The King of Posthumous

Michael Jackson is still dead, at least for now anyways.  Whereas his 11 year old daughter, Paris, apparently is real and normal looking – judging by the gratuitous photos of her shedding tears, like a hairy Parisian does a Speedo.  The whole public funeral seemed extremely weird to me however, even in Michael Jackson terms.

First, who has a funeral where attendance is determined by not only your relationship to the deceased, but also by your ability to use the refresh button on Ticketmaster.com?  I even heard there were fools selling their tickets on Stubhub.com.  No matter how much you liked a guy you had never met, why would you try to get behind-the-bench seats at his funeral?  He’ll probably be pickled anyway, and go on at least one last world tour; so just hold your dead flowers and horses, and go to the nearest Amtrack station to camp out.  I imagine it’ll be like a Phish show for morbid, non-hallucinatin’, three dogs or less folks who didn’t quite make it out of mortuary school.

On that note, do you think the morticians had to embalm him, or did all that Diprivan do the trick?  I’m not a doctor - but I sleep with one not as much as I’d like.  So my sources tell me you could knock out a sumo wrestler, and the scoliosis-ridden horse he rode in on, with a milligram of that stuff.  Famous people have worser (yeah, I made up a word…deal with it) subscription drug problems than the rest of us peons, because candy man doctors hand out that shit like Xanax Pez dispensers.  Seriously, who in the hell gives MJ (a guy that has undergone the knife more than Julius Caesar) a prescription for an intravenous anesthetic to be used at his home-abusing leisure, under the guise that it treats insomnia?

I also heard something about the designer who made the suit that MJ wore for his final curtain call.  How would you like that to be your claim to fame?  I don’t know if they took his casket down the red carpet, or if the pallbearers were questioned by Ryan Seacrest about what he was wearing inside the box, but someone is running with it.  I guess they’ll get all the dead celebrity business now. Cue advertising campaign: ”This Fall, new from Armani, the Non-Responsive Collection. When it’s your time to go to heaven, you want to look good walking through those pearly gates. If you’re going to hell, you want to look hot. Armani…it’s to die for.”

Then people like Magic Johnson (the basketball player - not the album, song, or porno title), Brooke Shields, and Jermaine Jackson turned MJ’s funeral into a freaking episode of Where Are They Now? on VH1.  I mean hell, I think the only person missing was Screech from Saved By the Bell.  Brooke Shields ain’t been cool in years; whereas nothing used to come between her and her Calvins, something has been coming between her and a hit T.V. show.  Jermaine Jackson ain’t been cool since everyone realized he wasn’t Michael.  Kobe Bryant was there too, but he only got in because he has a stall in the funeral locker room. Word is, he was allotted 15 tickets to give out to family and friends.

With all this being said, I am sure a hell of a lot more people disagree with me, rather than agree with me.  Maybe they’re right, maybe this is the proper way for a celebrity to go out – especially someone who had enough plastic surgery to require “Made in Taiwan” to be tattooed on his back.  I guess The Staples center was appropriate too, because staples were probably the only thing holding him together for the last few years.