Greggie Downer

I just finished the day's second bowl of Cherrios and raisins after vacuuming two month's worth of Goldfish crumbs and dead skin cells from the groove where glass meets wood on the coffee table -- and who knows how many months' worth of popcorn seeds and hairpins from the couches -- when I decided that today needs to be therapy day for Can You Dig It?
It feels good to have clean grooves, but it's only a momentary feel-good. I have to fight against curling into a ball on my clean couch and whining about how depressed I am. Instead, I'd thought I pull the computer over to me and moan about it on here.

Of course, the economy remains in the shitter and NPR's insistence on finding a million different stories every day to illustrate it doesn't help, but that's not really the problem. Everything else is the problem.
Let me give you some sound mental health advice. If you're not feeling too chipper, don't read Push by Sapphire. The movie version was the big winner at Sundance this year and my wife had read it, so I gave it a shot. It's about an illiterate black girl growing up in Harlem in the 1980s with a father who molests her, impregnates her twice and infects her with HIV. Oh, and her mother's abusive and her first baby, which she had when she was 12, has Down syndrome.

It's really a great book, just not fun, and I need fun.

I went to Michael Jackson for fun.

After posting that video a couple weeks ago showing Michael getting up on stage with James Brown, I was inspired to dig up some old songs -- some pre-Thriller, Jacksons-era jams like "Shake Your Body Down to the Ground," "Blame It On the Boogie" and "Lovely One."

It's been about four years since he was acquitted of those dirty charges and I was ready to dance again. Then some Internet searching brought me to the site for Julien's Auctions, which is holding Michael's big garage sale in April. It's sad for him that he has to sell all of his weird crap, but it's depressing for me that I don't have the money to buy any of it. You don't know how bad I want his "Hotflash Air Hockey" table listed on page 13 of Volume IV, "Amusements, Arcade Games and Disneyana."
I like that term, "Disneyana." I need more Disneyana.

The catalog would be good enough for me, but the $400 signed copies are already gone. You can still get me the $100 five-volume set, though. Just flipping through them online is a treat. I've always dreamed of seeing the King of Pop's octagonal cement planters and now I can thanks to his personal financial crisis.

I had read a few weeks ago that Michael was seriously ill, maybe that was actually what piqued my interest again -- the thought of him dying. If so, that's really depressing.

Thankfully, it seems he's healthy enough to do some shows in London, which he said will be his last there. The press conference was a real downer, with Michael doing some strange posing, but his speaking voice sounded like it had lost its 1980s pixieness. At least nobody can make fun of him for that anymore. The sleeping with children jokes are still on the table. And feel free to throw in a "Jesus Juice" reference if you care to.

While we're on '80s pop sensations, I might as well talk about my musical hero, Prince. He's releasing a 3-CD package at Target this month for just $11.98. That's sort of exciting. Something to look forward to, until the day two weeks later that I put it back on the shelf under the stairs with all of his other 21st century work.

But wait! He's also launching a new site that promises to include a vast collection of full-length concerts from the Golden Age of his career. There are rumours, as there always are when he starts a new site, that it might also include official copies of unreleased songs from the same era, many of which stand up to his best work.

The cost to access the site? Some are saying $77 a year. Should an unemployed househusband spend that kind of money? Yes.

Now, back to being depressed.

* The other night on the local news I saw a tween-age girl wearing a Confederate flag shirt at an anti-Obama rally.

* I'm burned out on Facebook. Too much time spent reading what you're up to. I'm tired of you. Sorry 'bout that, it's really about me getting busy living offline, said the man blogging about being depressed.

* It's going to be 80 degrees this weekend. We're going to have a picnic. Sounds good, right? Wrong! It means it's only a matter of time before I spot some dude with his cellphone belted to his jean shorts. That might send me over the edge.