The GirlAlive Blog

The obligatory Michael Jackson post

June 26, 2009 on 11:58 am | In Life In General, music | 1 Comment

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m out of a job soon. The one thing I will truly miss about this job is the people I work with. They’re smart, witty and in several cases, every bit as twisted and sick as I am. Of course the conversation around here this morning was primarily about Michael Jackson. Here were some of the comments made in my office and elsewhere on the topic of Michael Jackson’s death. Some were from me. Some were not.

“He was like Elvis. He started out a talented musician and ended up a mutated freakish caricature of himself.”

“I don’t think I could stand another 20 years of watching bits fall off of him anyway.”

“They won’t need to embalm him. He’s mostly plastic already.”

“If they bury him, he’ll never decay. That’s what future civilizations will think humans looked like.”

“They can’t cremate him. Can you imagine the fumes? It would be like burning a tractor tire.”

“It’s a bit like when my grandma died. She was gone from dementia years before she actually died, so when she finally went, we didn’t really mourn because the person we loved was gone long before she died. It’s the same with him. We lost Michael Jackson, the musician, years ago. Now it’s just the passing of the demented shell that was left behind.”

“Elvis, ‘The King’, died at an early age. Now the ‘King of Pop’ died at an early age. Someone should warn Prince and Queen Latifah.”

Are we rude and insensitive? Yes we are. Tasteless? Certainly.

In reality, it sucks for his family and friends. They’ve lost someone who matters in their life, and that always hurts. At the same time, the world doesn’t get to stop and the tv schedules and radio play don’t change when a non-famous person dies. When a celebrity dies, the family has the whole world crowding around to offer encouragement and comfort. When a regular guy dies, most people never hear about it, and the family is told, “Deepest condolences. You have 3 days of bereavement leave and then you’ll have to dip into your vacation time.”

In the last year I’ve lost my husband’s best friend, David, (You think MJ was young at 50? David was 39.) a lifelong friend of the family, Don, and my grandfather’s girlfriend, Jeannie. Plus two hamsters and a guinea pig. I prefer to save up my grief and sympathy for the people who really matter to me, not for a has-been singer I’ve never met.