Elvis and Me

This is a red letter day. I put Chapter 12 together in recod time. I started writing it around 7:00 a.m. and I just finished it a few minutes ago and the time now is 12:55 p.m. This is a good feeling, let me tell you. I have been telling my wife, Dottie, ever since yesterday that I think I have "turned the corner" insofar as how Misdemeanors & Felonies: A Memoir is progressing. Today chinched it, I believe, for the time being at lest, I have a good handle on the book. The words are coming easier and I have a better feel about each chapter that I write.

Chapter 12 takes place as Elvis Presley comes screaming onto the world stage and rattles my brain. Actually Jerry Lee Lewis coined the phrase "rattle my brain" in the song "Great Balls Of Fire." But it was Elvis who affected me the most early on. There would be pleanty of time for The Killer, and actually I liked Jerry Lee as a ballad singer rather than rock and roll, but that's just me. The sudden appearance of Elvis Presley on the radio and even television was really something else. I sure had never lived through anything like it in my young life, and I don't think most people even older than me had either. His songs, his in-your-face persona took hold of me and I began to think seriously at that time about about leaving Taylor. I was in the ninth grade and it would be three more long years before that could be accomplished. The book is about to take a drastic turn as I, myself, took a drastic move in my life . . . The begining of my misdemeanors and felonies as it were.

There is something very strange, however that is going on with me as I turn this corner. Although the words are coming, and are coming pretty easily, something is going on inside of me. It is like, as I write the words onto the screen there is a very pronounced "hollow" spot inside my chest. It doesn't exactly hurt, this hollow spot, but it is there and it is real. I have a funny feeling that this sensation will continue as I go continue knocking out chapters and may even start hurting for real. Just now, in fact, I had to get up and take an anti-acid pill because, well, my chest began to feel like indigestion. Do the things I write about, and will write about, cause a physical reaction? I think that it probably will, and already is. For someone to write about his life when his life hasn't been such a steller one can give him pleanty of tension, I can already see that. Can that tension promote chest pains and even eventual physical problems as I write about my life when it really get to be bad? I have a feeling that it also can do that. I don't care. Well, I do care that it could affect me to such an extent that I am unable to continue writing the story, but the "hollowness" and other feelings inside my body will not deter me from my goal, the finishing of the book and its eventual publishing. I imagine I'll go to Lulu for the publishing, they turn out a good product.

NOTES:

Write To Murder . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/956621

Margaret and David: A Love Story . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/1072842

My Mother's Revenge . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/1132742