Slime! Ah, but what slime! A writer going one-on-one with innuendo, exclamation points, rumors, half-truths, and gossip. Dreck! These are scandal sheets whose most sensational and improbable stories come from England or Bora-Bora or Waco, Texas – places too inaccessible for the average reader to check for accuracy. Sludge! This is the kind of “journalism” in which verification of alien visitation consists of a pencil sketch that could be bested by your seventh-grade cousin. Ooze! The yellow journalism of the 1890’s pales into pastel anemia beside the day-glo tints of this stuff.

Over the past year, in the name of journalistic research, I have undertaken a long and lurid slide into the dank, dark maw of Tabloidland. It’s cover story (replete with an “artist’s conception” picture) proclaimed, “ELVIS IS ALIVE! The King admits his funeral was faked and tells of secret life in Michigan!” I guess it was the Michigan reference that got me, and started me babbling to the checkout girl about Elvis and the Tabloids by the time I left, she was looking at me funny. Just today I made a spectacle of myself in the grocery store when I couldn’t contain my glee at finding a copy of the Weekly World News.

On Wednesday he delivered wedged between New York magazine and Architectural Digest, a smudgy copy of the Sun. Last Monday, as he has each Monday for about a year, he delivered to my mailbox copies of The New Yorker and the National Enquirer.

Elvis king lives guitar clock