Sunday, January 11, 2004

Seeing the new World Champion Elvis Impersonator, Robert Washington, perform last night was surreal. I had a profound spiritual experience where everything I once imagined about the cult of Elvis imploded into a psychadelic vision of slavery, the civil rights movement, Black Panthers, and the confounding boundaries of race. Here was an African-American man taking back the "blackness" that Elvis used to catch the white, McCarthy-repressed world of the 50's on fire. I saw it as not only as a coup on "white, America" but the as-yet-pinnacle in the slow-turning wheel of my own private American revolution... There he was dancing and singing on the stage in front of all these clumsy, embarrassed, beautiful white people who could only stare. And all I could do was sob uncontrollably with Trisha wiping the tears from my cheeks. It was like the ghost of Elvis Presley and Robert Washington were doing tag-team on my Spirit. It made me realize that everything, all my cancers, will turn out benign in the end. And that the world is okay.

(Editor's note: Jack Norton read this and said I could make a million dollars writing romance novels. He's just afraid of the fuzzy rabbits in his own closet.)

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