He Said Matter-Of-Factly ...

Staring out window
Wish for rotten milk to drink
Too sick for 4th grade

'Will I See Heaven In Mine?'

The little boy says, "Look at me! I can jump in the pool."

The 33-year-old man who passes for 45 struggles to think how he is important enough for a little boy to care what someone like him thinks.

He is the guy ...

Who could have had so much. Who lost so much before he had it. All the unique human qualities we wish we had. Who has lost hope that he will ever fully return to the the good inside him that others tell them they see.

Who would tell you he remembers, almost 20 years later, when we'd tresspass on farm ponds and fish until somebody ran us off.

Who would steal your cell to score a rock.

Who you'd want to smile with, because there used to be more to smile about, and it felt good.

But nothing can just be good. Feel right.

Yet here he is, in this moment -- important, implored by uncorrupted acceptance.

Uncontrasted.

He feels what he can feel. And he says what he can say -- before walking away with a smile difficult to see because his nature is to turn his head from the thousands of eyes dissecting him.

"That's good. Keep jumpin' in, just as long as you can climb back out."

The victory in just surviving. This is how it happens.

Just Upining

One of the more commonly used devices among the critics is to describe the movie "Up" as a film that intentionally keeps you grounded.

That is true.

The best way I can explain it:

You might find yourself emerging from the theater with a warm, melancholy smile cracking the dried salt on your cheeks.

'When The Groove Is Dead And Gone, You Know That Love Survives ... So We Can Rock Forever On'

Michael Jackson's death has freed him now.

And us from our living mourning for the past two or so decades.

It was like watching someone slowly die and degenerate from a terminal disease -- but now all has been made whole. They don't typically show the state of those of people as they're dying, but we watched it unfold as each stranger year passed.

I feel a warm melancholy as I watch his performances in the early 80s. Music almost as essential to watch as to listen to.

All on his own, early 20s, full of an elegant self-confidence.

It's nice to be a 9-year-old kid when a definitive cultural moment arrives.

"Thriller."

It usurped my summer, 10-plus minute extended videos at a time.

Then he began his transformation ... and that's all need be said, now that he no longer lives.

And now, two and a half decades later, here are the tributes -- which from our generation can be told through music videos.

Once the tributes are done, I don't plan to watch any of the drama related to his death, both when he was alive and dead.

I am allowed freely to believe in what I remember on those summer nights of childhood, as we flipped the awkwardly large and cumbersome cable converter box remote (ironically still attched by a cord) to watch him perform daily eclipse's over MTV.

I really have missed that part of my life. I tried to moonwalk tonight. I think I did it.

It's strange how death brings these things to life.

Analog Purgatory

I had thought I had watched the last analog TV of my life on my porch the night the Lakers went up 3-1 on the Magic (because Jameer Nelson decided to play the exact opposite defense you play when your team is up by 3 with only seconds left).

It was the night before the big June 12 digital switchover.

The game was over. I collapsed the attenae and watched as the screen went snowy. Then I clicked the TV off. Dropped it out into the garage.

I had long dreaded this moment, even after Obama extended the deadline from February.

I know there are options, but I just can't let it go. For whatever reason.

The other night I plugged it into a socket in the garage. I fished out the damaged antennae and attached it, just to see what would happen.

And I found ... glorious programming!

Analog purgatory. With the strongest signal coming from Charlotte, no less.

Looping info-packages on how to handle the digital switchover.

It's almost like the joy one of my dear cousins gets out of religiously watching the TV Guide channel scroll by, over and over, all day.

Like her, I can't get enough of it.

I turn on the analog purgatory as I grill food, drink a beer and smoke a clove.

The chatter is comforting, the feeling of having been left behind in the rapture. Battling post-apocalyptic isolation with but a few remaining survivors.

They even offer trivia on when the earliest digital signal was sent. Did you know it was like 1994 or something? Or maybe 1999? I don't know; I wasn't really paying attention.

Alas, nothing can last forever.

Throughout all the regurgitated instructions of how to screw a cable into a box then screw another cable into another place, and after all the interviews with electronics experts and the suprisingly clean graphics ... they let us know that they will stop doing what they're doing on July 6.

Well, just so you know, this one loyal viewer is melancholy.