Today my boss came in to work after a long night of thinking, drunk with thoughts. The innovation was infectious. I’m exhausted.
June 2009
31 posts
“
Years ago Michael and I were having a deep conversation about life in general.
I can’t recall the exact subject matter but he may have been questioning me about the circumstances of my Fathers Death.
At some point he paused, he stared at me very intensely and he stated with an almost calm certainty, “I am afraid that I am going to end up like him, the way he did.”
I promptly tried to deter him from the idea, at which point he just shrugged his shoulders and nodded almost matter of fact as if to let me know, he knew what he knew and that was kind of that.
14 years later I am sitting here watching on the news an ambulance leaves the driveway of his home, the big gates, the crowds outside the gates, the coverage, the crowds outside the hospital, the Cause of death and what may have led up to it and the memory of this conversation hit me, as did the unstoppable tears.
A predicted ending by him, by loved ones and by me, but what I didn’t predict was how much it was going to hurt when it finally happened.
The person I failed to help is being transferred right now to the LA County Coroners office for his Autopsy.
All of my indifference and detachment that I worked so hard to achieve over the years has just gone into the bowels of hell and right now I am gutted.
I am going to say now what I have never said before because I want the truth out there for once.
Our relationship was not “a sham” as is being reported in the press. It was an unusual relationship yes, where two unusual people who did not live or know a “Normal life” found a connection, perhaps with some suspect timing on his part. Nonetheless, I do believe he loved me as much as he could love anyone and I loved him very much.
I wanted to “save him” I wanted to save him from the inevitable which is what has just happened.
His family and his loved ones also wanted to save him from this as well but didn’t know how and this was 14 years ago. We all worried that this would be the outcome then.
At that time, In trying to save him, I almost lost myself.
He was an incredibly dynamic force and power that was not to be underestimated.
When he used it for something good, It was the best and when he used it for something bad, It was really, REALLY bad.
Mediocrity was not a concept that would even for a second enter Michael Jackson’s being or actions.
I became very ill and emotionally/ spiritually exhausted in my quest to save him from certain self-destructive behavior and from the awful vampires and leeches he would always manage to magnetize around him.
I was in over my head while trying.
I had my children to care for, I had to make a decision.
The hardest decision I have ever had to make, which was to walk away and let his fate have him, even though I desperately loved him and tried to stop or reverse it somehow.
After the Divorce, I spent a few years obsessing about him and what I could have done different, in regret.
Then I spent some angry years at the whole situation.
At some point, I truly became Indifferent, until now.
As I sit here overwhelmed with sadness, reflection and confusion at what was my biggest failure to date, watching on the news almost play by play The exact Scenario I saw happen on August 16th, 1977 happening again right now with Michael (A sight I never wanted to see again) just as he predicted, I am truly, truly gutted.
Any ill experience or words I have felt towards him in the past has just died inside of me along with him.
He was an amazing person and I am lucky to have gotten as close to him as I did and to have had the many experiences and years that we had together.
I desperately hope that he can be relieved from his pain, pressure and turmoil now.
He deserves to be free from all of that and I hope he is in a better place or will be.
I also hope that anyone else who feels they have failed to help him can be set free because he hopefully finally is.
The World is in shock but somehow he knew exactly how his fate would be played out some day more than anyone else knew, and he was right.
I really needed to say this right now, thanks for listening.
” —Lisa Marie Presley, on her Myspace blogMichael Jackson
In 1977, Elvis died. It was an anticlimatic moment, and an anticlimactic death. Long past his prime, and even past a comeback that failed to cohere into some sort of second-act respectability, his death left many things unresolved, a fact attested to by all the posthumous sightings. What was unresolved isn’t exactly clear: there were secrets yet to come out, true, a drug habit that could’ve been kicked, all right, and an embrace of schmaltz that could be rejected. But all seem like unlikely outcomes. It was just an unexpected place to cut off the arc, like someone realized they’d run out of ideas five years back and couldn’t think of anywhere else to take it. Elvis was written into a corner. But he died just when the changes he’d wrought were, according to popular legend anyway, at their moribund peak. 1977 was the year that dinosaur rock was theoretically killed by punk, the supposed “year zero.” Taste killed him, maybe, thinking if it cut out the living embodiment of lazy, bloated, self-satisfied rock the body would die off, too.
Which is basically the situation we have here with MJ. This is an unsatisfying resolution: there was no successful comeback, no redemption, no elder statesman period, not even a blaze of glory to go out on, just a middle-aged heart attack. But at the same time, we are in some sort of end times of all he represents. The world of celebrity journalism and gossip seems to have hit rock bottom, self-sustaining on a steady diet of nothing, running on the fumes of a system totally contained within their walls and unconnected with any sort of exterior fame. Megafame itself is mostly dead, a few old stars aside. Maybe this is a kind of year zero, too. Maybe something else will come along. Maybe it’s politics. God help us all.
When I turned on the TV last night the first thing I heard was “the King of Pop is dead, tonight, after going into cardiac arrest…” All I could think was that I felt sad, but I couldn’t think of a single unselfish reason to feel bad that he was gone. That is not the right response to the death of a cultural icon.
Farrah Fawcett’s passing made me feel sad for her. She loved life. She didn’t want to die. She had things to live for and reasons why she would rather have stayed on Earth a little longer. Did Michael?
I dug around in my brain for a reason to be sad for his passing, but never came up with anything. I kept going back to the idea that he was probably never truly happy a single day in his life. Suddenly his death felt more like the end of a lifelong prison sentence than the end of a life of fame and glory.
He made a lot of money but it wasn’t his own. He was always in debt to someone and didn’t have the maturity to deal with his finances properly. He had a lot of people around him and adoring fans everywhere he looked, but I don’t think he ever really knew or understood what love was about in a personal sense. He was a prisoner of his own circumstances. Circumstances that I’m inclined to believe he only “chose” because it was the only lifestyle he ever knew & the only thing that made him feel important to anyone.
The poor man never had a chance to be anything but a machine built to entertain the drooling masses. Sure he was an incredible performer and did some amazing things for music, but his life was so tragic that I just can’t really mourn his passing.
So I say thank goodness that he’s free from the monstrosity that his life had become. Thank goodness that he’s free from enduring the public scrutiny, shame, and accusations that followed him wherever he went. Thank goodness he can finally stop flipping between hiding from the public and begging it for acceptance.
I hope that people see that our obsession with tragedy and fame is what turns these brave & talented people into helpless pawns. I hope people realize that we helped cause his demise by loving Michael Jackson the celebrity and not caring at all about Michael Jackson as a person. I hope that in the future people learn to leave celebrities alone so their only hope for an escape isn’t an untimely death.
My 9 month old laptop just completely stopped turning on today. Sent it out for service. Estimated down time 3-5 weeks. I might not survive.
I found a peanut
in my pile of clean laundry. A warm, polished-looking, slightly crumbly peanut. In my laundry. At 2am.
That’s the sort of week I’m having.
Cher = not motivational
Some really funny shit happened while I was working downtown in Detroit at the River Days festival this weekend. One group, the Charlie Wheeler Band, asked me to pass out their CD’s to people who looked like they were enjoying the show. I had 200 so I was giving them away pretty indiscriminantly. I gave one to a man who was sitting in front of the sound booth, alone, with a cooler full of Coors Light. He stood up as I approached to hand it to him and as his movements disturbed the air I noticed a slightly spoiled smell. Oops - homeless guy! As I was realizing my mistake we had this conversation…
Guy: Who’s this?
Me: The band that’s on stage right now. They’re free.
Guy: Oh! You know, I’m a homeless guy.
Me: Yeah?
Guy: Yeah, see I was living in this parking garage and I thought things were going pretty well. My buddy was holding onto my boom box for a while.
Me: Uh huh?
Guy: So see, he gave it back to me but I’m not sure it works. I think he broke it or somethin. I know the cassette player works, but I only have a Cher CD and that never really motivated me to try and see if it will play.
Me: Oh… cool. Are you going to try it now?
Guy: HELL YEAH I AM! WOOOOOOOOOOOO!
“My tamale’s all dried up!”
—While working in Detroit at the River Days festival, some old guy with a mouth full of something that didn’t really resemble teeth had a 5 minute conversation with me about who-knows-what. This was the only thing I could understand and I had to repeat it back to him to confirm.
US Military: White Supremacists > Gays →
salon.com
See also:
Prescription drugs > Marijuana
NFL players > Prison sentences for DUI/manslaughter
Strip malls > Nature
Was it really "buck" or are you just trying to coin a phrase?
Whoever choreographed the contemporary dance that Karla & Jonathan did on So You Think You Can Dance tonight is fucking genious. Stacey somethingorother from Canada. Her lift transitions are insane. Who is this lady?
I hate watching this show because of the ridiculous fanfare, but there aren’t really many other places to watch people dancing like that these days.
Is there some kind of fine arts management union I can join?
I wonder if there’s something like “selective hearing” but for email. Is there? What’s it called?
It’s like I’m actually supposed to believe that everybody gets my emails (from my two gmail accounts, which are linked together) except for TWO PEOPLE, who both claim to get them sometimes but not always. I’m highly suspicious since a quick search proved that they only respond to my messages when I’m answering their questions but not when I’m the one asking them for information. Or money. This is highly inconvenient since I’m contracted to do work for them and there’s a final deadline looming in the near future. There’s also a pay date coming up that I don’t feel entirely confident about, since I invoice them via email.
I’ve put up with a lot of crap lately, but being forced to deal with setting up Outlook so I can have a fucking read reciept on all of my business emails has got to be sufficient grounds for pleading temporary insanity, right?
“credit card issuer Capital One (COF) reported horrible default numbers for the month of May. Why’d they do that first thing in the morning on a Monday? Turns out it was an accident. They tried to file the data on Friday night — which is when you typically dump bad news. Eagle-eyed filings watcher Michelle Leder realized it was filed at 5:36 on Friday, 6 minutes after the deadline, meaning it only showed up this morning.”
—
Whoops, Capital One Tried Burying Their Horrible Credit Card Numbers
If Capitol One can’t even dupe reporters, how on earth are they going to dupe investors into thinking their cardholders have a chance in hell of paying back their mountain of debt.
(via financegeek) (via poortaste)
Well, they couldn’t convince me to stay with them after 5 years of their poor business practices, that’s for sure. I don’t think they’re very proficient in the persuasion department. They had to continuously lie and tell me that my card was closed or that they couldn’t close it for one reason or another for four months before I threatened to report them. I continued to get a 2 page statement with a $0.00 balance and about 8 additional junk mail pages from them monthly for another 4 months until I called and complained. Is Capital One good at anything besides making pretty credit cards?
Ow, crap.
First sunburn of the season on set up day of my first fair of the spring/summer season. Bad start.
We came back to the hotel to find the Weather Channel personalities [anchors? reporters? hosts?] joking about a “little change!” in the weather forecast which, until this evening, had been 74 degrees and partly cloudy all weekend. LOL, WEATHER CHANNEL! YOU GOT ME, YOU LITTLE STINKER! I still don’t find it particularly amusing.
Tomorrow morning begins the scramble to open the show, organize volunteers, hold an emergency weather preparedness meeting, then locate and buy a rain coat that is actually water proof (my last two turned out to be water-safe, but not water proof) before The Gloom sets in at noon and I spend another 8 hours soggy. Once this week was enough, thank you.
I only wish my shoes weren’t made of a meshy-substance for superior ventillation. Having no choice but to smoosh, smoosh, smoosh around for 3 more long days before I get home will send me into a firey rage. I am envisioning the money I had set aside for buying respectable, adult work attire being diverted into an emergency “1082th pair of sneakers” fund. I am envisioning my appreciation of dry shoes melting into a puddle of buyers remorse by Tuesday.
Today, I finally got around to eating breakfast at 6:30pm. It was an 11 hour old (ie. stale) apple fritter. If I’m lucky, I’ll be huddled in a tent attempting to enjoy at least a few bites of a calzone for breakfast before someone needs something from me by 2pm.
No joke, this is the easiest art fair I’ve done in 4 years.
Greenday
What are you doing? Please stop.
“I was not expecting to broadcast details of my love life there, but it happened because I’m in love and it’s all I think about and that’s that. If this has bummed you out or destroyed what you’ve projected on me, fair enough - it’s probably time for you to leave.”
—Trent Reznor. It’s so funny watching people try not to become the love cliche. Especially when it’s the person who wrote Pretty Hate Machine.
This is awful
My mom just called me from D.C. She was on the third floor of the Holocaust Museum when some crazy fuck came in and started shooting people in the lobby. I can’t find any news links yet as this JUST happened. This is fucking awful.
omg I hope it was just a car backfiring or something. I feel like I’m going to be sick.
