and the location is my apartment, where in my own strange way, i'm mourning the death of michael jackson. Its hot as hell so i'm sitting here in only a pair of high waisted granny panties, but all the candles in the place are ablaze anyway, and i'm playing " I want you back" on repeat, thinking about life after an icon. i would not say that the news ever brought me tears, or that i could claim his music kept me going, nor i could i promise i never made a joke at his expense or deny that i was creeped out by his bizarre actions and wasted face in the recent past.
what i can say, though, is that in his absence i have lost a piece of the cultural landscape i was born into. No matter that his influence was not an overt or direct presence in my life, in 1984, the year of my birth, Michael Jackson was the most important player in the popular culture of the time. by then he was already a veteran performer and his record thriller was two years into the process of becoming the best selling album of all time. and still the sound of his childhood voice echoed from the past on radios in homes, cars and shopping centers where they entered the collective conciousness of a generation. True, the contemporaries of Macaulay Culkin, a lot of us grew up with a developed awareness of Whacko Jacko and the sort of school bus jokes that accompanied his increasingly erratic behavior. Still, the made for tv movies about his difficult childhood that hit airwaves in my adolesence still resonate, and now that I have the safety of hindsight, i can say that Michael Jackson's death has me saddened and a little lost. like everyone gone before his time, we haven't had time to prepare for the void. a part of my past, our past, the past, is gone.
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