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Michael Jackson died. I feel like those words should be weirder to write. I guess his life had become so tragic already - he was such a fallen hero - that this almost seems like an inevitable next step. I remember thinking “Is he really going to do 50 comeback shows in London?” I couldn’t see that happening. As if he was so foregone the only direction I could imagine him headed was down. Anyways, very very sad. For his kids especially.

I’m very aware these days - perhaps it’s all the time I spend on perezhilton.com - of the risks of celebrity. Any fantasies I once held about the fun of being famous are long gone. Now it just looks like an incredibly vulnerable place to be, and that most actors/musicians are in a frantic, stressed scramble to get big or stay big. I mean, does it look like fun to be Tom Cruise, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Nicole Kidman, etc? There’s such a desperate, panicked air to all their professional choices…like, “Pleeeeeease, for the love of the god, let me stay where I am, or once was…”

It’s the danger of success in any field, really. Where do you go when you’ve reached the top? A newscaster was saying last night that Michael Jackson ‘began to turn weird’ after the release of Thriller because he was so freaked out that he could never be that good again. I think about that with our generation, so many of us high-achievers. So many of us with BIG dreams of how we want our lives to go. And we’ve all done pretty well so far. Good colleges, proud parents…everything is on track. But are we maybe setting ourselves up for disappointment? Because we can’t be THAT golden?

I’ve always though celebrities were an interesting metaphor for our generation. People with EVERY choice in the world. But maybe people aren’t MEANT to have that many choices. Wouldn’t it have been better for MJ if he COULDN’T have bought Bubbles the chimp. Like, some paths in life are best not taken? So what happens when there’s nothing stopping you?

Anyways, goodbye to the King of Pop. (Farrah Fawcett too. Sad sad sad.)

It’d be nice to remember him like this:

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