THE DAY AFTER Michael Jackson's death, I wrote on my Facebook page:
When Michael Jackson was born I was thirty years old. I barely noticed his existence until the very hour of his death. For me, his entire life's work amounted to a tiny crepitation in the far, far distance. Pity the poor struggler who fights to win attention from the remotest edges of being. RIP.
The disappearance of Jackson came as the greatest shock only to members of the "Boomer" generation. To people like me, who were born before 1929, Jackson and his associated popular art means little or nothing.
During the week of Jackson's death, two other pop icons died: Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon. I had known of them since the 1970s and they had become, in a small, TV-ish way, part of my life. Their passing saddens me.
But I am used to death. I have lost many parts of myself, physically and mentally, to Time. Very soon I too shall cross the river. Everything perishes. Even protons decay after a very long wait. What is to become of us, no one can know.
Nothing repeats, except perishing itself. Boomers and their publicists must get used to it.
