Jesse are you listening?

I was listening to Scott Walker's The Drift, because it's October, and that's the time of year when you willfully scare yourself shitless, and there's no music in the world that does that better than Scott Walker's later work. In particular, my interest is very much renewed in "Jesse," a song about Elvis Presley's stillborn twin brother, Jesse Garon Presley.

I guess I'm sort of wondering why the thought of Elvis Presley having a stillborn twin brother freaks me out so much, aside from Scott Walker's horrifying music. I think the fact that he had a name (and thus the tiniest bit of an identity) is a good place to start. I guess the Presleys had names picked out for their twins already, not knowing that one of them would come out already dead. How do you pick which one gets which name in that situation? What logic led to Jesse being the brother that never was? Were we a coin flip away from getting future rock music legend Jesse Presley, with poor Elvis Presley being confined to a mere footnote?

That kind of makes me think about an alternate universe where the other twin had been stillborn. What might Jesse Presley have been, had he lived and Elvis died? Why did Elvis live and Jesse die? How many future stars exist only in a parallel universe where they weren't stillborn?

It also makes me consider the thousands and thousands of things in life that have to happen exactly as they happen to lead us to where we are. How many would-be composers are there who have just as much talent as Brian Wilson, except that, say, they didn't grow up in California in the 1950s and 60s? Or maybe they did, but their dad didn't beat them as a child. Or what if Elvis had received a rifle for his 11th birthday instead of his first guitar?

Life weirds me out. This kind of stuff keeps me up at night sometimes. Amateur philosophy hour over.