butterfly dream

There is a great disturbance in the pop-culture Force.
 

Michael Jackson is dead. He who has been in my vision for as long as I have been aware of the wider media universe, who has acted first as the ultimate definition of cool, then of wretched excess, then plain ol'what-planet-is-this-guy-from weirdness...isn't there any more.

I did not expect to be nearly as moved by this as I am.

Well, perhaps moved is the wrong word. Something more along the lines of what happens when you try and go home again. Your worldview has been so comfily arranged for so long that when a piece is removed the whole thing feels unsettled for a little while. Farrah Fawcett, who also died today, was undoubtedly a beautiful, talented and courageous lady, and my heart goes out to those who knew and loved her, but she had no such niche in my memory.

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The Jackson family apparently took a few stabs at being Jehovah's Witnesses over the years; our belief system revolves around a final resurrection to a Paradise earth. The great tragedy of Jackson's life is that something - a whole lot of somethings, all of which will be lovingly analysed in exhausting detail over the next weeks, so I don't have to - drove him to try and recreate that Paradise here and now, in this system of things. By the time he was done he'd pretty much canonised himself Lord Protector of All That is Pure & Innocent Amen.

As many of your major works of literature have observed, an imperfect human playing God is never a smart idea. Playing God with American celebrity culture for a throne...now that's just prime cosmic comedy.

So we laughed - and then cringed, as you do when the joke just goes on way too long, reveals way too much. Then...finally left, shaking our heads.

A lot of us did, anyway. Unfortunately (speaking of great tragedies) a sense of humour is not universal among the human race; never mind perspective. So a lot of other people bought wholeheartedly into Saint Michael. The misunderstood emissary, mocked and bullied by a world too jealous and shortsighted to appreciate his Vision.
This is what I'm really afraid of now. That natural guilt re: slandering the dead will translate into a huge backlash of mindless sentiment. A warm collective glow will arise from the media - which after all has been ready with fists poised melodramatically over breasts ever since the Britney circus - and suddenly the World Will Understand. Perhaps he really was a saint, after all!

Um, no. He was a humongously talented kid that warped into a sad, strange monster, finally unable to cope with reality to such an extent that - guilty of an actual crime or not - he honestly didn't see anything wrong with his taking little boys to bed. I'm not even sure if a proper understanding of what led to all this would be worthwhile, so little of it applies to real life. It'd be like holding Howard Hughes up as a warning example of overwork among businessmen.
 

So I'm sitting here, and I wanna do a Bob & Ray post to cheer myself up, but I don't really have anything. (Other than some mild curiosity about what a 'magic lantern' might involve, in 1940's usage. In the new ep I listened to today, the organist asks Ray if it's true that Mary McGoon is selling them, and suddenly they're both giggling, and Ray-as-Mary goes off on a 'giddy' falsetto ramble that has nothing to do with anything and is clearly totally baffling Bob. It's all about as vaguely disturbing as these two ever got.)

I'm sitting here a week until moving day, in a bare-ish small room made ever smaller with a scatter of cardboard boxes. For the past month we have been living in this manner, oddly reminiscent of the Collyer brothers only with less agoraphobia. Some of the boxes are full - mostly of my favourite things - but more are empty, and all are skewed oddly in and around traffic areas. I have tripped over more cardboard in the past six weeks than...well, than most people do in six weeks, anyway. Probably in their entire lives.

Which is about as long as I'd rather go without staring at cardboard. Hideously depressing stuff, all sort of blank and...beige. Except the ones from the liquor store. Even though this is only the third move I've made in the last dozen years, boxes with wine labels on the side still raise the hackles of the thirty-odd Shoe family shuffles prior to that. Endless cast-off boxes hauling the flimsier family possessions to...houses that were still under renovation by other people when we stayed in them...OK, actually just one of those. Still, random guy tromping across our kitchen for a couple months drinking beer and muttering, that was memorable.

*shakes self* Right, enough of that. Think of new furniture, in a new room - my new room. With a door. Also, a walk-in closet, have I mentioned that? There are new shelves in there now. And new bathroom fixtures, and new appliances. I mean, the appliances aren't in the closet, of course. They're in the kitchen. Which makes it even nicer. Think too of the friends next door, with whom I am (finally) going to see Star Trek next Tuesday. And the hot potato salad Shoemom is making for the painting party Saturday.

So I'm really having angst for no particular reason at all - she tells herself, firmly. I am simply tired and cranky and blocked on that last game level on the iPod and just got back from Wal-Mart. Before that, there was an entire workday getting nothing at all done, because of a missing sample that the vendor claims is the only thing standing between fit approval and production, and why the hell are they entrusting us with their only sample in all of everywhere to begin with, don't ask, because I don't know. I am at a low ebb.

So I have been spending most of my time out in the newly summery twilights lately. Hovering somewhere in the gap between wishing fervently that something - anything - might happen, and realising that even then it might not bridge the whole. I am thinking that this may be one of the things purgatory means.