I thank my lucky stars every­day that my fam­ily and I were over­seas from mid-June through mid-July. We went to Italy. It was won­der­ful and we had a great time and our fam­ily felt bet­ter again since Kim and I had been work­ing 60+ hour weeks.

In the town of Loro Ciufenna that we were stay­ing there was a news­stand that sold, on each Sun­day, one copy of the Inter­na­tional Her­ald Tri­bune. The IHT is the Euro­pean ver­sion of the New York Times, but from a decid­edly Euro-centric view­point, but you still have to put up with Paul Krug­man and Roger Cohen. So the first time we bought the IHT (for  2 Euro) and splashed across the front page was a story about Michael Jack­son, sort of a career ret­ro­spec­tive and how it men­tioned that he had planned to tour in the fall. Only after 10 or so para­graphs did it men­tion that he was dead.

Wow. Michael Jack­son was dead? I called my mother and asked her when it had hap­pened and was told that it was a few days after we had left the States, which made me happy to be in Italy, because it meant that I didn’t have to live through all of the crap that was going on in the States about how, oh my God, he’s dead! What hap­pened? What will we do with­out this lov­able eccen­tric genius who died before his time? Let’s all run out right this freak­ing sec­ond and buy every­thing that we can that has Michael Jackson’s voice or pic­ture or essence on it!

Sup­pos­edly Michael Jackson’s estate has earned over $100 mil­lion since his death. And yes, I feel for his chil­dren, whom I’m sure loved their father, even though he nick­named one of them Blan­ket. And I’m sure that his fam­ily was sad when he died, but I hope there is some remorse they feel cash­ing checks for every­thing from their shares of his estate to the new real­ity series that is going to be broad­cast with most of the Jack­sons in it. I’m prob­a­bly being pes­simistic, given what human nature is really like, of course.

I think that the thing that gets me the most about this Michael love is that every­one seems to have for­got­ten how com­pletely freaky this per­son they are wor­ship­ing was. All of these “Thriller” dance things and “Thriller” on Party City tele­vi­sion ads and Nev­er­land Ranch and the child-sex thing — what the — ? This per­son, only a few years ago, was con­sid­ered a freak of nature, a pos­si­ble child rapist and under­stand­ably dis­trusted by many peo­ple. Is the new love the prod­uct of a remark­able PR cam­paign? It’s def­i­nitely pos­si­ble. Who knows.

And why do I care? Part of the “Thriller” thing is, I’m sure, a long-lost love of an ephemeral, imag­ined 1980’s and a sim­pler time. Do peo­ple feel lonely for this? Should I care at all?

Give it a lit­tle while. It will go away.

I hope.