The Man in Many Places

My tweets last night;

On the fifth day, the claret's not so great.
Plastic plants never want to be broken.
Lots of people don't mean there's a long wait.
A caterpillar army has woken.

I woke up at 11am and I've been colouring since noon--I coloured three pages over the course of eight hours, and I still have one more page to cover. This largely because I slacked off so much early on--you'd think I'd know better.

I feel like a toasted loaf of bread in the rubble of a primitive bakery. The sad thing is, if I could put off colouring now, I can't think of any activity I'd be able to enjoy doing. Headache. It's probably a good think the wine was bad by last night--my head would be filled with masticated twinkie by now.

So. I just read about Michael Jackson's death. I guess with Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon, this makes three. Though Michael Jackson was actually someone I cared about as a kid--I remember liking Thriller and Captain EO anyway, and seem to remember always getting fixated on the "Billie Jean" music video. I always had a sense that what I was seeing wasn't complete nonsense, that there was definitely something going on, but I couldn't figure out what. Very mysterious, maybe I thought it was something I was too young to understand. Adults wouldn't explain it to me when I asked, though now I suspect it's because they couldn't figure it out, either.

Looking at it now, it seems to me to just generally be about the life the singer's smallest actions could take on--that his touch lights up lamp posts and concrete tiles, and then he disappears in a woman's bed at the end. I suppose one could simply look at it as the nature of gossip around a celebrity, but I think there's something more basic about impression and the paths carved from comprehension limited by socially anticipated behaviour. Looking at the lyrics, the most significant one seems to me to be, "be careful of what you do cause the lie becomes the truth." The kid, which doesn't feel like a literal kid but more of a metaphor for lowest common denominator expectation, has to be his son because it's what makes sense to everyone.

Anyway, I'd better get back to colouring . . .