Dead Pharaohs

Every once and a while you find out one little thing and it sets off a cogitating avalanche. The old brain sizzles a couple minutes and all the old ideas about how things ought to happen get fried into a mushy omelet that won’t hold together anymore. It’s a brain blowout.

That happened when I was a little kid and heard what you put where to make babies at recess. Then again when I was in the army and figured out why I was sitting locked up in a tiny trailer listening on a big radio to some other army headquarters talking Russian about their latest girlfriends: so we could drop big, fat A-bombs on them and break up their little patty-cake parties.

It happened again the other day. I was hearing about old Egypt before pharaohs married their sisters and got fancy with tall, pointy pyramids. Back then, really far back B.C., everyone dead just got covered up with a couple feet of dry, hot sand. Then, if someone happened to dig them up after a hundred years or so, they looked fine, just a little wrinkled. Sand dried out those naked hot bodies like three-year-old prunes and the dead folks looked like they might just sit up and talk about the weather or what they had for dinner last night.

But you know how rich guys are never satisfied, even back then. The pharaohs started buying fancy wooden boxes covered with gold paint and cat pictures on the sides. Then when they died, they got packed in their boxes, like a fat old sardine with their wives and servants and then locked up in a old damp cellar way down under their fancy new pyramid. Down where it’s so damp even the bugs get wet feet. So what happens there? After a month or two the dead turn into a nasty box of Pharaoh mush. As smelly and smushy as road-kill rabbits rotting on the road side.

To save the day, Egyptian hot-shot scientists came in and looked up how to make pickles and Egyptian sauerkraut and tried it out on their pharaoh.

That was the little thing I learned. Mummies are just a nostalgia craze. Wanting your body to rise up after you’re dead is just an accident of geography. All history is just a bad experiment in pickling and packing the dead to save them for a rainy day in dead-guys-walking heaven. This risen dead body thing would never have happened if Egypt were down in some jungle and all our followup Western Civ religion ideas dealt with a wet and soggy afterlife.

Anyway, how come you want an old, used dead body to come back to? I’d rather return as a hot looking 55 Chevy or a T-bird spouting flames in the wheelwells and cruise a million, million miles on an empty road-race hi-way running all over heaven.

And even if I got this body back I’m not sure which parts I'd want in it. My muscles peaked about when I was 30, but the brain was not in great shape for a long time after that. And what about those parts the doctor cut out. They can stay out. They are preserved in a jar down in the basement and that’s fine with me.