Life is a limited time offer

So I’ve been processing this whole Michael Jackson thing, and other people have said it better than I could. Basically, if you were born around 1975 or earlier, Michael Jackson was IT. He was EVERYTHING in the 80’s. Yeah, he turned into something so ‘other’ that it can barely be explained, but for me, in elementary school, MJ was MUSIC.

But today Billy Mays died. To me, that’s just a huge, huge shock. Sure, MJ dying at 50 was shocking, but with the way that dude was carrying on, it was really only a matter of time. With Billy Mays, well, we expected him to be on our TVs for a good long time, hawking OxiClean and Orange Glo and Slider Station and a hundred other things. Wonder Mop (I do want one of these).

When Jillian was a tiny tiny baby and we were having marathon breastfeeding sessions, Billy Mays was there for me. He was there at 3:30AM, shouting about Orange Glo or some other thing that I just HAD to have. Even though the TV in Jillian’s nursery was hooked to the cable, we didn’t have a converter box for it so I only got about 20 channels on it. We had to watch a lot of network dreck in those days. But Billy was always there. His yelly presence was the music to which we drowsed, in those late nights/early mornings.

And now he’s gone. Limited time offer, my friends.