Exploiting the Archives: Revisiting the "Thriller Killer" Doctor's Fascinatingly Insane Ego Trip, THIS IS IT: THE PRIVATE LIVES OF DR. CONRAD MURRAY AND MICHAEL JACSON
The “This happened () Years Ago Today” feature on Facebook can be a blessing and a curse, and not just because as I write this, Donald Trump was elected President (a series of words it still physically pains me to write) exactly one year ago today. As you might imagine from a man who has written multiple memoirs about his battles with depression and mental illness, not all of my memories are rosy. Heck, I’m not even sure a majority of my memories are happy. Or even a strong minority. Or a small minority. Basically there's just my wedding, my son's birth and Thor: Ragnarok.
Regardless, Facebook does occasionally resurrect in its weird nostalgia factory experiences I’m actually tickled to remember or relive. That was the case a few days ago when I was reminded that a little over a year ago I had the curious “honor” of reading and writing about one of the most loathsome books I’ve ever come across not entitled The Art of the Deal.
I didn’t just feel dirty reading and writing about Conrad Murray’s This Is It!: The Secret Lives of Dr. Conrad Murray and Michael Jackson. I felt dirty just looking at the cover. I felt dirty just knowing that the man notorious for being sent to prison in connection with Michael Jackson’s fatal overdose had written an oily, endlessly self-regarding tome about his own legendary, fabled greatness as a cross between Jonas Salk, James Bond and Mother Theresa and how lucky that unfortunate Michael Jackson creep was to have a man of Murray’s stature in his life, even if he repaid his greatest/only friend and confidant’s boundless, selfless generosity by very inconveniently dying in a way that left Murray the proverbial bag full of Fentanyl, even though, as Murray establishes exhaustively here, he was not only innocent of this crime but of all sins and transgressions, on account of being the world’s greatest human being. Speaking of crimes, how egregious of a word crime was that run-on sentence? It's a good thing I cannot be imprisoned for what I write here.
This Is It!: The Secret Lives of Dr. Conrad Murray and Michael Jackson should never have been written or published. I’m not just saying that on creative or moral grounds. I’m pretty sure there are laws specifically preventing people from profiting off accounts of their crimes, and while the only thing Murray seems to feel guilty of is being too amazing for a world as corrupt and degraded as ours, he sure seems to be trying to profit off the things he went to jail for here.
Murray isn’t just one of the most fascinatingly deluded figures I’ve ever encountered: he also writes in the barely comprehensible, profane, rage-filled manner of a semi-literate teenager taking his rage at the world out on the English language.
This is the ultimate “I read this so you wouldn’t have to” masochistic delight. Enjoy? It doesn’t get a whole lot creepier or more morbidly fascinating than this stunning exercise in self-delusion and self-mythologizing.
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