. The mummy’s secret is safe from me. You can’t bring the undead back to life, either. But what about the living?

Living ... the living ... wait — that’s a clue! I am ... I am the living ... I am still alive, at least for now, which means —

The hidden world behind the bluffs must still be beaming out its secrets. The secret subtext is ours to reinvent. Listen — hear that insistent PING? We’ve heard that sound before — the pigeon lifts its healing wing — tests its strength — it’s time to turn the page.