Friday, June 26, 2009

so, because I live a couple of hours away from where the King of Pop died, our local news coverage of this has been ridiculous - cameras camped out at his home, at his family's home, at his star on the Walk of Fame - with nothing new to say. He's still dead, it's still a shock, and there are still no definitive answers. The worst, though, was this afternoon when the local news showed footage of people leaving flowers at a makeshift memorial in England and the newscaster stated that it was "possibly saddest for those in London who had tickets to his comeback concerts"... Right, that's the real tragedy, that some people in London won't be able to go to a concert. Screw the friends and family who are completely gutted by his unexpected death, we should really be mourning the profit that Ticketmaster is going to lose here.

I've never considered myself a Michael Jackson fan - I know all of his songs, his music was everywhere when I was growing up. To be honest, though, I've never been able to understand why people were so batshit insane over him. But I get that people were/are batshit insane about him and everyone has their own ways to mourn, but where does it cross the line from mourning to morbidity? Do we need to see footage of the ambulance that transported him to the hospital? Do we need to see pictures of his body being transported to the coroner? Do we need to see footage of friends and family driving in to the family's property?

I'll admit that I'm all kinds of infatuated with the wealth of information available on the internet, but sometimes it's a little bit like one of those giant ice cream sundaes - in theory, it's a cool idea, but if you don't watch yourself, you'll end up feeling like shit for the rest of the day.