Elvis Aaron Presely

                              

Dream from last night: I was getting ready to seasonally jettison the sociological dregs of Peoria and embark on a book signing tour in Ireland ( being a writer who  is soused half his waking hours and can still ineluctably quote rote passages verbatim from Joyce’s Ulysses  does have its benefits).  My plane was scheduled to leave later that afternoon and for some reason I inexplicably go into the bathroom culled from childhood and cut my long hair,  the ricocheting image mirrored back to me reflecting exactly that of Jason Priestly circa 90210 renown. When I was in high school I used to go through a cylinder of Aqua Net a week so that my hair would be caked with this intractable plateau arched above my forehead like a balcony at a sophomoric thespian dress rehearsal of Grease. With my high school hairdo I continue to pack for Ireland finding myself seated on the backsteps of my childhood home with my friend Tim Flanagan. Somehow all the diva’s (beautiful untouchable high school seniors to our listless libido freshman) pedaled by on banana seat bikes. Tim was always coy around the opposite sex but he turned to me and brazenly proposed that he, “could too” get Martha, Holly, Vanessa and Julie to lift up their tops like mermaids. I told him there was no way he could achieve that but Tim, with a confidence seldom exhibited sans consulting the oracle  of the standard Dungeon & Dragon ten-sided dice, waltzed over and said something and the next thing these sirens were giggling and doffed their (replete with shoulder pads)tops. While I was optically sliding into second base I heard my mom’s voice maternally beckoning  me to come inside. I told her I still had to pack for Ireland and mom informed me that, “ It’s time for you to know our greatest family secret.” Mother then told me that Elvis Presley was still alive and that I was his grandson and that he wanted to meet me before I went to Ireland on my book tour because he was getting old.

 

 

Akin to the sloppy late-night cable cinema of my youth, the dream then jump cuts and I find myself outside Granpa Elvis’ house, which was this three story log-cabin on a secluded southern strip of land next to a waterfall. The portion of the house I entered was adorned with all these black and white frames of Elvis in the late 50’s. The room was flooded with beautiful yet disconsolate loners that were artistic and heavily harbored Bohemian vibes. Mom looked at me and informed me, “That I wasn’t allowed” to hit on any of the females because ‘everyone was family and they are all my second cousins.” Before going into the next room I saw Elvis next to my late-father. My father died suddenly twelve years ago this February and it’s always nice when he appears in my dreams. Grandpa Elvis gives me a hug, but, understandably I want to hang out with my father. I give dad a long embrace, tuck my nose into his shoulder, sniffed his powdery after-shower scent.  My father and I go for a hike trying to scale the abutment of the bucolic waterfall behind Grandpa Elvis’ house.  We get half-way up the side of the waterfall when we get stuck in this mud whose color can best be delineated as ‘neon-taupe.’ We turn around and scale down to the side of the landscape and I tell my father how much I miss him. When we get to the bottom everyone is partying outside. Elvis hands me a beer (a Schlitz tallboy) and fires up a cigarette. Elvis then turns to me and inquires if I would like to fire his gun.   My dad (keeping with the corporal integrity of his earthly persona) refused to fire buy I accepted the invitation and started firing along side Elvis. Elvis kept insisting that I call him Granpa and we kept drinking more Schlitz and smoking more cigarettes all the while my anxiety that I was going to miss my flight to Ireland. I asked Grandpa why he decided to hide and he rhetorically retorted, “With all the shit that was going on, wouldn’t you?” The dream ended with myself firing Elvis’ gun at a bowl of cherries (or maybe they were enhanced renaissance grapes). Elvis then began to get drunk and fell down. As I helped grandpa up I asked if he was okay and the last thing he said to me was, “I know man, tallboys.” (referring to the beer) all while laughing.

 

 

I don’t know much about elvis, except that he died the same year I was born.  You can imagine the shock when, after waking up and wikepediaing his name, I discerned that dream I harvested about Elvis Presely transpired in the waning hours of what would have been his 79^th birthday. Unreal. Alright dad, elvis and Ireland, time for this   wayward writer to crack open a tallboy and get some work done. Succulent Sobriety 2 starts t’morrow….
 

crazy dream culled from the residual vignette of last nights nocturnal slumber (don't know if it means anything or nor)...we were back in Christ Lutheran Church and it was during a christmas service...we both didn't want to be there but we found ourselves banked in the pews... we saw yer dad (he was healthy) and you ran out..your dad then switched hymns and started singing loud and you came back in and he embraced you and started crying and saying how much he missed you....(note: I aslo had a dream that night where I was drinking vats of Guiness and cussing out a Bradley Eng. prof telling her that her husbands novel wasn't worth two shits)....hope all is well....

dream aug 8th, 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crazy nocturnal vignette culled from the ceiling tiles of last night's dream: I was futilely surrounded by this Babylonian-eque army, all of them wielding arrows, all of them clad in gilded Spartacus-like headgear. I was trying to rescue this wispy-clad 'maiden' (i.e., my feminine side?) and this old man...we were surrounded at this impasse thwarting us from making progression and going forward. Infantrymen brandished arrows on all side but directly in front of us was this general who demanded that we pay a fee of gold (imagine that an artist needing money)... the general had a wild Bear on a leash and the bear began swipe its claws and snap its mouth in our direction, purportedly this Thermopylae was to be our demise. I looked at the girl and she told me, very vividly, "Remember the myth. What you need is inside." I brandished my own sword, and, in a single linear whiff, severed the ursine creature's head at the neck. I then sliced it again near (linear fashion) above the bears eyes. I reached in and grabbed the cerebral chandelier constituting the creature's brain and hurled it as hard I phucking could at the soldiers, bowling them over...when arrows began to fire upon us like a spring tempest I employed the top o the bear's head and his nape as a shield and the three of us were duly protected and were able to move on.....

 

 

 

                                                  

dream: July 8th, 2013

Two nights ago I had dream where I was driving through a vertical neon-doused Appleton with my mother looking for you. I kept trying to call you only you wouldn’t pick up. Finally you answered yer damn phone and told me that you would be late meeting me because you were “busy changing clothes,” (all these years later and the thought of you in bra and panties still turns me on…”

Two enthusiastic thumbs up, Gene..

Four years ago I had a dream where I was drinking at one of my “seedy Rick Baker writer bars” in the Southside of Peoria (bars with names like Duffy’s and Boa’s and Dave’s on Shelly. Bars where you can still smoke in and all of the female patrons have big boobs and bad teeth. Bars where it behooves you to take an insurance liability out on your liver before entering. Bars that I have to go in to by myself b/c all my friends get scared shitless to even go down the social-economic slope of Western hill even though I went to gradeschool just down the street at Christ Lutheran). In the hazy den of the dream-bar I was imbibing draught beer (Schlitz) with a young Roger Ebert. He had ruffled, unkempt grainy-hair the color of fresh kitty-litter. He was pudgy, ashen countenance that drooped from the lower hemisphere of his neck like a bespectacled Pillsbury dough boy.  He looked like the kind of kid who spent much of junior high adapting to the ill-time hazing of a locker room wedgie. The type of kid who spent much of the day mulling over Dungeon and Dragon manuals while fantasying about girls he would never date.

The type of kid who would one day be a writer.

In the dream I invited Roger to belly up next to me at the bar and we drank heavily. There were tufts of cigarette smoke, sawdust cumulus morels sprouting as if from the earth between intermittent sudsy swigs of beer and intermittent journalistic banter. In the dream we talked about the loneliness of the literary lifestyle, the critic who cavils vs. the critic who creates, but in the end of the dream I remember sitting next to Roger Ebert and looking around the room and all he would say to me is, “This is a great bar. It’s a great bar.”

 

Two days after I waded through this nocturnal-splotch of sifting images I stumbled upon the article linked b’low. For all the accumulative prizes he rightfully garnered throughout his four plus decades as a movie critic I guarantee the thirty year medallion mentioned below was his most valuable because (like the addled protagonist of any cinematic inflection) Mr. Ebert was willing to change while graciously goad such change via instilling hope in others.

So here’s to you Roger Ebert. It’s a great bar but it’s also a great life. Two thumbs up, Gene. The greatest review awaits you…

letter to Renae....

 
Oh dearest Renae, this is a beautiful crazy story that happened t’day and its just for you....
I should preface this e-mail by telling you that in my mid-twenties I lived a very poetic and peripatetic lifestyle (uhm, still do) and ended up crashing with this this older sage who was a Psychic (he was kinda Gandolf  to my
emotionally fretted Frodo if that makes any sense, best way I can explicate the nature of our rapport) His name was Mike Truskey and he was fairly well known in the local psychic community and he actually used to give readings to a very well known psychic who lived in Delevan named Greta Alexander who was always on the news (informing police where they could locate the corpse or whatever) back in the day.
Uncle Mike died a few years back and I was with him as he passed but hanging out with him for so long I was introduced to the world of metaphysics and light, ie, I have what might be classified as weird encounters, seeing what might be classified as ghosts and spirits and other shit that is weird and just hard to explain and that (except for those closest to me ) I don’t promulgate or talk about in public much at all.
So my old friend from high school now you know where I am coming from here is what happened t’day:


At five o’clock tonight I was sifting through my attic rummaging through old manuscripts for one of my novels when I came across a folder I had not seen in a couple of years. I took the folder to my writing desk downstairs ( I have the coolest writing desk ever) when what fell from the folder was a Xeroxed obituary of your father’s death. One thing Uncle Mike always taught was to say this prayer for the departed which I did. I then went back to writing and looked at read your father’s obituary and realized, as I was reading it, that (ironically??/mystically) it was the anniversary of his demise.
What happen next was one of those weird things I don’t talk about much but it happen.
I was situated at my writing desk reading the Xeroxed copy of your father’s obituary that I randomly found in the attic when it tumbled out of a folder I picked up when I hear a mans voice vividly resonating through my chest. The voice was middle age, semi gruff and he was happy and laughing.
Then the voice said this:

“Tell my daughter that I love her and that I am so proud of her.”
After that the room just flooded in a sheet of white light and I felt this warm presence and everything around me (what some psychics call vibratory levels) just echoed in peace.
Old friend I don’t mean to fuck with you at all, but that is what I heard today in my writing chamber in West Peoria.
I hope life finds you well and this message ferries forth perhaps closure and the peace I felt this afternoon. Your father was a good man Renae. And he loves you and is never far away….
DVB

 

Mystical Baha’I house of worship/golden copper dream for sister Polly…

Dearest Beloved

I experienced this dream around 11 o’clock this morning , beatifically buffeted by a gentle spring rain outside hushed in the avenues of dreams, sleeping in Uncle Mike’s old bed between shifts, the house nearly vacant now almost three months after his demise. (Important note: I usually dream about the house of worship once a month and have dreamt about you and the mystical latitude and limbs of our rapport hundreds of times for perhaps lifetimes on end but this is the only dream I can really recall where the copper manifests itself in its entirety).

In the dream I was chasing a flighty airheaded college girl past the house I grew up in, through the university that fired me and found myself on the steps of the House of Worship in Wilmette.

 
 When I ended up on the ivory steps of the house of worship they were hosting a famous oriental psychic (she was old/clad in a kimono) and lots of prestigious weird almost cult like psychics were in attendance. It was a very important affair and it was guarded and several conspicuous ‘celebrities’ were in attendance and had to wait in line. The convention was in the basement of the House of Worship and I learned that it was expensive to attend but for some reason I was allowed in for free. There was this famous blonde headed ‘celebrity/pyschic’ that people were also following around and when I was allowed into the basement of the House of worship people were having ‘energy’ work done with chakra orbs (you could see the orbs and they were also having their palms “worked on and read” in these silhouette-library carrels. I found you with yer sister in the back of the convention and we casually said hello. The psychics who kept on coming in kept in getting weirder in a non-spiritual esoteric –séance-cult like fashion. You seemed glum-eyed and sad and I told you I had something I wanted to give you. I reached into my pocket and unearthed the copper you gave me all those years ago but the moment it left my pocket it was pure gold RESPLENDENT and it shone BRIGHT…like chipped dry wall from heaven or GOLDEN coals from a mint barbecue, It was pure gold and it was hold and honestly (in the dream) I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything brighter. I handed the copper back to you and you turned to a nearby freakish psychic and said, “This copper has spent a lot of time on the cornerstone of God. This is where the true power is at.”



We then began to get uncomfortable with all the freakish psychics and tried to find a way out. Your sister followed behind us ( Fred, always trying to be a third wheel). In typical Diggory and Polly fashion we unearthed a “hidden passage trap door” in the bottom of the basement” with a spiral sylvan staircase stowed inside only we opted not to go in. Instead we continued to walk around the bottom circumference of the basement. We found a black and white poster a house of worship (it was a cross between the first house of worship in Russia and this cool picture I have a home) only the poster was TILTED. I then grabbed your wrist and pulled and fell to the ground under the picture of the TILTED house of WORSHIP . You were on top of my body in dry humping fashion and I started cryin, sobbing irrevocably/uncontrollably pressing my teary sockets into the gentle whiteness of your cheekbones. I then addressed you as “My dearest and eternal Polly Joon” and thenI started crying more and apologized and asked for forgiveness for yelling and emotionally erupting at you last autumn. Like that blissfull day on the parkbench (or in the hookah lounge. Or in the park here in P-town) we held each other for a long time and it was pure. You then told me that I was forgiven and we started breezing gentle kissed on the others cheekbones and forehead and smiling at each other. The moment you said the word forgive good ol’ anisa FRED jumped on to of us (think of a sports victory celebration) and we kissed her forehead (frontal lobe) as well. We then got up and decided to leave (we were all smiling—miss that smile of yers angelface) and as we left a weird gray-eyes guard psychic told us to hurry up cause the conference would be starting soon. I don’t think we were in a hurry to get back.