One of my favorite all-time Seinfeld episodes was the one in which George is convinced he should leave a room as soon as he makes a good joke, lest he ruin it by trying to make another one. While anyone that has ever read any of my rambling, dysfunctional posts that seem to never end (or even really have a point) may assume I missed the key lesson of this episode, I have always taken that as one of my favorite mottos in life. Always ‘leave on a high note’.

If I thought that was important before, the last couple weeks have driven home that point more than I ever could have expected.

In a couple week span in which we have seen what seems like an unprecedented string of celebrity deaths that have gone from the unsurprising (an 86-year old, a 62-year old battling cancer) to the inexplicable (a former kung-fu master, one of those guys from infomercials) to the jaw-dropping (a 50-year old man-child, a 36-year old former quarterback), the thing that I have started to realize is that George was more ahead of his time than we even knew. How you go out may matter more than just about anything else.

The most tragic example of this is of course Steve McNair. A man who spent his celebrity life as well as anyone ever could may be from this point on remembered for how it ended. A former NFL MVP; a pillar of the Nashville community; someone who played through more injuries than the entire 2008 Broncos; a historically black college legend that broke ground for all small school players when he became a Heisman finalist (while making distracted white people wonder why someone named a state school after an acorn); the quarterback of a team one-yard from Super Bowl immortality. All could have been used to describe McNair a week ago.

Now, will anyone remember him as anything but ‘that former quarterback who was (apparently) killed by his 20-year old girlfriend in a murder-suicide, while his wife and kids waited at home for him’? I hope so. I hope that the bizarre circumstances of his death don’t overshadow all of the great things he did in his short 36 years on earth.

Contrast that with Michael Jackson. A man whose time in the spotlight could most charitably be described as ‘eccentric’ yet just today nearly 20,000 people (of nearly a million that applied for tickets) crammed into a basketball arena to say goodbye. Long forgotten are the accusations and disturbing evidence of what he might have done (or wanted to do) with innocent children only guilty of having parents wanting to bask in the reflected light of being near a superstar. Due to a death that was most shocking in its ordinariness, Jackson is now praised as an angel. 

I am not here to shred Jackson or spit on his grave. I enjoyed his music (I may be the only person that would admit to loving Man In The Mirror) and his lifestyle was certainly entertaining for me in a certain Borat-esque cringe-humor sort of way. Yet I always felt a little sorry for him and am still shocked that the vast, vast majority of the discussion of his life has focused on his music. A part of his life that really ended over a decade ago.

I just think it is unfair that years of good work can be seemingly wiped away by something essentially out of someone’s control. I can only hope that once the immediacy of these deaths pass we can take a more reasoned look back and recognize the contributions those now gone made to our lives.

I can’t be the only one that noticed David Carradine will forever be a punchline but is guilty of something less disturbing than what Jackson was widely believed just a couple weeks ago to have done.

I think I am comfortable speaking for all of the country (anyone that objects feel free to speak up) in that the last couple weeks have been a little jarring. Losing so many people that many of us felt we knew. Whether it was a woman whose poster adorned our walls which we….ahem….examined very closely, a guy’s whose music was some of the first we owned, a man who was literally one of the last people we saw every night, or someone that played quarterback and in the process showed millions of people that they could too; we have all lost someone in the last couple weeks. We are all in a collective state of shock. Every time I pull up MSNBC.com I half expect to see another headline that someone else is gone.

I just hope that when the fog lifts and we all move on, we focus on the life they lived and not the death they died.

Not everyone can always go out on top.

As we approach the Fourth of July, I thought I should pause and take a moment to embrace the holiday. On other holidays you often hear of people using the occasion to appreciate their lives – whether it is assessing the things for which they are thankful on Thanksgiving or airing grievances on Festivus.

However, it doesn’t seem like anyone looks at the Fourth of July to appreciate all that our forefathers had to go through to allow us to live as we do.

It’s funny that as a kid you learn so much about the revolution but I don’t think it really dawned on me until just a few years ago reading about John Adams that our forefathers weren’t always heroes. Initially they were traitors.

With two hundred years of revisionist history, we have been trained to believe that they were good and the Brits were evil. All of this makes you really wonder what future generations will look back on this time and think.

Was the Iranian election of 2009 a watershed moment or a road bump on the road to continued maniacal, theological, narrow-minded, intolerant leadership? Was the war in Afghanistan, an imperial super power forcing its views on a simple people or the freeing of a people from tyrannical leadership? Was Michael Jackson a musical genius and man of god or a pervy weirdo that took advantage of children?

We can’t address these questions today, but it got me to thinking about the greatness of this country. Those many years ago our forefathers fought for freedom. Freedom to say and think as you desire. Freedom from afternoon tea and crumpets and poor oral hygiene.

So in honor of the men that founded this country I have decided to express a number of things I am free to think and say because of them.

In the United States in 2009 I am free to think:

• That Michael O’Donoghue’s quote of ‘Good career move’ when he heard that Elvis had just died summed up better than I ever could my feelings about all of these people suddenly sanctifying a child molester.
• That people who have decided to forget that Michael Jackson molested children just because he made some good music and passed away are too moronic to be allowed to reproduce.
• That when these people (inevitably) do reproduce their children will most likely become reality show contestants and inflict their uselessness and idiocy on the rest of us.
• That a better use for Guantanamo would be as a detention center for all reality show participants and the paparazzi
• That the 2-0 lead that U.S. soccer held over Brazil was a much less accurate indicator of their relative strength than getting outscored 3-0 in the second half.
• That you should only watch the movie Vantage Point once because the second time you will start figuring out that there are some holes in the timelines between the different versions of the same event.
• That the movie Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is the perfect combination of realism and absurdity
• That in Walk Hard, the fact that Pam from The Office is surprisingly gorgeous and wearing low cut tops the whole time more than makes up for the extended penis close-ups.
• That Raul Ibanez is not taking steroids, despite what some blogger said. Here is what I wrote last year on my first visit to SafeCo field: Raul Ibanez might be the greatest player in the majors…if he could bat exclusively against Jered Weaver. Lifetime he is 12-21 with 4 homers against Weaver. Friday night, he hit two massive homers (the first was measured at 438 feet) on a cool, damp evening. Put him in Coors Field and he might hit one 600 feet.
• That the Rockies are a fun story but I wouldn’t put much money on a Rockune, Rockuly, Rockust, and Rocktember run propelling them into the playoffs.
• That after watching some of the Rockies / A’s series last weekend, everyone involved would be happier if Holliday were still playing for the Rockies.
• That Jim Tracy’s helming of this team to a 23-9 record actually helped prove the point of my rant in which I declared the Rockies dead to me.
• That after questioning every single move that Tracy made in the 9^th inning of a tie game against the Pirates a couple weeks ago only to see them all work to perfection, I should stick to football.
• That they could all get ‘Brady-ed’ in the first quarter of the first game and Colt McCoy, Sam Bradford and Tim Tebow would still be the top three vote-getters for the Heisman.
• That the guy whose thesis in PCU was that you could find a Gene Hackman or Michael Caine movie on cable at any hour of any day, will be proven correct this fall only it will be about finding a glowing tribute to Tim Tebow.
• That T.O. and Tony Romo are going to both wish T.O. was still in a Cowboy uniform by November 1^st.
• That Jay Cutler’s perception of his time in Denver is going to change radically about the fourth time he throws to a wide-open Devin Hester and the ball goes through his hand after spending an entire quarter handing off to Matt Forte.
• That it is sort of pathetic that the NFL is currently trying to determine which of the following players deserves the harshest penalty: a guy that inadvertently shot himself in the leg, a guy that ran a dog fighting ring and treated dogs worse than Kabayashi, and a guy that ran over and killed another person while driving drunk
• That a guy being stupid enough to shoot himself in the leg is to the other two as Martha ‘Dumptruck’ Dunstock is to Christian Slater in Heathers.
• That the Fourth of July signifies the beginning of the end of summer despite technically coming about 14 days after the official start of summer.
• That training camp can’t come fast enough.

What are you free to think?