ELVIS DEATH DAY

Today we can celebrate – should we care to – the thirty second anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley, and how, in all of the intervening years since he left the planet, every kind of conspiracy theory and more has been advanced to claim that Elvis was not dead at all but was living in anonymous seclusion, had been abducted by aliens, or, according to some very tricky cosmology, was the face on Mars. Me, I don’t really like to celebrate this August 16th Elvis Death Day. It’s just too fucking negative and depressing. I’d rather go for the birthday party on January 8th when we recall the Hillbilly Cat and generally throw the first party of each new-minted New Year. The Death Day is the dour domain of mean old Republican woman with wigs and facelifts of the kind who would happily follow Sarah Palin to perdition, and who go to Memphis to hold dismal convocations of grief for the big-fat-spangled-sandwich-eating-fucked-up-Vegas Elvis, and play his cover of the god-awful Timi Yuro song “Hurt” as a representation of totemic misery and stolen what-might-have-been.

I also kinda blame the Tennessee Tourist Board for the whole thing. I swear they promoted these Elvis Death Day antics as a wicked ploy to lure elderly visitors with credit cards to Memphis in the sweating big-river August heat and humidity, which probably kills a whole bunch of the faithful with delayed strokes and heart failure when they get back home. But hey, it’s another way the pull the plug on Grandma.

Elvis singing “Hurt.” Click here if you’re not depressed enough already, or scroll on for some suitably random artifacts from the Doc40 Elvis collection.