It would be a bit disingenuous of me to write a few pop culture pieces with a shadow like this looming overhead; at this point I'm sure everyone is tired of reading about Jackson, or perhaps just sad and burned out and needing to just walk away from the analysis and the fights regarding his personal life versus his professional contributions. But I think there is something to be said about the way the world seems to be handling this death, as opposed to the other high profile deaths we've seen over the past few years (and can continue to expect, as our "legends" continue aging up), and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that people who were old enough to remember Michael Jackson in his prime are also being faced, perhaps for the first time, with something that their parents have already been through: the weird aftermath of a childhood idol's death.

There is a generational gap in mourning, it seems: the younger you are, the less likely this is to affect you, as Jackson's reputation and musical career was already in decline by 1993, and many grew up only knowing the plastic-surgery obsessed Jackson who put out mediocre hits like "You Rock My World," while fighting off pretty damning child molestation charges. But if you were a child of the 80s, and you loved Michael Jackson as a kid, you really loved Michael Jackson.

For many of us, I think, Michael Jackson was the first person outside of our immediate families that we really fell in love with. Not in a sexual sense, mind you, but in the way you fall in love with a song, or a movie, or a poem, and you keep playing/watching/reading it over and over again. He seemed otherworldly at times, a Ziggy Stardust who never stepped out of character, walking around in sequined uniforms and red leather jackets and sparkling gloves. There was one summer in the late 80s where every kid on my street was lightly bruised from shoulder to ankle on one side of his or her body from trying desperately to replicate the "Smooth Criminal" lean. We loved him because he was so unlike anyone else. And when he suddenly became someone else, through the surgeries and the revelations about his personal life, we do what people always do when they lose an early love: we shut the door and said things like, "I was a kid, and that was a long time ago."

Now that he's gone, the debate over how he should be remembered will begin, and it will probably never, ever end. He is a divisive figure if only because those of us who are feeling sad over his death are the people who have been students of the school of Two Michael Jacksons: the "old" Michael and the "sad" Michael. Turns out you can't split a person's life in two and pretend that the pieces won't eventually have to be somehow placed back together: in mourning his death, we are also faced with the darker sides of his life, and both sides are just pretty damn sad. The internet has exploded with both tributes and harsh comments: if nothing else, his death has provided people a platform to say the things they've wanted to say for the past two decades, which is typically what happens when someone famous dies—suddenly everyone realizes that they have feelings about someone they've just assumed was going to be around forever. When a celebrity this big dies, it's a reminder that everyone dies. I've seen people writing things like, "I feel like my childhood died," which is, of course, code for: "I just realized that there really is no going back and I'm mortal just like everybody else."

If you're sick of the tributes and the tear-downs, you're in for a rough fucking ride over the next 40 years. We're running out of celebrities of Michael's stature (and he was arguably the biggest one we had), and the ones that are left are growing older, just as we are, and the grief, anger, and questioning over the love, adoration, and support we've given certain artists will be thrown out the second one of them leaves us. The world is a small and strange place: every so often, someone comes along with the talent to move from a town like Gary, Indiana to the record players, television sets, and brains of billions of people across the world, leaving a mark that invites both celebration and mockery. It could be argued that we will never see anyone burn quite as brightly as Michael Jackson in our lifetime, nor will we be as stunned when a light like that suddenly goes out. But talent and fame does not make anyone invincible, nor does it make anyone a perfect human being. Michael Jackson was sublimely gifted and terribly cursed, and the world is now left to deal with the legacy of both.

Earlier: The Thrill Is Gone
Was Michael Jackson More Normal Than We Thought?

[Image via Bauer-Griffin.]

I am wrestling with this issue right now. See, we have a mouse who's been leaving the unhygienic evidence of his existence around the kitchen (and yes, I am steadfastly asserting that there is just one and will put fingers in ears if necessary to maintain the fiction.) I want the mouse gone. Like most people, I don't think of myself as being scared of mice, leaping up on a table and screeching like someone out of a dated cartoon. And yet, while I'm not exactly frightened, there's something super-disconcerting about seeing something mobile, something living, scuttle across one's peripheral vision, or hear an ominous after-dark rustling in the bags one keeps under the sink. In our carefully curated lives, it's unsettling to find an aggressively rogue element disturbing our equilibrium and I, for one, am not well equipped to deal with it.

Given the age of my preferred domiciles, vermin are nothing new...a few buildings ago, I had a highly eccentric landlady who, in addition to lecturing me and my friends about the evils of living in sin with boyfriends, would catch any mice in her bare hands and bear them out, squeaking, with an extremely satisfied look on her face. When my boyfriend put out a glue trap once and we were awoken by pitiful squeaking, I broke down: who were we, I said, to kill and maim just because an innocent creature had had the ill-fortune to wander into a space that we had arbitrarily designated as our own and pretended was separate from nature? My boyfriend carefully cleansed the mouse's paws with oil and released him, where he lumbered off slowly, sure to be picked up by the first predator who came along.

I have friends who kill mice with impunity. One couple's apartment was next to a construction site and the resulting flood of mice was so dramatic that at the height of the problem, they were catching a Pied Piper-style seven to ten a day, which he quickly dispatched. To anyone raised with more nature than the occasional rabid squirrel and ratty pigeon - never mind the proverbial "on a farm" — getting sentimental — or scared — about a tiny mouse probably seems unbelievably silly. But I can neither live with them nor kill them, surely some kind of horrible Rousseau's paradox for the modern city-dweller. Worst of all, I make my boyfriend deal with it which, besides being the worst kind of cliché , is really unfair. So come clean, dear reader: Do you kill? Cry? Scream? Catch and release? Pass the buck? How do you deal with one of the few reminders of inter-species cohabitation left to us?