Yes, I admit that I follow celebrity deaths…I check the Buzzlog every morning and if I see a celebrity name I click to see if they kicked the bucket overnight. I think it has something to do with my own inexorable march toward mortality. The world is slowly morphing from a place where everyone is older than I am to a place where everyone is younger. Every time some old movie star or writer or other public figure that has been a part of my consciousness dies, I am a little closer to my own oblivion.

I told my adult daughter this morning that celebrities always die in threes (yes, that sounds silly to me too…) and that my prediction was for either Walter Cronkite or Patrick Swayze to give it up next.

She doesn’t know who Walter Cronkite is at all, and her familiarity with Patrick Swayze is kind of fuzzy. She is 21 years old.

I had to tell her which greying guy was which when she watched a black and white video clip of Ed sitting beside Johnny Carson (who was on his knees, lapping Alpo from a dog dish). I can hardly believe that I am now on my third Tonight Show host…and I still don’t feel old enough to even watch it!

I also had to show her an image of The Poster, and tell her that her name was Farrah Fawcett Majors when I “knew” her — married to the six million dollar man and my sixth grade fantasy lover, Lee Majors. And of course, an Angel, but that was a show my parents liked and that I tolerated because we only had one TV and no internet. I then launched into Ryan and Tatum O’Neal, more strangers from another time. Farrah died slowly and horribly and way too young, but I think she lived a good, strong life. I was never a fan of Farrah in her day — too pretty, too blonde, too unintellectual, too female — but it seems like she was a nice woman with many people who loved her.

My daughter knows who Michael Jackson was  — a  freakish washed-up pop star who maybe molested kids at his weird home amusement park, dangled his own strangely-named kid over balconies, and sang and danced in those moderately cool old videos. I told her about the poster of him in a girlishly bulgeless white suit, pastel yellow shirt, and shining Geri-curled hair that I had tacked over my bed during a brief spot of madness between my Duran Duran and Sting fetishes. About how I waited eagerly for the world premiere of the Thriller video on MTV that halloween night so long ago, leaving my family in the middle of a game of Sorry or Clue to watch it, awed by it’s utter amazingness (although Billie Jean was far more my style). My daughter is a good listener.

Today I have a significant and somewhat unexpected feeling of sadness at the death of MJ, in spite of the fact that I have not been a fan for 20+ years. He was a tragic figure, a spectre of human unhappiness and wasted oportunities. He was a prodigious child, a phenomenally successful young man, and then a huge and public disaster. He couldn’t seem to avoid humiliating himself with his pathetic and sometimes desperate antics. His high-profile relationships with boy actors, chimpanzees, and Elvis-daughter-wives, all increased his ridiculousness factor exponentially. Interviews in which he tried to explain himself made him appear all the more unnatural and disturbed. Wacko Jacko.

I admit that I smirked a bit at his “comeback tour” and wondered who would go to see him. I wouldn’t…after all, he just reminds me of my own failures and blunders in the same time period. I don’t want to be reminded of my crummy relationship record, my poor parenting skills, my miserable self-image. I don’t want to look at a frail and scrawny, middle-aged man with barely-recognizable-as-human features, trying so hard to hold onto the flamboyance of his youth, and then compare him to the chubby-faced, brightly-smiling, afro-headed Michael of the 70s or the sneering, dazzling, dancing machine of the 80s, realizing that my life has taken a similar if far less dramatic trajectory.

I guess I am waxing way too sappy again, but Michael Jackson serves as a kind of a picture of Dorian Gray for some of us. He started out so well — talented and attractive and bound for superstardom, the King of Pop, amazingly wealthy and famous and loved — and then burned out like so many bright stars.

Unlike us ordinary losers, he wore every one of his failures on his person for all to see. His ruined nose, his mottled skin, his increasingly, frantically, unusual behavior reported in tabloids and papparazzi-TV. His Elephant Man bones and ferris wheels and single, sequined gloves finding their way into stock jokes. His strange bedfellows and pets and oddly-named children all a testament to misery rather than eccentricity. His health deteriorating until, at mere fifty years of age, his body gave up on him as maybe he gave up on himself. An all-too-human celebrity living out real, personal struggles in the public eye.

Michael, we hardly knew ye…and I’ll wager that ye didn’t really know yourself well either. I hope you are at peace now.

And my world has gotten a little bit smaller today...