It’s been a bizarre week. Nine dead on the Metro crash. Farrah loses her battle with Cancer. Michael Jackson unexpectedly dies. Distant deaths of people I didn’t know but have had some sort of impact or memory in my life. Thursday I found out I’m separated by one degree to the driver of the Metro train that crashed.

In 1977 I had “the poster” iron-on on a yellow tshirt, and wore it to school. My principal made me turn my tshirt inside out for the remainder of the day. Apparently the teeth or the boobs (or the nipple) was too much. Some people didn’t know how to handle Farrah’s sex appeal. I also had a puzzle of the poster image, too. Her teeth was perfectly centered onto one of the pieces and I always thought that was cool. Maybe if that piece had not been cut so, if her teeth had been divided between pieces, I might never have remembered even owning that puzzle.

There are many more memories and associations with Michael Jackson. The first was back in 1972 or so. On my Cub Scouts handbook (Wolf? Bear? I can’t remember.) I had affixed a Michael Jackson plastic 3-dimensional sticker, which I probably got at the bottom of a cereal box. And also I remember watching the Jackson 5 cartoon series, with its groovy warm colors and animated videos to their songs. And singing Rockin’ Robin in music class.

Later, as an adolescent, I can remember the singles from Off The Wall on heavy rotation on both radio and at the skating rink. My favorite was always Workin’ Day & Night, maybe because it was the most frenetic of the singles from that album, maybe because all the staccato of the percussion. This, of course, was setting the stage for my fascination with the sequencer-laden pop from the early 80s and in particular one Mr. Nick Rhodes.

Then, right after high school, Thriller dropped. The sleeper first hit, The Girl Is Mine, was pretty much under my radar but then Billie Jean showed up on the radio and MTV, and I swear that bassline is still the hottest to date. I watched, live (at broadcast date) the Motown 25 special, where he first moonwalked and really declared his independence from his brothers, who had performed with him minutes earlier but then left the stage once the bass from Billie Jean started. Soon everybody was talking about the Beat It video and had I seen it yet or not. And you probably know the rest of the story from there: the Pepsi spot, the premiere of the Thriller video, super-hyper-mega-stardom, etc.

My interest in MJ waned over the years, but it was always obvious when a new album was coming out and there was no escaping the publicity about his personal life. Wacko? Guilty? Perv? I guess it really doesn’t matter now. The talk on the news is what he will be remembered for, will it be the music or will it be the oddities and scandals? I presume it will be both. No one speaks of Marilyn without mentioning JFK; nobody mentions Elvis without referencing the gaudiness of Vegas shows and dying on a toilet. And it’s probably better that we do remember both sides of Michael, the great music and the perverse plastic oddity he had become.

Today I found out a friend’s cat also passed away, the cute and friendly Kosmo that I spent some time with back in April. Friend’s pets passing is always sad for me, having The Twins™ pass away and knowing what those feelings entail. So RIP to all, even Mr. McMahon.