Please, make it stop. Please.

Hollywood is grieving right now.

For the past several years I have given Michael Jackson a lot of flack. My perceptions of him have always been clouded by the controversies that surrounded him. What this made me forget was how talented the man was, his genius as a musician and performer. I love his music eternally and should have given him more credit and respect.

RIP Michael Jackson, 1958-2009

Michael died only hours following the death of one of the original Charlie’s Angels, Farah Fawcett. Since his death, ONTD has posted two other deaths. A Belgian singer named Yasmine  and Sky Saxon of 60’s group The Seeds have also passed on.

…

Death is a strange thing which I find hard to articulate. Death is a reminder that nothing on this planet lasts forever. Regardless of whether it is self-inflicted, the effect of old age and deterioration, or simply an accident — being at the wrong place at the wrong time — there’s no pun intended in saying that this is all part of human nature. I shall now quote Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, since he seems to put it best with these words:

“Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.
It’s a cliché translated into words, but at the time I felt it not as words but as that knot of air inside me. Death exists — in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a pool table — and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.
Until that time, I had understood death as something entirely separate from and independent from life. The hand of death is bound to take us, I had felt, but until the day it reaches out for us, it leaves us alone. This had seemed to me the simple, logical truth. Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.”