After many years, apparently Morpheus has decided to end his absence from my life.  I’ve recently started dreaming again and I don’t care for it.  In fact, I find it rather annoying.  I guess I should consider myself lucky: Uncle Morphy has never plagued me with nightmares, night terrors, or the hellish-sounding sleep paralysis. But a good panic-inducing nightmare might actually be refreshing at this point.  My dreams, dear reader, have become extraordinarily mundane.  Typical, even. Take last night, for example. I dreamt that I was back in community college as a student, showing up after a long absence only to find it was final exam day, and I was woefully unprepared. Sound familiar? That’s what I mean…who hasn’t had the same or similar dreams hundreds of times in their lives? Back in my adolescent years, this terror-inducing trope was at least somewhat applicable to my waking world. But now it has grown positively boring. I keep dreaming about common interactions that apparently my subconscious thinks are relevant, but I can assure you they are not. But while I’m in the dream, I’m having to deal with someone’s whining, or some issue someone has with me, and trying to resolve the issue, which stresses me out and causes disruption in my sleep. Then I wake up, immediately realize the problem and people (typically) don’t even exist, and the entire dream was just a lame fuck-around. What once would have brought on cold sweats and heart palpitations now barely warrant a yawn as I open my eyes at dawn. Maybe Morpheus is just messing with me. But I refuse to relinquish my hard-won peace of mind to the whims of a capricious dream-weaver. I can only surmise that Morpheus is attempting to lull me back into a state of complacency before unleashing his more twisted creations upon me. But I don’t know…nobody’s talking.

And so much for all that.  We have a bit of DPS business to attend to today.  Because on this day in 1544, Italian poet Torquato Tasso was born in Sorrento, near Naples.  I’m sure you’ve never heard of him, literate reader, but you can trust me on this one: dude was a literary firebrand – his epic Jerusalem Delivered (1581) is a blood-and-guts tale of the First Crusade, packed with heroic knights, clashing swords, and a defiant spirit.  Tasso’s life was as wild as his work: he battle mental illness, got locked up in a madhouse by the Duke of Ferrara for seven years, and still managed to crank out verse that’s revered still.  He was set to be crowned “King of Poets” by the Pope in 1595, but he died just days before the ceremony – talk about a tragic, badass exit.  His mix of brilliance and chaos make him a legend.  Happy Birthday, Uncle Torq!

N.P.: “Hot Stuff” – Voxxx