It's been a while. I wonder what random act brought me here today. The IPOD is shuffling through an assortment of eclectic alt music. I put too much store in music. It truly is a drug and like a drug, its effects weaken over time.
It's a strange world in which we live but then I guess it's always been a strange world it just seems a little stranger as you get older. A couple of week's ago Michael Jackson died. Like most people, I was hit by the initial shock. I wasn't a huge Michael Jackson fan. Most people I know weren't big MJ fans. I'm not sure I actually know anyone who has an album by him, (does calling it an album give away my age?). Surely someone I know must have had one cd of Michael Jackson tucked away. After the initial shock gave way a strange thing happened. I stopped thinking of Michael Jackson as a strange looking, alienesque creature who had little in touch with reality and started remembering him as that guy from the early 80s that was a monster musician. This would have been nice if it had lasted but within a couple of days, a media blitz constantly shoving MJ down my throat made me turn again to total ambivalence. Again, I wasn't a big fan of his music. I didn't see his death as a great tragedy. A drug overdose after all is self inflicated even if death was not the intended result.
All of this hype led me to think of the other death that day that being Farrah Fawcett. Fawcett's death was completely overshadowed by Jackson's death yet, at least personally, it affected me as much. When I was a child everyone seemed to proclaim Farrah Fawcett as perfection in beauty and frankly, I believed them. As celebrities go, FF was as big to me as MJ. What really strikes me as strange is why do I or anyone else care. I didn't know either one of them. Neither had even done anything that I had cared about in almost thirty years. Yet, of course I care. I'm not crying outside anyone's house and leaving flowers on the sidewalk but it does affect me.
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