Sleep evades me.

Thoughts of death, memories of days gone by, the faces of friends I've lost, regrets, specters all, haunt my thoughts this night. I long for sleep, but it does not come.

La Morte de Jacko

There seems to be two schools of thought on the death of a celebrity. The response most commonly seen is the "psycho stalker fan" response, whereby a fan with way too much time on their hands grieves the fallen superstar as though he or she were a family member. The grieving psycho stalker fan shows all the traditional signs of a grieving family member, such as wearing black, blubbering like an idiot, lack of appetite, etc.

In the aftermath of la morte de Jacko, I have observed another response. It is an opposite extreme, but an extreme nonetheless, and, I believe, no less strange.

There are those who, in their ardent desire to express their complete non-chalance toward the celebrity (an unusual juxtaposition of feelings, no?) brazenly proclaim that they care not one iota about the celebrity's passing.

I find this second attitude to be almost hypocritical, as most of the "I don't care" crowd seem to want to crawl all over each other in their efforts to prove who cares the least. Odd.

I usually tend to fall somewhere in the middle. Even when it's someone whose art I didn't much care for (as is the case with Michael Jackson with his later work), I at least acknowledge the significance of that person's contributions to the art. MJ, like him or not, was an important figure in music, and his absence will be felt. He made a lot of people happy. That has to count for something. Of those who flippantly dismiss his passing as "another dead child molester," I wonder how many of those same people happily scramble to the dance floor every time "Thriller" starts playing at a halloween party.

Though I wouldn't count myself as a fan, I, for one, believe the world is slightly diminished for his passing.