Half-mast flag blues
junior year, writing contests, movies and music, inappropriate principals, a litany of Profane tragedies, music again
the first music i ever listened to while writing was during Junior year of high school. Mrs. Reynolds’ English class. She nominated me for some statewide competition that required a couple timed in-class essays and then either a short story or poem or something written at home. The last time i had tried writing fiction i don’t think i had two digits comprising my age — they were short stories about my pets, and they could talk. Lucy could fly with her floppy ears. Our neurotic cat made more neurotic because i thought it was funny to terrorize her spoke in all-caps.*
*i feel bad about doing that now, and get that little shudder that runs through you when you remember an embarrassing or uncomfortable or guilty thing. sorry, Mrs. Potts.
But Sometime around Mrs. Reynolds class i discovered a few key things:
Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later in theaters. the movie ended and my knees were drawn to my chest.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Their music played against the early scene when Cillian Murphy wakes up and wanders an empty London after the plague
Cormac McCarthy. More specifically,
The Road, which i largely understood
All the Pretty Horses, which i kind of understood and
Blood Meridian, which i didn’t understand, but claimed to understand
because i was a ‘sensitive’ aspiring writer manchild — emphasis on child — who thought the world began and ended with the phrase ‘predawn dark’ or some bullshit.
Anyway, i wrote a horror story that ripped off Cormac McCarthy’s undeniable and absurd prose while listening to Godspeed, and i ended up one of the contest’s winners and forgot which day i was supposed to go downtown to the central mississippi school district administration monthly meeting to accept a certificate. My principal who looked like a walrus and upon recollection hugged all the cheerleaders too long in the hallways between classes was pissed
but he also made a joke about the whole thing later that day which made me laugh because it was objectively funny, and i had yet to realize 15 years later that he objectively still has thoughts about those cheerleaders that i don’t want to know about. Thoughts far more unsettling than my stupid horror short story about some demon-spirit called The Profane that shows up in every generation to do something heinous that makes society remember to be afraid of the world. Maybe Principal Walrus is my real life Profane.
Huh.
Sorry. Took me a moment to get here.
All of this is to say that Godspeed’s most recognizable song is most likely “The Dead Flag Blues,” which plays during that scene i mentioned in 28 Days Later. One of the introductory monologue’s lines in that song is
“And The flags are all dead at the top of their poles,”
And i think about flags a lot lately because they all seem to be hanging half-mast more often than they aren’t, and that indicates tragedy. It used to be, the flags were mostly half-lowered when one of the old Presidents croaked, but now it’s generally for tragedies.
A litany of Profane tragedies, when you think about it.
And i think about flags a lot lately, and how they aren’t dead. not yet. But they are half-mast so goddamn much of the time
like they are dying but not dead not yet.
like “The Half-Mast Flag Blues” or something.
And now it’s hard for me to write without some kind of music behind me, and a lot of the time
all this time later
it’s often Godspeed. Not right now, though. Right now i’m listening to something else.
(((EC)))