Of Anger and Michael Jackson

Some think that I get angry too often. But that isn’t the problem. What irks them is that I usually don’t need any reason to get angry. Of course, I don’t agree. I believe that my cynicism permeates through and comes across as anger. I used to get angry about a lot of things. Since I quit smoking, been three years, things have been different for me. If you ask me now days I just don’t get as pissed off as I used to in the late 1990’s. I got angry last night. I was trying to catching something on the TV to put me to sleep. I could have finished the Elmore Leonard that I am sifting through these days but the lure of the idiot box was too strong. I switched it on and saw people eulogizing Michael Jackson on seven out of the ten odd channels that I frequent. I would have endured it but I lost on Stevie Wonder, Kobe Bryant and the others talking about the gloved one. Instead I saw one big boned African American woman, whom no one knew (she introduced herself as Congresswoman from some state, yak yak, yak) talk about MJ. Not only that she finished her ten minutes of stage time and actually saluted the departed!

No one talked about the nut job that Michael J. had become and why would they. Isn’t it funny that even hushes tones were amiss when he started transforming into a freak show in the mid 1980’s. Its one thing to separate the man from his crime and think of him in objective terms but even in his bizarre death no one said that he should have been chastised when his skin started turning white. Peter Pan syndrome anyone...I think he was more like Pinocchio replete with the nose and all. I loved his music. I still feel happy when Beat It plays some where. I can’t help but tell anyone who’s standing next to me that Eddie Van Halen played the crazy riff on the number or how Martin Scorsese directed Bad or how one watched the video time and again to spot Wesley Snipes but the fact remains that the man was a nut job. How screwed up was he that he actually has white children- not his sperm; the surrogate mother didn’t contribute anything besides her womb; the kids look as lost as any white child would be in a non-white part of the town.

But the changed man that I am, I started to look for something good in the bad. Let’s see. The Staples Center where the memorial was held looked like some part of Gurgaon. Don’t get me wrong even my friend agreed and she knows places. OK. Let’s see…hmmm yeah OK…it’s good that MJ passed over or else he’d have suffered more. But does that count when you do crazy things without coercion? Oh we’re looking for the goods. Yeah! I still have the original Thriller LP from my father’s collection. It’s in mint condition and a friend thinks that ebay needs to be graced by a visit. If watching reruns of Friends wasn’t enough seeing people talk about Michael Jackson as if he didn’t do anything crazy was strange. For a minute there I thought he’d almost moonwalk his way out of the coffin…