So & So So & So

I meant, a couple of days ago, to rebut all the tributing and eye-wiping over Michael Jackson's death. Fuck that guy, I was going to say. So what? So he's dead. Whoopitee-goddamn-do.

But tonight I find myself in the uncomfortable position of sympathizing with the man. Not the dead man, for there is no sympathizing with the dead, but the man who was once alive. The man who, in his final days, seemed to want nothing more than to be out of the spotlight (financially necessary world tour notwithstanding).

Oh sure, when the courts came calling he came out of hiding, swaddled in pajamas like a boy reluctantly on his way to the first day of school. But by and large, the freak (and yeah, he was a freak, by every possible definition most likely) stayed out of sight. On his own, alone, in his own freakish way, he passed his time. And then like that he was dead. Ah well.

I spent the evening at a rock club watching a rock show while the friends around me tried, eventually successfully, to take a couple of college girls home with them. More power to them. Clearly the byproducts of Kirkland breeding are no match for the manly wiles of my compadres. Fair enough. And as amusing and entertaining as their efforts were, as the night wore on I grew more and more restless, eager to lose myself in the goings-on on stage and forget about the shenanigans off of it. I had no desire to compete in this game. I found myself drifting backwards into the crowd, doing my best to become anonymous. Trying to stay out of whatever spotlight might shine my way, and refusing to interact with others in any kind of social manner.

This was my comfort zone, I decided. This was where I wanted to be. Not potentially engaged in what ultimately might wind up as the most awkward group sex scenario ever imagined, but alone, back to the wall, focused on the music, removed from everything going on around me. Being human by shunning the ties of other humans.

Perhaps this is how artists feel. I don't know; I am not an artist. But I find myself siding with them more often than not on these matters of social behavior. I can see the desire to squirrel one's self away in an amateur theme park of their own devising. I get that. Maybe not so much inviting children into your bed--not the least of which because I really, on a personal level, can't fucking stand being around children--but the isolationism, and the perceived eccentricity, the withdrawal into one's self? I kind of get that.

Or maybe I don't respond well to liquor. Or oxygen. Or the combination of the two. Whatever it may be, I sit here, alone, typing, and feeling quite the better for it.