Wow. Just Wow.

I wasn’t planning to write about this (of course) like I had other things planned for my personal blog all week – not that I’ve had a chance to get to those either – but then yesterday happened and whoa, so Michael Jackson is dead. I don’t know, there’s been a lot of talk, of course, on Twitter the last 24 hours, and someone brought up that they couldn’t understand why people kept saying “gone too soon”.

No, I don’t suppose I expected he’d live forever, or even to necessarily be really old at 70 or 80 or 90 or anything… but 50, that’s kind of a shock. Especially when one (me) pretty much grew up my whole life keenly aware of Michael Jackson being out there in the entertainment world and not all that much older than me. You just don’t really expect someone like that to go that early unless it’s a suicide (Kurt Cobain), drug overdose (Brad Nowell of Sublime, Shannon Hoon of Blind Melon), or some horrible tragic accident like a drowning (Jeff Buckley). (Although as we all know, rumors of chronic morphine use in Jackson’s case are starting to swirl and whether that’s true or not, who knows yet.)

Granted, I’m at an age where it’s become disturbing to see how many people I went to school with are passing away at ages much younger than 50, even though in my case and my graduating class’ case, it’s something we’ve been dealing with since we were all 17 years old. Still, in the last couple of years there have been a disturbing and growing number of cancer deaths and other deaths, as well as former classmates winding up with severe and terminal illnesses of all kinds.

But none of us are the biggest pop stars in the world, and you probably noticed those I namechecked a couple of paragraphs above are from a completely different sphere of the music world than Jackson’s pop-kingness was. Those and others were losses that affected me more, whether a little or a lot, because that realm is where I have been rooted for most of my adult life musically, and was starting to seed even before.

And, too, those losses in the music world were a little different from me – in a way, losing some of those people was like losing “one of us” in a way where Michael Jackson could never be compared to the average person. I personally know many from that scene who were never as big as, say, Cobain, but close. My longtime boyfriend went to school with and grew up with a couple of the most influential people in all of “alternative” music, including a Grammy winner. I am thankful that pretty much everyone we are acquainted with pretty much made it through the Eighties, Nineties, and Aughts (for lack of a better word), but any of those passed above could have been almost anyone we know, at one time or another.

So now, Michael Jackson. An unexpected death, and as Kat Coble stated earlier today on Twitter, all deaths are “sudden”; his was “unexpected”. Ten years from now when I’m 53 instead of 43, and if Michael Jackson had died at 60, it just wouldn’t have been as shocking as it was to me yesterday. It’s all relative but I think a lot of the difference is in how old you are yourself, and which era(s) you grew up in.

Sure, people much younger than me knew who Michael Jackson was and experienced him being out there as the “King of Pop” for many years muscially, as well as his ongoing legal and financial troubles the last almost-couple of decades. But most of them weren’t even born when Michael Jackson wasn’t really MICHAEL JACKSON yet. He was always there, almost as long as I’ve been alive, but first he was just Michael Jackson of The Jackson 5, and pretty much almost ever since I’ve been alive, either The Jackson 5, The Jacksons, or Michael solo have all been on the radio, somewhere, sometime, all the time. I have very clear memories of several Jacksons-related episodes, probably the earliest being when I couldn’t have been more than three or four, accompanying my grandparents on the trip to Memphis either to pick my eldest aunt up at nursing school or bring her back home, being in the car with “ABC” playing on the radio.

The Jackson 5 or, later, The Jacksons’ singles were always being spun on Fridays during recess at my elementary school, Friday being the day they brought the record player out and everyone was allowed to bring the 45 RPM singles they wanted to hear be played over the schoolyard PA system at recess – and dance, if you so desired to. Countless of their singles being played on those Fridays - “Dancing Machine”, “Enjoy Yourself”, and Michael’s early solo, “Ben”.

And Michael, and usually with his brothers, was always on TV – awards shows, all the millions of variety shows there were on television during the Seventies, music shows like American Bandstand and Soul Train. I can’t imagine there were many weeks from 1969-1979 that there was not a Jackson-related single on the charts, or many weeks that Michael or all of the Jacksons were on TV somewhere, sometime.

I was in the seventh grade when “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)” came out, and had been spending much of my time long before I got into a double digit age listening to stuff like The Beatles, the Stones, The Who – a lot of even then-classic rock but also more “out there” stuff for a young kid like the Jefferson Airplane and T. Rex, and was just starting on my lifelong Cheap Trick fetish and interestedly watching bands like the Ramones and The Clash on TV by the time I was a seventh grader, but still – Michael Jackson was there, though in Jackson 5/The Jacksons form before he really went from being Michael Jackson to MICHAEL JACKSON – and all my rock & roll and punk rock seeds being planted and tended to aside, I still listened to a lot of AM radio and pop radio at that point – mainly because if you were going to listen to the radio in Northwest Tennessee, rather than playing your own records, you really didn’t have a whole lot of choice most of the time. It was pop or nothing, for the most part. But even then, I still was buying things that were mainstream and popular at the time – The Jacksons’ Destiny album from 1978 is the only Jackson-related album I ever owned. I never even, later, bought Thriller - probably because I didn’t feel like I needed to. It was everywhere and all over ANYWAY.

All those songs and videos were everywhere all the time anyway. I was in the eighth grade when Michael Jackson became MICHAEL JACKSON, when the Off the Wall album was released. In fact, the record was released the week before my eighth grade year started. I kind of think if you were not around and old enough and alive back then, it’s probably a little impossible to get a grip on what I just said in that sentence: when Michael Jackson became MICHAEL JACKSON. If you were alive at the time, and old enough – you already know. I can’t really explain it other than to say it just happened, the minute that first single hit the radio airwaves.

I never was a huge fan so I didn’t pay all that much attention to him, but still, Michael Jackson was a HUGE part of the background soundtrack to most of my junior high and all of my high school years. School dances – Michael Jackson tunes. I (and everyone else trying out) tried out for cheerleading with a routine to Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough”. And then Thriller came out and it was the biggest thing ever.

Granted, the stuff we as a collective group were listening to mostly throughout high school was very much NOT Michael Jackson, though probably almost everyone (but me) had a copy of Thriller anyway – but if you pooled everyone’s 8-tracks and cassette tapes together to see what the youth of Northwest Tennessee was listening to in 1982 and 1983, Jackson (or much of any R&B for that matter) was far outweighed by artists like John Cougar Mellencamp, Van Halen, Loverboy, .38 Special, Journey, Bryan Adams, Joan Jett and many more of all different kinds of styles, ranging from old Foghat to New Wavers like Adam Ant. I took a lot of crap back then for my major Duran Duran fandom, and was likely the only person in the county (maybe two) also spending my money on new bands and artists that intrigued me late weekend TV nights on Night Tracks out of Atlanta – bands like U2, General Public, The Cramps, and a host of others nobody much down where I was was ever listening to.

But Michael Jackson – or by then, MICHAEL JACKSON – was just always there, especially after Thriller hit. “Beat It” was cool because Eddie Van Halen played on it. There was a cheerleading routine at Homecoming that year, in 1982, that incorporated “Beat It”, “Billie Jean”, and “Thriller”. I remember summer evenings in 1983, riding around back roads and down to the river beach in a friend’s MG convertible with the top down, three of us squeezed into it with a huge thermos full of pink lemonade and vodka with “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” just blaring, all of us singing at the top of our lungs. There were several songs on that album I don’t care for at all, but the ones I’ve mentioned I’ve probably heard a million times, as well as the others – and I never even owned the album.

By the time Bad came out, I was away at college and off on musical journeys and adventures where few even my age dared to tread, until Nirvana hit and made weird off-the-wall music cool and trendy, so I don’t really have any memories of Bad-era Jackson. I was never in places that his music would get played, and although Julie and I watched prodigious amounts of MTV then in the mid-Eighties, if I saw a Jackson video, it was usually something from Thriller.

So at that point in my life, Jackson wasn’t part of the ongoing soundtrack playing behind my life like he had so often been until then. But until then – he was just always there. And even as an adult – as I’ve become an adult – he’s always been there, albeit mostly newsy bits in articles of magazines and newspapers I’d pick up here and there. I remember seeing him walk out with Lisa Marie Presley shortly after they married, on some awards show on MTV, and thinking as much ridicule as there’d been, he was acting pretty cool in the face of all that. I remember sometime around the same time seeing a video he and sister Janet did that looked pretty cool, and kind of liking the song at the time. Musically, that was really my only Jackson moment as an adult.

But still, Michael Jackson was always out there. Somewhere. And now he’s not, and I think that’s what’s weird for many of us of this age, even those like me who really weren’t big fans at all. When I was young, he was really one of the few “big music stars” and “big pop stars” that, while older than me, was really pretty close to my age – him, Donny Osmond, and a handful of others. Most of the rest were lots older.

And when it comes down to it, I just never would have guessed that a time when I’m older, but still relatively young, and certainly not what one would call “really old”… I never would have guessed that Michael Jackson, who was once Michael Jackson but then became MICHAEL JACKSON – the biggest pop star and maybe even arguably the biggest celebrity in the world ever other than Elvis and The Beatles – would be gone this early in the game. It’s just weird.

Had it happened ten more years down the road, I probably wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow at the news. Today, it’s just a little disturbing, and yet another reminder to me that life is short. I may be 43 and some days I may feel 83, but in a lot of ways I don’t feel that much different than I did ten, twenty years ago, and people are still arguing with me sometimes that I can’t be over 30.

But I can guarantee you twenty years will pass in the blink of an eye, and you’ll wonder where the time went so fast, and how it can be that someone you just always figured it would be there – whether it’s the most famous pop star in the world like Michael Jackson, or a dear friend you loved – is just suddenly not. It’s weird, and life is short.