I am sort of in between articles this week, and the pile of stuff left to do is pretty small. Which is a good place to be on Thursday afternoon. It's really nice out today, too. And here I am, looking out the window.
On Friday, I'm out of town in the afternoon (high school golf finals) and then Saturday I'm busy all day (track finals). They're both about 50 to 60 miles away. More driving, more gas.
So I was looking over the news, and two major celebrity court cases caught my eye. "The Runaway Bride" and Michael Jackson.
The Runaway Bride. Sigh. It's too bad that this isn't the '30s and she doesn't look like Claudette Colbert and didn't meet up with Clark Gable along the way, with "the walls of Jericho" and everything. (Assuming you've seen "It Happened One Night"--and if you haven't, you should.) It's an old familiar story--cold feet just before the wedding. Infamously by men, but women get cold feet, too. Thinking about the life she'll be leaving behind, the terra incognita she will be entering. It can be damn scary.
In Claudette's case, it was her heart instructing her brain to flee from a worthless, pointless life with someone rich and dull. In the current case, the reasons are far from clear, and I guess she's getting the help she needs to sort her life out.
I guess you can get into a debate about marriage from there. Since I've been wed for so long, this may sound strange, but I really don't endorse it. I see plenty of problems with the "institution" as it exists today that aren't easily fixed. Like jealousy. Like monogamy. Like taking the other partner for granted. Like boredom.
And (let me add) while I am very hetero, I believe that gays/lesbians really do fall in love, too. So why aren't their relationships given the same legal seal of approval? Politicians and religious zealots, of course.
The Christian Taliban in Michigan pushed through a ballot proposal last fall, joining in the nationwide fad during the presidential election. Just think. If only the Massachusetts Supreme Court had just kept its big yap shut and not "legalized" gay marriage, it wouldn't have been a hot button issue in 2004 and George Bush would be a former president in 2005. [Sigh!]
Our other big legal case is, of course, Michael Jackson and what he supposedly did with a certain young boy. It's going before a jury in the next few hours.
Well, I'm definitely no Michael Jackson fan, but I have to wonder whether he's being prosecuted/persecuted just for being terminally weird. I'm old enough to remember the little lead singer with the Jackson 5, and I just can't understand how or why that happy little guy morphed into what we see today. What screwed up his mind so to make him want to change his appearance so much? My theory is that something must have really gone wrong when he was growing up. And I feel sorry for him. I really do.
I haven't followed the case closely enough to decide whether he really did something wrong with the kid or if this is just another round of celebrity leeches trying to rob someone in a courtroom.
But occasionally I say thanks to God for being poor and unknown. This is one of those times.
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