ultra laser

this chest cold is fantastic.

it's four o clock on MONDAY THE 29TH why are you shooting off fireworks already?

the kid is not my son

it’s been kind of surreal watching people’s varying reactions to michael jackson’s passing. my own reaction was that if you wanted to mourn him, we had plenty of opportunity over the last 15ish years. as has been stated elsewhere, he stopped being the michael jackson of our youths a long long time ago.

what i hadn’t quite realized, until i saw the depth of the response to his passing, was just how much a part of his time he was. I mean, i was born in 1981. to a certain extent, from my point of view, star wars and michael jackson have always been there. he was huge already by the time i was really old enough to pay attention, and if his best work was behind him, he was still michael jackson.

so while his fading relevence always struck me as kind of a tragedy, it wasn’t a loss to me in the sense that something once given had been taken away. it was just the inevitable march of time. michael jackson was, already from the day i was born. he had had his run, his time, and it was ending, and i had missed it’s peak. but at the same time, his work was still there, would always be there. and whatever else happened to him afterwards, he’d still have made thriller and bad and captain eo and so on.

so while i personally don’t mourn his death as excessively worse than any other, and while i don’t entirely like that his death has overshadowed the iranian election among other important stories, i do understand why people are having such a massive and public catharsis and why it’s so contradictory to our own expressed feelings over the last ten years or more.

we’d be having nearly the same conversation if george lucas had died. he’d stop being a tragic figure, and go back to being the man who made star wars.