Love, Peace and Soul

I got a record player for my birthday.

I wanted one because I missed the pops and skips I got used to. For the longest time I thought Obla Di Obla Da was a dirty song and I had inherited a cleaned up version.

Desmond says to Molly - girl I like your face, and Molly says this as she takes him by the POP

I thought the pop was the CRTC hard at work.

I also had this great Tarzan story book. But I didn’t think Tarzan had a swearing streak, instead he had the hiccups. The TV and movie remakes were never the same without the hiccups.

Reminiscing out loud about the popping, and the endless undertaking of cleaning freakishly persistent dust particles off shiny vinyl with a little velvet brick, led my better half to buy me a record player.

So there I was, flipping through some musty old records, in a musty old used record store with questionable architecture, with my good friend Cornelius.

Yes.

Cornelius.

And no, his parents did not have the decency to name him after some illustrious ancient Roman thinker. Instead, they kindly named him after Don Cornelius. The first host of Soul Train.

But fear not for Cornelius, despite the awkward teenage years (though not more or less awkward from the rest of us), and the complete loss of irony he experienced during Fight Club when Edward Norton wore the “Hello my name is Cornelius” name tag at the testicular cancer support group, he would lead a very fulfilling life.

So there we stood in between the bargain bin and the soundtrack section where he had just finished questioning the merits of whose moustache was more distinguished, Sonny Bono or Freddie Mercury.

(I was partial to Sunny’s.)

“What’s with your need to return to the olden days?” he said as he mimicked putting an invisible needle on an invisible record, frowning, then moving the needle, frowning some more, then moving the needle again.

Cornelius claims he was a mime in another lifetime.

“I need to find the pop back in Obla Di Obla Da. My ears miss the pop.”

My ears also happened to miss the sound of the Full House theme song, however I chose not to volunteer that bit of information.

After finding the White Album and wondering whether I could manually replicate the same scratch as my old copy, Cornelius turned around and asked me, “You really shouldn’t be enjoying returning back to the Stone Age this much. You don’t need to crank the phonograph anymore,” he said while cranking an invisible crank, “I’ll introduce you to electricity.”

“Darwin had it all wrong,” I said, “Devolution is where the party is actually at. That’s why we’re obsessed with youth. That’s why nostalgia is so nostalgic. Most of us idealise our childhood, and the younger the better. We want our wombs back. No, even that isn’t enough. We want to be sperm.”

“Sperm?” he said as he made a little fish slither gesture with his right hand.

“Yes. And there’s proof in nature: snakes evolved – or should I say DEvolved – from lizards. They started out with legs, and now look at them: sperm with tongues. In evolution, you acquire legs to better run around, but snakes knew what they were doing: they were devolving back into the womb.”

“What’s next? Egg snakes?”

“Egg snakes,” I said gravely nodding my head.

Back at home, I crawled onto the sofa and listened to Obla Di Obla Da. But it had a different skip, all its own.

It wasn’t terrible, but I bet it doesn’t beat being a sperm. Or so I hear.