my so-called blog: June 2009

MICHAEL JACKSON HAS DIED. Those were the words I heard as I stumbled from the bathroom to bedroom where Brian Williams broke the news in a voice that was both calm and stricken. I sat down for a second only to fail at absorbing what was unfolding on the TV before me then I rushed downstairs, running late for work and forgetting my wallet.

THE KING OF POP HAS PASSED AWAY. Outside, the world moved and weaved through traffic in slow motion. From every car, his songs emanated from each open windows as every radio station of every genre it seemed, scrambled to change their programming to include Michael Jackson songs. The kind girl at the I-95 toll booth who let me through even with a dollar short of the fee, had something from Off The Wall blaring from her station, while the DC rock station I'd listen to going to work, played Wanna Be Starting Something & Dirty Diana and was taking more requests of the like.

PETER PAN IS GONE. Gone is that mythical human being who conquered the world with talent and moves that both defied gravity and gravitated the emulation and adulation of a generation from California to Calumanggan. That precious little boy with the gigantic gift in those filler films from 70's TV specials; that angelic voice who signaled the coming of the Season by his urgings to give love on Christmas Day, who became the world's golden child, can now only be revisited in the grainy, jumpy annals of YouTube and our sepia-hued memories. He is the idol we vaunted in childish braggadocio in dusty neighborhood streets in the weekends and summers, in flooded school halls after a typhoon, and in the classroom when Ma'am Sultan or Ma'am Alcachupas was looking away. He is the MJ I'd scribble in slumbook questions about first crushes. He is the superstar that my sister, Pinky regaled me with factoids she'd read about and known way back when he was in Jackson 5, which jumpstarted my ardour for him.

He is the pop phenomenon my sister Melissa made a reverential scrapbook for, with clippings from the TIMEs and tabloids our Auntie Letty sent us from Canada and from "songhits" she has collected, which I eventually inherited. He is the teen idol whose posters Melissa put up on my wall in the bedroom we shared when we first moved to BISCOM. Meanwhile, the rest of the world went through the same adoration that I felt solely was my own, in varying manifestations, in similar degrees of awe. He had no color, no race, no nationality. There was nobody like him, yet he belonged to all of us. He was just Michael.

R.I.P., MAN IN THE MIRROR. Somebody in Facebook bade farewell, one of millions in a matter of minutes after the news broke. Admittedly, I despised the his transmogrification after Thriller. In the years leading to his death, he seemed to have devolved from Hero to the Hunchback of Notre Dame. His music, genius and even the moonwalk never waned but it was us who changed. We grew up. Worst of all, it was our image of him that changed and we turned on him. We marched to his bell tower where he dangled Baby Blanket with torches, tabloids, TMZ and even with doves released after a trial. How we pitied him and his bizarre sad life, and how dare he defaced the Michael who lit gritty city streets with every step in Billie Jean and electrified us with this.

AND NOW MICHAEL JACKSON IS DEAD. We try to wrap our head around a world without this icon of our lifetime. We are getting old. Like Elvis before him, we will share his music and stories of what made him great and precautionary tales of extraordinary individuals with feet of clay. And he will win over generations more of fans and followers even after death. He will live forever in our general psyches in the image we chose to remember him by. In every soundtrack that punctuate the moments. In every lazy summer afternoons of childhood dreaming big dreams listening to Jackson 5 on AM radio.

In every fond memory of our lives. That's how icons are.

As I'm writing the end of this post, Janet is on the BET Awards both thanking & expressing the pain of the loss of a brother, then Ne-yo & Jamie Foxx sing, I'll Be There....

THANK YOU SO MUCH, MICHAEL.