MJ

I've have mixed feelings about the death of Michael Jackson. I never really listened to any of his music until college, where I developed a serious appreciation for '80s hits that I'd bypassed while spending the first 10 years of my life (I was born in '79) listening to Crystal Gale and the Eagles.

As a child during MJ's peak, I remember him largely as a figure of unvarnished terror. I must've been maybe 3 or 4 when I first saw the Thriller video playing on a display TV during Halloween season while shopping for a costume at Jamesway, and I remember having nightmares about it for weeks.

Around the same time, my parents (who were unaware of my fear of werewolf-Michael), as part of their sporadic attempt to keep my musical tastes from totally alienating me from my peers (see their 1991 purchase of New Kids concert tickets), installed in my bedroom a seriously creepy poster of MJ and ET., which engendered a new round of nightmares until being taken down.

For the following 15 years, I had a hazy idea of Michael Jackson as a weirdo celebrity, with any reference to his actual body of work made hazy by my better familiarity with Weird Al's "Eat it" and "Fat". In college I drunkenly sang along to MJ's hits from my spot at the beirut table, although usually slipping "Ham on, ham on, ham on whole wheat... all right" into Beat it.

I watched Michael's descent into MacCauley Culkin-befriending, baby-dangling weirditude with the eye of the prescient- hadn't I known from the age of 3 that this guy was scary? - but with a sense of regret at the wasted talent.

This morning, after hearing yesterday's news, I felt a weird urge to memorialize MJ by facing down my childhood fears, and I became the 136,457,280th person to watch Thriller on Youtube.