It hasn't been so bad. The girls and I watch What Not to Wear, and for a while, we were overindulging on Top Chef. Sometimes I would watch the news. Sometimes we would try to find a movie. There are one or two other shows we might watch if the television were already on. Maybe we watch two to three hours a week.
Oh my goodness. Am I sorry I have cable now? I'm not sure, but I am taken aback. I am very surprised no celebrity has yet broken a leg trying to get to the phone to call Larry King to describe his or her feelings of sorrow and bewilderment about the death of Michael Jackson. But it is early in the spectacle and who knows what will happen before it is all over. (We do have a pretty good idea, now that I think of it.)
What people are saying is so awful, so silly, so ridiculous and so focused on themselves that one can hardly keep one's countenance. And yet, I confess that I was right there watching, from the moment I first read the alerting email from Chicago C. until I finally went to bed.
The blame is already gathering in the distance. We won't know anything for weeks, though--even though we do know. Vultures were buying memorabilia today. Some horrible person on CNN basically said that the positive thing about Michael Jackson's death was that it put an end to the accumulation of debt.
One thing that would be funny if it weren't so terrible is how people try to brush past the child molest accusations on their way to the podium. "It's all academic now," said Kenny Rogers impatiently.
But people who were abused as children are the ones who grow up to abuse others, in whatever manner. It's so sad. As everyone can't help but point out, Michael Jackson was such a beautiful child. Then when the evidence of plastic surgery started showing up, he seemed like the illustration of a bad joke. It's always seemed obvious that he was suffering. To do that to yourself, to live as he did, to do all that one can do in order to try to burrow back into childhood--a childhood he never had. And then, he had to live out his suffering in front of the world. Well. It's over now.
Today was Show the Pain Day on television. I wanted to hear the coroner's press conference, so I turned on the TV and learned nothing I couldn't have guessed myself. I left the TV on, kind of like how I went to the casino that one time with S., to see what all the fuss was about. I cried when I watched Oprah. The guests were several obese teen-agers who had tried to kill themselves, along with a couple who runs some kind of therapy group. The clips from the therapy session are what made me cry. Those poor children are suffering so much, and not just because they are fat. They are suffering because life just hands it out sometimes. One kid's dad left his mom on the young man's birthday. Another girl kept trying to tell her mother that it wasn't the mother's fault the girl's father had abandoned them. The pain was so raw and real. If someone can see that kind of pain and not feel anything in response, I am not sure I want to know that person.
And then. Why, dear Lord Jesus, did I do it, I watched ten minutes of Jon and Kate Plus 8, a show I have never ever watched. It was a rerun, and seemed as if it may have been the pilot. If you have never seen it, it is a monstrosity wherein a family of 10 (mother and father and one set of twins and one set of sextuplets) lives in front of cameras from dawn until dark.
I knew the couple is now divorcing because I'd seen the headlines on yahoo or somewhere, but I didn't know anything about them. Dear sweet Lord Jesus, I say it again. I watched that man talk about how his wife's appearance had changed since the birth of the sextuplets, and could not believe she could remain sitting next to him without cracking him on the head with a cast iron skillet. Then she went into another room and showed her post-partum abdomen to the camera and said sadly, "How beautiful."
That brought tears to my eyes, too. Why do people hate themselves so much? She gave birth to 8 children. (We are not talking about the wisdom of her decision to bear 8 children, remember, nor about her personality, which does seem a little inflexible.) Her body was not going to be the same. Of course, part (maybe all, who knows) of the reason she hated herself was that her husband no longer found her beautiful because she no longer had the long blonde hair (no time for the cuts and the highlights and the blowdrying) and centerfold body she had when they first met.
It's back to that, is it. The only way is to learn to love yourself. Otherwise, there is not enough Demerol in the world, there is not enough food in the world, not enough booze, not enough money nor fame nor attention nor whatever we can use to try to deaden that pain.
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