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Howard's Curse

Why don’t I blog about Michael Jackson? Well, blogging requires typing and frankly every time I hear his name, I jam my fingers into my ears and I start chanting “NANANANANANANA-NOT LISTENING!!!!”. It makes it damn hard to type that way and thus my blogging productivity goes way down when the man-whos-name-should-not-be-mentioned is in fact, mentioned.

I do not understand the public fascination with this creepy character. Let me be clear, I don’t think he’s odd or eccentric; he’s just creepy. In the "creepy metric scale", he’s right up there with the whistling guy in the Fritz Lang classic movie “M”.

I don’t think its all his fault that he’s creepy, either. In my opinion, He’s fallen victim the worst disease that can afflict the human mind, and that is "paid-lackey-enforced-self-indulgence".

Self-indulgence, when left unchecked can ruin even the best of men, but when its inforced by people you think are your very best friends, you are in deep trouble.

You’ve seen other people afflicted with this disease; Howard Hughes for example is a pretty big poster child for this disease. Howard had a clear problem, and it wasn’t just in his head, there was clearly something physically wrong with the man which then manifested itself as series of mental disorders, but since he developed a lifestyle that did not allow anyone to have any say in his life, Howard went untreated for years. Any attempt by anyone to even suggest to Howard that he might have a problem was met with his firing or removing the individual from “Howard’s Inner Circle” life. The result was that Howard created a group of people in his life that were dedicated towards doing one thing

“Keep Howard Happy”.

While they did their best to do that, what really happened is the man went slowly mad, was poorly treated and had any healthy person been kept in the conditions that he willingly kept himself it would rightly be called torture. But for Howard, it was the sweet embrace of the goddess of indulgence. Howard got what he wanted, when he wanted as he wanted, and answered to no one.

Howard created for himself a world where there would be no other Gods before him, and in the end, it killed him.

There is a price to pay for the improper use of the narcotic of self-indulgence. The goddess of self-indulgence took her revenge on Howard, she helped him ruin himself, turning what was once a genius of design and business into a madman incapable of functioning in even the most basic human relationships. The same curse is afflicing Michael Jackson. I call it "Howards Curse".

We all think that if only we had more control over our money, our lives, if only we could be truly free to be whatever we wanted to be or do that we would live in a utopia on earth. The truth is far different. Far from utopia, those people who have achieved the goal of becoming a ‘God on Earth’, find the experience much closer to a hell on earth rather than the heaven they imagined it to be.

It turns out that the most valuable thing we can have in our lives is the idea that there is something more important than the satisfaction of our own self, and we need other humans to help remind us of it. Those people are the most valuable things we can have, and they can’t be bought. If you are lucky you have more than one of them in your life. I count on my “odd men” to provide me with council. I don’t always do what they say, but I always listen. We don’t always agree, but I always listen. Those are people who will tell you that you are over the top, an idiot, being gross of self-indulgent or in Michaels case, they would be the someone who would be there to point out to him the rather obvious fact that grown men who are not married do not make playgrounds for children at their house without drawing the obvious conclusion that they might be up to something rather unseemly.

If you were an average unmarried red blooded American male and you were a mega pop star, who would be likely to be found around your pool parties? I rest my case.

Look, Walt Disney was an adult man loved kids too, he just didn’t party with them at Club 33, get it?

In Michael Jackson, we see once again what happens when people who have vast wealth and power have no one in their life who can help them ‘right their compass’. You see what happens to the human mind when they live in a world where they eventually are convinced that there “are no other Gods before me”.

Michael Jackson has done what Howard Hughes did, he surrounded himself with people who live to do one thing “ Keep Michael Happy”, and when he started doing it, his fate was sealed, and it could only end badly and he has started his slide into hell and there is no going back to normality, He is now one of the living dead, and there is no redemption. We will watch his train wreck of a life and gawk at the horror that his life has become. There is no comeback, there is no second chance for the former 'King of pop'.

For me, I know I'm not the most important thing in the world, and I don’t want to live in a world where that is even a remote possibility. I don’t want to live a life free of strife; it’s the struggle of life that makes it worthwhile, not the absence. You want to know what food tastes like, go without it for a day, just one day without food. I once had a broken jaw; I didn’t eat solid food for 3 months, all I ate was chicken soup and spray cheese in a can, breakfast lunch and dinner. That first day I had my jaw unwired, I ate a steak, it was an experience I will never forget. I can still taste it, I can still sense it. I’ve had thousands of steaks since then but none have tasted like that one did. I would not have had that experience of really understanding what a steak really tastes like had I not broken my jaw. Imagine living a lifetime without understanding what a steak tastes like and you begin to understand what the absence of strife does to the senses of the human mind. I’m not happy I broke my jaw (or more properly, had it broken for me- another story for another time…) but I’m happy that I lived through the experience, it made me a better man and I see the world in a slightly clearer way than I did before it happened. Three months with my mouth wired shut taught me about food, the absence of it, speech and thinking before you open your mouth and people in general but it also taught me about myself. You can’t buy that and no one can give it to you, you have to experience life in order to say that you have lived it.

That ‘lack of food’ phenomenon was a common occurrence in the lives of humans just 2 generations ago; you didn’t need the condition of a broken jaw to experience it. We should never forget that we are here today against the odds. All of us who are alive today are here because 300 generations of humans who came before us struggled to survive, and since they did, we are alive at this point. But it doesn’t end with us, there are generations after us that are counting on the work we are doing today. How dare we dishonor the sacrifices of the earlier generations and take from the generations to come by thinking that life is ‘all about us’. Its not about us, were just one link in the big chain of life. Like it says on the old coins of England, “we stand on the shoulders of giants”, but there are those who will come after us who are waiting for the foothold we will provide.

Michael Jackson lives in a hell of his own making, and the really sad part is there are legions of people who desparately hope he stays their because of how it benefits them personally. I don’t look at Michael Jackson and see an artist or a performer; I see the walking x-ray of a ruined soul. I cannot understand why this man doesnt generate anything but disgust from the general human population.

Posted @ March 10, 2005 12:08 PM | Current Affairs