I Don't Understand You

Christian A. Dumais
April 30, 2025

OPENING MONOLOGUE

POP CULTURE MUST DIE

Taco in all of his glory.

Here’s a better picture of Taco than the one I posted last week.

We adopted him from the local animal shelter back in August 2020, and he’s been an absolute dream. We don’t know anything about his previous history, but he came into our home fully trained and happy as a dog can be. We don’t know how old he is (the shelter guessed his age at around seven when we got him), but from the white hairs on his chin and the slowness in his step, Taco is an old boy.

Outside of his unwillingness to climb stairs, he doesn’t like swimming (or water in general) and he’s not afraid to let you know when he wants to play. The neighbors love him while they seem to accept me begrudgingly.

Taco is, hands down, the best dog I ever had the chance to share my life with. We’re lucky to have him in our family.

Now that I’ve lowered your defenses with Taco Talk, let’s get down to business.

Pop Culture Must Die is the official newsletter for Christian A. Dumais, an American writer and freelance editor living in Poland. His books include Smashed, Killing It, and Go West.

NPR said, "People get paid a LOT of money to write comedy who are not one-tenth as funny as [Christian]."

Your mileage may vary.

YOUR LIFE SHOULD BE A TRILOGY.

AT THE DESK

Saying Goodbye to Dave

September 3, 1996, is the day I met Dave Matthews.

I met him in the parking lot of the Sun Dome on the USF campus where I went to school. The album Crash had been released earlier in the year and his songs were getting plenty of play on the radio and MTV, but I hadn’t connected with his music yet.

I had just finished a full day of classes and needed to get to work when I saw someone who looked like Dave Matthews lying on the grass near my car. I knew that he was having a concert that night at the Sun Dome, so I put two and two together and asked, “Hey, man, are you Dave Matthews?”

And that’s how we started talking. He was clearly tired, but he was incredibly polite, especially in that ridiculous Florida heat. The more we talked, the more I realized that even though I knew who he was, I didn’t know a thing about his music. So we did that conversational dance of two strangers speaking to one another without having a clue about what to say (“You a student?” “Yeah. You like to sing?” “Yeah.”). I immediately regretted having started the conversation.

Eventually, he asked, “Are you coming to the show?”

“Oh, I can’t,” I said. “I have to work.”

“Are you sure? I can get you in.”

“I wish. But I have to work.”

“…”

“It was great to meet you.” And I got into my car and left.

About six months later, I finally sat down and listened to his albums and immediately fell in love with his music. Some of those songs, like “#41”, “Say Goodbye” and “Let You Down” spoke directly to me in that way music only can when you’re young.

If I had met Dave Matthews after that, I would have made out with him for free tickets. No questions asked.

But instead, I met him too early and made it awkward, as with most things in my life.

No one complained when Burger King said sometimes you've gotta break the rules. Now look where we are.
— Christian A. Dumais (@cadumais.com)2025-02-18T10:53:59.007Z

YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS.

READING PILE

The Colorado Kid

The Colorado Kid came in the mail when I was about a hundred pages from finishing Wizard and Glass. I cracked it open to dip my toe and the next thing I knew, I read the whole book.

[The Colorado Kid was the first of three books King wrote for Hard Case Crime. I get the impression that a lot of readers slept on these books, which is a shame because they’re some of King’s best work, especially Joyland and Later.]

⁣I previously listened to the audiobook version of The Colorado Kid back in 2009 and found the story to be charming, especially in the ways the narrator tackled the Maine accents of the characters.

The Colorado Kid is about reporters Dave Bowie and Vince Teague, the elderly two-person staff at The Weekly Islander in Maine, who decide to tell the story of the island’s greatest unresolved mystery to the fresh-out-of-grad-school intern, Stephanie McCann. Their story is operating on a few different levels, but outside of explaining to McCann that not every mystery is a story, the process of telling her about the mystery is their way of letting her know she’s one of them. In fact, the more distant and head-scratching the mystery gets, the closer McCann becomes The Weekly Islander’s third staff member.

This time around, I’m struck at how this is a compact version of the story King told just a few years earlier in From a Buick 8, where older narrators tell a young person a mystery where there are no easy answers.

Accepting the unsolvable mystery is one hell of a theme for a writer to be tackling, especially someone who came so close to death, like King did in 1999. But these stories are crucial steps in King finding his footing at the start of the second half of his career.

[I’ve talked about this before, but I look at King’s recovery from his accident as a line of demarcation in his career. With this perspective, it’s easy to cut King’s work into two parts: pre- and post-1999.]

In fact, I’d argue that his exploration of this theme combined with the rapid publication of the final three Dark Tower books was a shedding of skin. A form of exorcism, if you will.

One of the most common complaints about King’s writing is how his endings often don’t live up to the rest of the book. As a genre, mysteries are stories that depend on good endings. So the idea of King tackling a mystery without an answer seems like a writer playing with fire. King makes it look easy with The Colorado Kid.

If I had to figure out the main difference between the two halves of King’s career, I’d say that the last 25 years is when King went from being a writer to an artist. And the thing about art is that it poses questions, not answers. Art is life, as they say, and we know that life doesn’t give you closure — that’s on you; not life, not the artist.

With The Colorado Kid, King is asking lots of questions, but it feels like he’s making a statement.