LAST NIGHT, I dreamed about Barack Obama. I'm certain I'm not the only one out there doing this (including Mrs. Obama, Democrat nerds, and Barry himself). He and I were discussing campaign strategy just before his big speech in a high school gymnasium. I was helping by handing out small plastic pom-poms to the crowd (yellow for McCain supporters, green for Obama supporters, and none for Hilary; I had a very funny joke to tell people when they asked about this, but can't remember now what it was) and reminding him that John McCain probably wasn't going to show. Sadly, Obama had just missed an excellent women's ice hockey game played in the gym before his speech; luckily for us, the players fell through the ice and the ice then vanished, so there was little to do in the way of cleanup.

I don't know what the hell was up with the hockey- other than the fact that I've missed the entire NHL season this year, much to my dismay- but Obama is going to be here in Memphis today, potentially, at the Mason Temple. Today, you see, is April 3rd, 2008, forty years to the day after Martin Luther King's final speech in Memphis at the Temple ('I have been to the mountaintop!'), the day before he was assassinated not five blocks from where I now sit. McCain and Hilary are going to be here; they've already announced it, their people are downtown securing all kinds of perimeters. Obama, though, hasn't said anything at all. No confirmations. No denials. I suspect he is going to be here with bells on, not sitting in the audience like his plastic-fantastic competition, but up at the podium in the Mason Temple, giving a speech which almost certainly will contain the phrase, 'I have been to the mountaintop!'

Last night I had a long dinner with charming company, one of whom was my former stepmother. She highly recommended Obama's biography (written in 1995 and containing references to smoking dope, doing blow, and bangin' pussy) and outlined it in fascinating detail. The more I learned, the more I liked him, and I do hope he's downtown this evening getting Memphis voters all riled up about voting for him. It's a tough road; here in Tennessee, there's only the small Democratic pocket of Memphis versus The Rest Of The State. However, a large voter turnout in Memphis can- and has, notably during the Clinton elections- sway the whole pointy state away from the Republicans and into the loving embrace of democracy. We can only hope. Hope, and play ice hockey.