help me sing it

I woke up this morning with The song "The Girl Is Mine" running through my head. I hummed it making bagels with peanut butter, honey, and bananas. Odd, really, I haven't heard it in a long time.

Clicking through my favorites links on my mobile phone, I checked BBC headlines a few minutes ago. It's really the only news source I read with any regularity. As I explained to my father a few months ago, it saves me a lot of agony. Reading headlines about every nasty thing that happens in the world, the country, the city, it's just grim. Totally morbid. It's a lesson I learned growing up in the metro Detroit area. No one needs to hear that much morbid horrible crap at ten o'clock before they go to bed. Or at eight o'clock, right when they wake up. Even though I moved away at nineteen, I kept the habit. As a matter of fact, I remember one year when I lived in Asheville, NC and the murder rate had reached an unprecedented high: eighteen that year. Small potatoes compared to the crap I grew up with, but I still avoid the shock tactics of news stations in general. So I read the BBC headlines to see if anything big is happening in the world, and I'm sure a lot of news slips by me, but frankly I'm ok with that.

The top headline was about Michael Jackson dying.


*blinks*

I don't know why I find it so shocking. He wasn't old, so there's that. He didn't seem to live the wild parties and drug addled lifestyles of many contemporaries, but then, did Michael Jackson have any contemporaries? He was one odd duck.

I loved his music when I was in elementary school, and I think I still have the Thriller album on cassette. Doubtful the song "Wanna Be Startin' Something" has ever played within earshot and my ass wasn't shaking- that whole bit at the end just GETS me. So that's how I'd like to pay tribute to one of my childhood idols, I think.

"Lift your head up high
And scream out to the world
I know I am someone
And let the truth unfurl
No one can hurt you now
Because you know what's true
Yes, I believe in me
So you believe in you
Help me sing it, ma ma se,
Ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa
Ma ma se, ma ma sa,
Ma ma coo sa."

~Michael Jackson, Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'