Happy 51!

MJ Birthday Block Party!

Farewell, Lost Boy

Soon The Baltimore Chronicles will return to its regularly scheduled programming--me, writing about my life in dribs and drabs of mundane revelation. I am not deluded. This blog is a vanity project more than anything else and only went through a brief period of being interesting when i was unemployed, but hasn't had the benefit of a mission since i started working again.

until now. and if my readership stats are anything to go by, i see that this point of interest is mine alone. very well then, one more (at least) indulgent post about Michael Jackson it is.

when i was about 14 years old, after the intense pre-pubescent crush i'd had on Michael Jackson had waned, i fell in love with someone else. I read J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan and felt true wonderment. I underlined and reunderlined the effortlessly true prose. Something hidden had been revealed. i was still young enough to hope for magic wherever i could find it, and this book transported the ever grounded, bookish me to some place that didn't exist anywhere, and was all the more real for it. Peter reminded me of every spritely boy i'd ever daydreamed about. i was always one to pine for boys with winged feet, who were also deeply broken, insightful, and sad. Like Wendy, i wanted to dole out my medicine and make them all better. i loved that wildness in them, but wanted them to want to stand still, just for a second, just for me.

but when perpetual movement is your lifeforce, when it is the thing that transports you, being still is tantamount to death. when you are doing exactly what you should be doing, what you were born to do, you cannot help but be beautiful and beyond everything.

when i look at Michael's body in motion, it is clear that he was doing what he was supposed to do, and it was a privilege to watch him and to feel transported by it. i loved the yearning sadness i could always hear in his voice (even on fast songs), but when coupled with his dancing, well, let's just say i understand why it made some people cry.

Michael, i will miss you so much. I got to know you through your experience of the music. You were the music. It was you. Farewell, Lost Boy and Wild Thing. I hope you are finally where you know someone loves you best of all.

"One Day In Your Life"

last night, Sarah picked me up so we could go out for crab cakes, and we took a sing along tour through "Off The Wall" on our way to the restaurant. Then we drove around, north of the city proper, and listened to all of "Thriller." The music, still so good after all this time, left my heart soaring and my mind blown, much as it did when i was 10 years old, first hearing those strains, chords, and the dazzling yearning in his voice.

it's been years since Michael Jackson has taken up this much space in my head. i dream about him most nights now, and in those dreams we (he and i) are usually trying to solve a mystery--the mystery of where he's gone off to. or sometimes i am simply trying to protect him from something abstract, yet menacing.

my sadness is strange. it is persistent, but not crippling. i have hours upon hours of reprieve, where it's not the first thing on my mind. then a wave of disbelief hits and it's all i can think about. and i want to talk about him. i want to keep remembering him. i wish he knew just how much i'm thinking about him.

i feel guilty, in some ways, because i really had to compartmentalize my thoughts about this beautiful genius of a guy for the last 15 years, at least. i could not reconcile the person i so naively believed i would marry when i was little with the person he seemed to want to become. i wanted the best for him and sometimes felt angry with him, when i allowed myself to acknowledge any feeling about it at all, that he couldn't do what he needed to do to correct the worst perceptions of him. because perception, not truth, is reality.

Michael, for so many people, is like a dearly loved relative that we could never give up on no matter how much our belief that everything could still be fine was tested. i know i allowed myself to be swayed by the portrayal of him--on some level. i tried to protect myself from that influence, but it crept in. when Chris Rock said he was "done" with Michael, I knew what he meant. but you can only be that frustrated with someone you love so much.

so i've gone back to the music--all the way back to "I Want You Back," and have made the exciting, momentous trek to "Billie Jean," and then I went past the pinnacle to the lovely hits of later years, including those lilting, soulful ballads on "Invincible," his least commercially successful treatise. I revisited "Bad," an album I just didn't connect with, or so I thought. Everything after "Thriller" sort of ran together for me, but when I, with love and sadness, went back to it, realized that I loved so many of those songs. I had failed to remember.

for a little while.

A song he sang as a young man was prescient:

One day in your life
You'll remember the love you found here
You'll remember me somehow
Though you don't need me now
I will stay in your heart
And when things fall apart
You'll remember one day...