In our family everybody was a comedian, even when we prayed we told God a joke and hoped he liked it enough to listen to the rest.

A few time I asked my Mother why I had never meet my Grandfather (my Grandmother has a small photo of as a young man  with  crazy smile holding his upturned Panama hat full of fire-crackers, obviously my kind of guy) but the question made her angry, angry and sad.

She snapped back, “he’s a ventriloquist on the radio, his work keeps him away”, she hit me when I asked what time and station.

Years later when I was in college some Great Aunt I never heard of contacted us with sad news, my Grandfather had died of cancer in Phoenix.

He’d been living out there she said since this release from prison some years earlier having served out his full sentence on Federal mail-fraud charges.

Too bad, I thought as the pieces now fell into place, wish I could have hear him tell the story of what happened, probably would have been pretty funny.

by-Doug Mathewson

So in this dream me and Elvis Presley are about eight or nine years old, drinking big glasses of cold milk at his Mom’s kitchen table.

We’re telling each other about our past lives, all of them we can remember anyway going way back.

Every single life of mine had me as one kind or another of dirt farmer, just digging Polish potatoes, picking Alabama cotton, pulling weeds under the Mexican melons, and I don’t even know the name of what I was growing when I was Chinese!

Elvis had this funny look on his face, eyes half closed and mouth half smiling but was all serious business when he told how he remember every single one of his amazing lives.

He told me about driving a golden chariot pulled by six jet-back horses, he told me about fighting with a sword in The Crusades, he told me about being a merman with a long beard and a tail, he even told me some darn fool story about being the first man to walk on the moon.

All I could do was sit there in my Leave it To Beaver striped shirt, swinging my legs back and forth drinking my milk while I thought: “Elvis surely is the King, king of the
bullshitters that is!

by-Doug Mathewson

Hell was busy, but still couldn’t make ends meet. Volume was up and the bottom line way down, and in Hell way down is really way down. No longer were they attracting the
high-end lush and intricate souls that the founder had built the place on. Souls hard won from Philosophers, Scientists and Kings. Nowadays it was just the  same old stream of Walmart shoppers who had simply fucked-up. Demons and Devils alike were on four day thirty six hour weeks, muttering some mindless management mantra about doing “more with less.” Many staff members had planned transferring to the White House as Dark Lord Cheney had promised, but after November second, all of those positions were no more.
“Oh what to do oh what to do” they moaned in agonized chorus, till a nasty little imp
named Brimstone cried “ There’s always The Motor Vehicle Department!”

by-Doug Mathewson

Brunt Coffee Hot,
Burnt Coffee Cold.
Served Up At The X-tra Mart
Tasted Nine Days Old.
Dislike It Hot.
Dislike it Cold.
Matters Not To X-tra Mart,
‘Cuz It’s Sold Sold Sold.

by-Doug Mathewson

Spence wasn’t going to do it, no way.

Such a selfish thing, her eating all those pills in that road side motel, and nobody sure why since the police kept her note.

His sister-in-law only and never a damned thing more to him.

Older brother Larry has six more years in Mowhawk Correctional Facility  way upstate New York and no week-end funeral pass even for his wife.

Spence knew he had to head the family and be a man about it.

First step was to forge a note to get himself out of school.

by-Doug Mathewson

My Chiropractor got upgraded to first class on a dog-legged flight from JFK to Miami
via somehow Milwaukee.

She sat next to a charming older gent, and over the course the flight, and their lively discussion he bought her a drink or two.

After he deplaned to catch his Los Angles bond connection, the cabin steward gushed “on-my-god, do you realize who you were talking to?, Adam West – TV’s original Batman, that’s who!!!

The show had come and gone before my Chiropractor was born, and more likely the TV reruns she and her four sisters watched were “Charlie’s Angels” or “Scooby Doo”, either one had better fashion sense and certainly much better examples of interpersonal relationships.

So that makes me two degrees of separation from The Dark Knight, and therefore
three from Eartha Kitt.

And now you, dear reader are three and four, meow my darlings, meow.

by-Doug Mathewson