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It's unbelievable he's dead. Like, Huh? I read the news on my laptop in my favorite patisserie after apartment scouting in San Francisco, and it just seemed unreal. There I was, eating the house quiche, a sublime concoction with cardboard thin slices of "featured vegetable" yellow squash, in the words of the statuesque, almond-eyed cashier, whose flashing eyes are with me still.

First of all, it doesn't seem right he's dead and I'm alive to write about it. He's younger than me, greater than I.

Blurry, supercharged video of ecstatic 21-year-old performer, 1980.

But mostly, Michael Jackson needed a break before the big sleep. He needed to pull out of that tailspin, accept himself, redeem himself... and then, okay, whatever, go ahead and die. After death, of course, he's thoroughly redeemed by his young work, but it would've been nice for the human behind the work to find some peace while still breathing on this planet.

His death seems unreal because as an artist he lives so vibrantly in images and sound, in the memories of fans and people who actually knew him. How many people learned to dance with his music, his moves? How can anybody that kinetic be stopped in his tracks?

His death feels unreal because he himself was unreal. Both as an artistic creation, a self-made spectacle, a 24/7 performance artiste and as the grotesque clown he'd reduced to in the rare, dreadful glimpses blazoned by a media beyond his control. Final photos make him look like bad Joan Crawford and nobody wants to look like that and nobody else wants to look at anyone looking that way.

But mostly, how can a zombie die?

Bizarre heterosex promotional video starring MJ and Naomi Campbell.

Michael Jackson was a zombie because he lived in some half-light, twilit, ambivalent intersection between genius and outcast, idol and pervert. He couldn't be one without the other. Balancing between opposites, not self-limiting to any pre-existing category most mortals cling to, he was an old prodigy, a butched-up black-yet-white girl, the love child of Diana Ross and Fred Astaire, Jerome Robbins and break dance, a fusional confusion of delusions we all wanted a piece of, even if it was just the white socks or the glove or the glitter or the glasses or the freaky-ass military regalia. He even made his arrested-adolescent, narcissistic isolation seem enviable. Moon walk.

But nobody wanted the pedophile. No one wanted the twisted child left behind in the mad rush to global megabuck megastardom.

Synchronicity: we're gearing up for Pride in San Francisco, the event launched by the Stonewall Riots in NYC, a visceral reaction by drag queens to the lying-in-state of Miss Judy Garland, aged 47, drug-addled child star exploited by a studio system that squeezed every lucrative drop from a sensitive instrument second to none in the songs-to-make-your-heart-break arena, who also had world-class charm and makes-it-look-so-easy comic timing. An entertainer, an embarrassment, an emotional genius.

Sixteen-year-old Judy Garland sings "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," 1938.

Pride is about reclaiming the undesirable. Assimilationists, stand back. Freaks, get ready to march.

Was Michael Jackson proud to be the person he was? Are we proud of him, I mean all the way down the line, not just the Disney version? Do we recognize in ourselves the terrifying conundrum he faced and could not reconcile, of being neither clearly man nor woman, child nor adult, black nor white, natural nor artificial, feel free to add your own set of contradictions as they occur to you...

Michael Jackson was a freak. Who's willing to claim that piece of the puzzle along with the music? Until we do, he will not rest in peace and neither will anybody else. I don't expect pedophiles to start a riot when some cop tries to interrupt their mourning. But maybe his death-in-life, his isolation, his inability to accept himself while simultaneously inspiring millions of imitators, will move us that much closer to respecting who we are, each one of us, deep down in our eeriest depths.