The Young l33 Chronicles!: The Mummy Story
Okay, so this is a tale of my misspent youth. It was going to appear last night but didn't because I fell asleep at the computer. It also has the dubious benefit of telling you what kind of person I am.
I've always been kind of obsessed with history, by which I mean unchecked Asperger's level obsession. This kind of segued into an interest in archaeology, which is something I'd still like to do with myself, because archaeologists don't have to teach and because it's sort of like science without a lot of math and because OMG IT'S THE PAST AND YOU CAN TOUCH IT. I come by this kind of thing honestly; my father was similarly obsessed. When I was growing up, I liked to read about history, and also about mummies and bog bodies. If I was out of books about mummies and bog bodies, I would swipe anything my father foolishly brought home from the library.
This happened when we were living in Pennsylvania; I don't remember exactly how old I was, but I'd guess I was around 8 or 9. My folks had built our house in a soulless development, and, being gardeners, they had set out to beautify it. The side of the house that looked out over the garage got direct sun, so the lolmom planted roses there, and in the process of buying such exotic oddities as styrofoam cones to keep them warm during cold snaps, she also picked up a huge bag of peat moss.
I was abnormally excited, given that I was then, at best, an unwilling participant on rides to the gardening and hardware stores. (I distinctly remember reading Everyday Life in Ancient Rome for at least the sixteenth time on one of these outings. Why do I remember this? Honestly can't tell you.) I didn't know anything about the business of cutting peat moss; I just knew that peat moss came from peat bogs. I also knew that mummies also sometimes came from peat bogs, and as far as I was concerned, that peat moss bag looked something like this.
Fig. 1: BEST PRIZE EVER
Being eight or nine, my attention was probably fairly quickly diverted onto something else. However, one day lolmom left the big bag of peat moss outside when I happened to be there, puttering around the back yard and making things up (this was a popular pastime for me even as a child). She had also left a trowel inside the bag of peat moss, which was still close to full, and being a bored and inquisitive child, I began to dig around in the peat moss bag. This was not particularly exciting, until my trowel hit something hard.
I suspected that I was en route to a rendezvous with Destiny, and treaded carefully; I began to scrape more with the trowel, and determined that the hard thing was not small and that it also had a rounded shape. Slowly, the significance of this began to dawn on me.
OH MY GOD
OH MY GOD
OH MY GOD
OH MY GOD IT'S A SKULL
IT'S A SKULL
THERE IS A MUMMY IN THE PEAT MOSS BAG
THIS IS SO COOL YOU GUYS
...OH FUCK, HOW AM I GOING TO GET THE MUMMY OUT
I immediately dropped the trowel, because although I desperately wanted to unearth the mummy, I did not want to actually look at the skull whilst so doing. I don't like to see decayed or mutilated faces, and doing so (especially when I can't control whether I see them or how much I see) actually gives me a very visceral shock reaction. Even as an adult, if I want to read about mummies on the Internet, I have to turn off the "load images" option and if I think there might be dead-body pictures in a book I've checked out, I'll skip straight to the illustrations to either check for dead bodies or get the shock reaction out of the way. Clean skulls don't bother me as much, for the record.
Hmm. I was going to need to think about this. The first thing to do, obviously, was to make sure my parents didn't contaminate the site. (Not only did I not put it in those terms at that age, but it didn't occur to me that I was contaminating the site.) This meant I had to make sure that my folks didn't use the peat moss bag--no easy feat, since lolmom did not work outside the home when I was a kid and often did yardwork when the weather was nice, and also I had to broach the subject without tipping my parents off that there was a mummy in the peat moss bag. (My father would have gone out and immediately unearthed it just to spite me.)
Also, I didn't want my sister or the neighborhood kids we often played with to find out, because then that would have resulted in their wanting a piece of my scientific discovery, or, worse, offers to "help" me liberate the mummy from its peaty resting place. They would have damaged it, being a bunch of clueless amateur hacks.
Great subtlety was called for.
I strolled up to my mother at some point during the week and inquired as to what was in the peat moss bag. (Mom is here portrayed as talking like a normal human being because I was in elementary school and she was an Authority Figure. The lol wouldn't arrive until I was of an age to appreciate everything she did for us when we were growing up.)
Lolmom: Peat moss.
young!l33: No, besides peat moss.
Lolmom: Um...a trowel and some gloves, maybe?
young!l33: MOM. NO. WHAT IS IN THE PEAT MOSS BAG.
Lolmom: Peat. Moss.
young!l33: NO. There is something in the peat moss bag that IS NOT PEAT MOSS.
Lolmom: [Lee's Hated Full Name], there is nothing but peat moss in the peat moss bag.
Well, at least she hadn't cottoned on to the fact of the mummy's existence. (Somewhere during the course of the past two days, the mummy in the peat moss bag had gone from "strong working hypothesis" to "OMG INDISPUTABLE FACT".) On the other hand, she had just oblivioned herself out of the co-finder's credit and National Geographic cover I had been planning to share with her once I dug the mummy out.
The next couple of weeks were torture, because I needed, NEEDED, to find that mummy. It was going to look so cool on the cover of Archaeology magazine, and there would be a three-page article and EVERYTHING.
I also secretly hoped that the mummy would come back to life, despite knowing this to be impossible. Then I would sneak outside at night and it would tell me stories about when it was alive. (The idea that the mummy might be one of the malevolent undead did not occur to me. I had such faith in the world as a kid.) Since the Internet was not in widespread use outside defense and academic circles during my childhood, my father was spared finding such search terms as "how reanimate mummy", "how bring mummy to life", and "LIVE MUMMY LIVE LIVE LIVE" in the cache.
(There is no Fig. 2 of me being super BFF with the mummy. That would have required me to go look at mummies on the Internet.)
I could not, however, reconcile this with my desire to avoid looking at its face. And so I hung on tenterhooks for two weeks. Two weeks is a huge amount of time when you're eight or nine, in part because you don't know that you're going to grow up and be like, "oh, fuck, man, how is it goddamn Thursday already? Where did my week go?".
Finally, one day, when my folks were doing something to the deck and I was alone with the peat moss bag and my unacted desires, I snapped. I grabbed the trowel and I dug. Oh, how I dug! I dug as I had never dug before. I dug my heart out.
At a certain point in the proceedings, I had cleared enough room around the SKULL OMG to enable me to reach in and lift it out. With fear and trembling, I reached reverently into the peat moss bag, narrowing my eyes to a slit so I would have some time to take in the skull and not be instantly horrified. Carefully, I eased my Splendid Find out of the peat and forced myself to open my eyes to take in the wonder of...
...a really large, hard, round lump of peat moss which contained absolutely no mummies.
God, I was so disappointed. Even having to clean up my peat moss mess, which my parents promptly discovered, was as small potatoes compared to being completely and totally scammed by the peat moss people. Dude, there should be a law. You don't just promise a kid a mummy and then not deliver.
Years later, I discovered that my mother had been baffled by my obsession with the peat moss bag, let alone my compulsion to dig in it and fling peat moss everywhere, and that everything suddenly made sense once she learned about the mummy. Well, I'm glad someone profited by my little misadventure.
And that's all you get, 'cause I have grocery shopping to do. After I answer my LJ comments. Yes.
I've always been kind of obsessed with history, by which I mean unchecked Asperger's level obsession. This kind of segued into an interest in archaeology, which is something I'd still like to do with myself, because archaeologists don't have to teach and because it's sort of like science without a lot of math and because OMG IT'S THE PAST AND YOU CAN TOUCH IT. I come by this kind of thing honestly; my father was similarly obsessed. When I was growing up, I liked to read about history, and also about mummies and bog bodies. If I was out of books about mummies and bog bodies, I would swipe anything my father foolishly brought home from the library.
This happened when we were living in Pennsylvania; I don't remember exactly how old I was, but I'd guess I was around 8 or 9. My folks had built our house in a soulless development, and, being gardeners, they had set out to beautify it. The side of the house that looked out over the garage got direct sun, so the lolmom planted roses there, and in the process of buying such exotic oddities as styrofoam cones to keep them warm during cold snaps, she also picked up a huge bag of peat moss.
I was abnormally excited, given that I was then, at best, an unwilling participant on rides to the gardening and hardware stores. (I distinctly remember reading Everyday Life in Ancient Rome for at least the sixteenth time on one of these outings. Why do I remember this? Honestly can't tell you.) I didn't know anything about the business of cutting peat moss; I just knew that peat moss came from peat bogs. I also knew that mummies also sometimes came from peat bogs, and as far as I was concerned, that peat moss bag looked something like this.
Fig. 1: BEST PRIZE EVER
Being eight or nine, my attention was probably fairly quickly diverted onto something else. However, one day lolmom left the big bag of peat moss outside when I happened to be there, puttering around the back yard and making things up (this was a popular pastime for me even as a child). She had also left a trowel inside the bag of peat moss, which was still close to full, and being a bored and inquisitive child, I began to dig around in the peat moss bag. This was not particularly exciting, until my trowel hit something hard.
I suspected that I was en route to a rendezvous with Destiny, and treaded carefully; I began to scrape more with the trowel, and determined that the hard thing was not small and that it also had a rounded shape. Slowly, the significance of this began to dawn on me.
OH MY GOD
OH MY GOD
OH MY GOD
OH MY GOD IT'S A SKULL
IT'S A SKULL
THERE IS A MUMMY IN THE PEAT MOSS BAG
THIS IS SO COOL YOU GUYS
...OH FUCK, HOW AM I GOING TO GET THE MUMMY OUT
I immediately dropped the trowel, because although I desperately wanted to unearth the mummy, I did not want to actually look at the skull whilst so doing. I don't like to see decayed or mutilated faces, and doing so (especially when I can't control whether I see them or how much I see) actually gives me a very visceral shock reaction. Even as an adult, if I want to read about mummies on the Internet, I have to turn off the "load images" option and if I think there might be dead-body pictures in a book I've checked out, I'll skip straight to the illustrations to either check for dead bodies or get the shock reaction out of the way. Clean skulls don't bother me as much, for the record.
Hmm. I was going to need to think about this. The first thing to do, obviously, was to make sure my parents didn't contaminate the site. (Not only did I not put it in those terms at that age, but it didn't occur to me that I was contaminating the site.) This meant I had to make sure that my folks didn't use the peat moss bag--no easy feat, since lolmom did not work outside the home when I was a kid and often did yardwork when the weather was nice, and also I had to broach the subject without tipping my parents off that there was a mummy in the peat moss bag. (My father would have gone out and immediately unearthed it just to spite me.)
Also, I didn't want my sister or the neighborhood kids we often played with to find out, because then that would have resulted in their wanting a piece of my scientific discovery, or, worse, offers to "help" me liberate the mummy from its peaty resting place. They would have damaged it, being a bunch of clueless amateur hacks.
Great subtlety was called for.
I strolled up to my mother at some point during the week and inquired as to what was in the peat moss bag. (Mom is here portrayed as talking like a normal human being because I was in elementary school and she was an Authority Figure. The lol wouldn't arrive until I was of an age to appreciate everything she did for us when we were growing up.)
Lolmom: Peat moss.
young!l33: No, besides peat moss.
Lolmom: Um...a trowel and some gloves, maybe?
young!l33: MOM. NO. WHAT IS IN THE PEAT MOSS BAG.
Lolmom: Peat. Moss.
young!l33: NO. There is something in the peat moss bag that IS NOT PEAT MOSS.
Lolmom: [Lee's Hated Full Name], there is nothing but peat moss in the peat moss bag.
Well, at least she hadn't cottoned on to the fact of the mummy's existence. (Somewhere during the course of the past two days, the mummy in the peat moss bag had gone from "strong working hypothesis" to "OMG INDISPUTABLE FACT".) On the other hand, she had just oblivioned herself out of the co-finder's credit and National Geographic cover I had been planning to share with her once I dug the mummy out.
The next couple of weeks were torture, because I needed, NEEDED, to find that mummy. It was going to look so cool on the cover of Archaeology magazine, and there would be a three-page article and EVERYTHING.
I also secretly hoped that the mummy would come back to life, despite knowing this to be impossible. Then I would sneak outside at night and it would tell me stories about when it was alive. (The idea that the mummy might be one of the malevolent undead did not occur to me. I had such faith in the world as a kid.) Since the Internet was not in widespread use outside defense and academic circles during my childhood, my father was spared finding such search terms as "how reanimate mummy", "how bring mummy to life", and "LIVE MUMMY LIVE LIVE LIVE" in the cache.
(There is no Fig. 2 of me being super BFF with the mummy. That would have required me to go look at mummies on the Internet.)
I could not, however, reconcile this with my desire to avoid looking at its face. And so I hung on tenterhooks for two weeks. Two weeks is a huge amount of time when you're eight or nine, in part because you don't know that you're going to grow up and be like, "oh, fuck, man, how is it goddamn Thursday already? Where did my week go?".
Finally, one day, when my folks were doing something to the deck and I was alone with the peat moss bag and my unacted desires, I snapped. I grabbed the trowel and I dug. Oh, how I dug! I dug as I had never dug before. I dug my heart out.
At a certain point in the proceedings, I had cleared enough room around the SKULL OMG to enable me to reach in and lift it out. With fear and trembling, I reached reverently into the peat moss bag, narrowing my eyes to a slit so I would have some time to take in the skull and not be instantly horrified. Carefully, I eased my Splendid Find out of the peat and forced myself to open my eyes to take in the wonder of...
...a really large, hard, round lump of peat moss which contained absolutely no mummies.
God, I was so disappointed. Even having to clean up my peat moss mess, which my parents promptly discovered, was as small potatoes compared to being completely and totally scammed by the peat moss people. Dude, there should be a law. You don't just promise a kid a mummy and then not deliver.
Years later, I discovered that my mother had been baffled by my obsession with the peat moss bag, let alone my compulsion to dig in it and fling peat moss everywhere, and that everything suddenly made sense once she learned about the mummy. Well, I'm glad someone profited by my little misadventure.
And that's all you get, 'cause I have grocery shopping to do. After I answer my LJ comments. Yes.