Oh the humanity! Oh cruel fate that has torn them asunder! Nicolas Cage seemed poised for a major connection with the King ever since his dweeb-cum-Elviswannabe turn in _Peggy Sue Got Married_. Then Patricia Arquette did the ding-dong honeypot Elvis fanatic in _True Romance_. WHY oh WHY would any guy divorce Patricia Arquette??? But I digress. Didn't we ALL already know Lisa Marie was a bit tetched? Marrying someone else from a famous family who grew up in the spotlight was bound to be fraught with nightmare problems, not to mention her prior marriage to the über-peculiar Michael Jackson. Early buzz on the Lisa Marie/Nicolas union was that Nicolas wanted to close Graceland to the public and live there. In Memphis. Imagine living with the sham-luxe 70's decor of the Jungle Room. I'm guessing Lisa Marie didn't find that such a quaint ideer, considering her wealth is expanded exponentially per annum by virtue of the white trash cavalcade that trots through the disused home of the King. Incidentally, one of my favorite Elvis stories involves his longtime maid at Graceland, who arduously collected hairs when she cleaned around his "throne" for years and years. When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was collecting artifacts with which to festoon its new showplace in Cleveland Ohio several years back, this maid offered for sale the baggie of toilet hairs. There were no bidders. Michael Jackson is known for odd predilections, including ownership of the skeleton of David Merrick, the elephant man. My little Gordian Knot theory on Elvis would have been complete if Michael Jackson had tracked down the Elvis maid and bought that bag of pubes. Someday, in the Enquirer you'll read the post-mortem inventory of the gloved one's creepatorium, and listed will be an odd ziploc bag of short-and-curlies, and you'll remember I told ya so.

She is draped across the sun-warmed mosaic tabletop, another page peeling from her finite stack of days. Her little body is heartbreakingly beautiful with its twitching paws and wet nose, and a taut little belly whose spots tan and darken when the long fingers of sunlight creep farther through our windows in winter months. If it could be bottled, I would keep this moment forever.

I awoke at 6:00am today, too early to get up. I went back to sleep and had the most amazing dream. I was in a car, driving out of a city on a very long bridge which traversed the confluence of several rivers. My mother and father were in front, I was in the back seat and free to focus on the frozen city and churning river. Suddenly, a great tidal surge of water burst the banks of one branch of the river, rushing the main and flooding the banks as I looked back. We passed another branch and the same thing, then we were across the bridge, climbing a road chiseled into a dark rocky crag. Icy snow coated everything like a century of dust, when a huge wave came across the top of the mountain crashing to the road behind us. I looked back on the cold bitter scene, all that destruction unfolding like a poem. Then we were over the mountain, and I saw Big Ben rendered in crystal-like ice, falling.