today is my 23rd birthday. yesterday marked the deaths of 2 pop culture icons. iran is in uproar. and north korea is suppose to destroy hawaii in the coming week. 

23 is one of those weird years in your life where you finally define the person that you were and also who you're becoming. its a pivotal moment where everything you thought you knew about life suddenly comes shattering down. 

i just finished the book "Killing Yourself to Live" by Chuck Klosterman. it's about his road trip journey across america where he went to all of these places famous rock musicians died. he spent 2 and half weeks trying to find the meaning of death and what it means to the music industry. basically....is there some kind of relationship between fame and tragedy?

now being in the middle of this kind of read - the death of michael jackson came as a sort of ironic, surreal experience to me. here i am reading this book about all of these famous icons of music who died....and i get a text message telling me that the king of pop just died too. this is the start of my 23 year on this earth. maybe by 24 i will understand...

i was 8 years old when kurt cobain died. and i had no idea who tupak or christopher wallace were when they were killed. aaliyah was unfortunate, but this is the first [definitive] death of a music legend that i have lived coherently through. it really makes you wonder about fame and whether or not it is some kind of horrible curse. 

michael jackson's death is something i do have emotions about. to say i grew up on michael jackson would be like saying that i was an american at some point in the past 40 years....so i don't want to do that, but his influence on my life was more than a collection of catchy songs.

my father is and will always be a motown fan. to him anything made by anyone white and after the 1960's doesn't even exist. so i had a healthy dose of jackson 5 growing up. i could sing all the songs by the time i was probably 10. throughout my teen years (i think i though it was still the 80s) the solo works of michael jackson became permanent fixtures in the back of my brain. i think i was one of the few people in the world to buy Invincible and love it. I taped his 30th anniversary special for him and not usher.....i promise.

His death is sad to me. not because he won't ever make music again....because his music will live forever. and not because he died before his time....even though he did. but his death is proof that i am getting old. and what the most disturbing thing i'm seeing is...how the older we get the more immune to death we become. as long as it's not us - it becomes just another event on a person's timeline. we will all become history eventually. 

much love to farrah fawcett too who was a truly remarkable person too...both professionally and personally.