What?! Something Happend To Michael Jackson?!

The North Koreans could have set off a nuke this week that wiped out Hawaii, and we wouldn’t have heard about it for daaaaayyyys because of the tragic death of the King Of Pop!

I have to say that I was shocked to hear about the death of Michael Jackson. MSN is my homepage on my home computer, so when I opened my internet explorer on Thursday afternoon that was the first thing I saw. The big box at the top of the page was even bigger than usual, going across the top of the whole page…huge headline MICHAEL JACKSON DEAD AT AGE 50. It’s one of those things where you do a double-take and you wonder if you’re reading it right, so you stare at it for several seconds until you are sure you are reading it right.

Wow…didn’t see that one coming…

The media frenzy that has followed to the exclusion of all other news…that I did see coming!!

Especially when I scrolled down the page, and near the bottom of the page, where I almost missed it, was a little tiny picture of Farrah Fawcett and one line next to it “Remembering Farrah Fawcett”….What? Farrah died too? Another double-take….and my first thought was “shouldn’t this story be at least as prominent as the Jackson story?” Sure she was older (not by much though) and we knew she had cancer and would not be with us much longer, so it wasn’t as big a shock as Jackson’s passing…but still…Farrah has become some strange footnote to the Michael Jackson story…

“Michael Jackson died tragically today…oh yeah, Farrah Fawcett died too…now back to the tragic death Michael Jackson story! We’ll talk to anyone who has ever heard of Michael Jackson…we’ll talk to the doctors, the crowd in the street, every A-B-C and D-List actor, actress and musician that ever stepped in front of a camera…we’ll read their Twitters and Blogs and…gosh, too bad Farrah Fawcett isn’t still with us so we could ask her how the tragic death of Michael Jackson has affected her…I wonder what Ed McMahon would have to say about the tragic death of the tragically tragic Michael Jackson and his tragic life of tragedy!”

I was just happy that Ed McMahon had passed away earlier in the week, or we might never have heard about that!!!

I do feel that Michael Jackson’s passing is sad…sad mostly because he was so young. I’m 52, so anyone younger than me is too young to die…heck, anyone under 80 is too young. It bothers me because Michael had what many people would consider “everything”, yet I don’t think he ever got to enjoy it even for a minute….and believe me, that’s the saddest part of all.

I do feel a strange and selfish sadness at Michael’s passing…I feel sad about Farrah and Ed too…all for the same reason, and that is because they were all very talented, and they were all such icons, and they were all a huge piece of my life and my consciousness and now they are gone….and that closes the door on another little section of my life….

I know it's not about me, and I shouldn't make it about me, but damnit, this is the kind of thing that makes me feel old!!!

(heavy sigh)

Ralphie