...and he loves it when she calls him names

So Michael Jackson's dead, huh? Never much cared for his music, his transformation into an alien or his child fucking so color me non-plussed by his passing. A friend wrote me livid over the sadness being expressed over the death of a pedophile. That is of course not really fair to the mourners. They are not so much mourning Michael as they are coming to terms with their own mortality. A part of their youth has disappeared and put them one day closer to death. So they mourn a pasty faced pedophile as a way of coming to terms with their own impending death. Fortunately my experience with celebrity death started early enough to inure me to such sentiment.

I was in 4th grade when my grade school squeeze (who will shoot me dead in the head if she ever sees herself referred to in that manner) came to me as soon as I got to school with news much colder than that December morning: John Lennon was dead. Shot by a crazed fan outside his home. I remember thinking at the time, "So?" But I watched the way that news hit my classmates and - even worse - my teachers! We got an announcement letting everyone know what had happened and I saw tears in Miss Terry's eyes. I thought at the time, "What is the big deal? None of you knew him."

None of it really made that much sense. Especially not from my classmates. Who was the walrus to them? This guy was no relation to them. He was not someone whose absence would affect them on a daily basis. Why the grief? It took my friend Mike Stanton to explain it to me, "They just need to cry every once in a while, I guess."