I’ve spent a lot of time updating the music section of this site, ostensibly for an audience of 12 people. Music being so subjective, I’ve learned long ago to never inflict my musical taste on others. While many musician friends of mine tend to pin me down and force me to listen to their latest tracks, I’ve always been of a mind to hand you a tape and leave the room. I’ve never been invested in the praise of others, and false praise—polite praise—is the absolute worst. As with most creative people, when I review my own work, all I see are the flaws and the missed opportunities, so listening to my own music tends to make me cringe. Listening to it in the company of others is simply unbearable, and I tend to get up and walk out.

I’d been wanting to clean up that code for a few years, but finally had a window of time in which to tackle it. I’m still in the process of remastering some of the clips there to make them sound a bit better (which doesn’t help my singing at all, but at least the awful singing will be clearer). I was inspired to do this by someone I refer to as Nancy The Terrible, who was, essentially, Lucy Van Pelt to my Charlie Brown back when she was 13 at the Word of Life summer camp in the Adirondack mountains of upstate New York. I’d said some fairly mean things about Nancy, as I’ve said about many people, especially in the older bowels of this site. I think I’ve always intended to be frank but not mean. I personally get bored reading obviously whitewashed histories or watching those DVD extras where the cast and crew all claim to have gotten along sublimely when you know, for certain, William Shatner had ego problems and Patrick Stewart was well-known for his on-set tantrums. I don’t think we need to bash each other but let’s at least be truthful: not all relationships were perfect. I myself spent a lot of time being a jerk—usually unintentionally, but a jerk nonetheless.

In any case, I went up there to edit the mean things I said about Ms. Terrible and just couldn’t stand looking at the abominable 1990’s code anymore, and, thus, an obsession was born. I caution everyone: the music section has precious little commercial value, and, other than a couple clips of MD “Doc” Bright playing bass on one of my songs, the section has absolutely nothing to do with comics. It has, an at best nostalgic value to those who participated in my music projects over those years, and hopefully the archive will serve as a reminder of what we shockingly now know were, in fact, the good ol’ days. Beyond that, it’s just me whining about ex-girlfriends. Your mileage may vary.

As great an admirer I am of Jackson’s amazing talent, I have absolutely no doubt, none whatsoever, that Jackson has been sexually molesting if not sexually assaulting minor boys for decades. This Penn State graduate assistant allegedly happened upon a six-foot-two, 200-pound, fifty-something year-old silver-haired man, naked in a shower with a naked 10-year old boy–by account of the indictment–pressed up against the shower tiles while the man sodomized him. The picture that graphic language creates is horrifying. Yet, I am persuaded this is precisely what Michael Jackson has been doing most of his privileged adult life. Many of Jackson’s victims were delivered, eagerly, into his hands by parents who either knew or suspected what Jackson’s actual motives were, but who were either starstruck or were positioning themselves to make money off of him. This is evil. Don’t parse it, don’t excuse it. It’s evil. Why was America so horrified by Sandusky while Jackson remains, in even my memory, a kind of tragically beloved figure?

 Complete Essay Is Here