ast night, I walked to a sushi restaurant in my neighborhood, past the Honda idling at the stop sign and playing "The Girl is Mine," past the oldschool jambox situated outside the bodega on the corner, blasting "Thriller." I sat down with my book -- Margo Jefferson's slim, suprisingly poetic "On Michael Jackson" -- and when the waitress caught a look at it on the table, she touched the cover and then her heart, offering, in what little English she had: "So sad. I love him."

This was one of the first breaks I'd gotten since an email blast from TMZ arrived in my inbox approximately 30 hours prior. "This has got to be a joke," I said to my boss when it arrived. The jets were still cooling on the Farrah Fawcett obituary, but there it was: Michael Jackson has gone into cardiac arrest.

We spent the next 20 minutes trying to strategize possible coverage, watching the life drain out of the man via instant messages and twitter feeds and gossip sites and CNN. It was a macabre, frenetic little waiting game. "Maybe he'll just linger in a coma," she finally said, and it was not 30 seconds later, around 5:30pm our time, that they called it. Put up the paddles: Michael Jackson is dead. Three text messages arrived on my phone within minutes.

As most of my friends know, I had a thing about Michael Jackson. He was my childhood idol, and though that is hardly unique, I managed to dial superfandom up a notch: I held on a little tighter, I bowed a little deeper, a little longer than it was appropriate back in the good ole 1980s. In fact, one of the many lessons I learned from Michael Jackson was the surprising shame of loving something after everyone else has moved past it, of still dancing at the party after the room has emptied and the janitors are sweeping the floor. In 1983, worshiping Michael Jackson was practically a requirement; in 1986, it was cause for serious mockery.

Over the years, I've written stories about my Michael Jackson obsession, I've made jokes about it. Three years ago, at a retreat for The Morning News that happened to fall on my 31st birthday, I was outside smoking a cigarette when one of the editors came out and told me that Michael Jackson had just died. It was a ruse, of course; I dashed in, comically distraught, to find the lights dimmed and 15 people gathered around a cake in what remains one of my favorite, and most touching, surprises. But the lesson was not lost on me: If you wanted to unmoor me, if you wanted to watch my insides melt, tell me that Michael Jackson had died. It was, for me, the ultimate breaking news.

What I never explained, or articulated even to myself, was why that news left me so sad. After all, this wasn't Kurt Cobain, or David Foster Wallace, felled in what still felt like mid-career. I would not have seen Michael Jackson on his upcoming world tour. I would not have bought whatever new album inevitably dropped. "Off the Wall" is one of my all-time, desert island discs, the songs of the Jackson 5 feel tattooed on my heart, and "Thriller" changed my childhood as irrevocably as it changed the pop landscape. But over the years, even I had let Michael Jackson go. And so I would have flipped the channel when I saw his pinched, tortured face on CNN, and simply groaned when the late-night comedians and the gossip sites unrolled a million molestation jokes. I didn’t care anymore. It didn't effect me. The person on the television -- that human excavation site, his nose and cheeks chiseled down to jagged nothing -- was of absolutely no relevance to my life, a fact with which I could never quite reconcile and about which I felt rather guilty. Some superfan I turned out to be. And the reason that news of his death truly upset me was not so much that I felt grief. It's that I felt, miserably, a kind of relief.

When the news finally hit on Thursday, I did not feel any of these things. I felt disbelief and numbness and the surge of energy familiar to those on news desks, where there is nothing like a big death to jolt the place alive. My colleague Alex and I hastily curated a loving collection of our favorite videos, and I watched as eloquent tributes rolled in, and critics took to the cable channels to talk about what a perfect album "Off the Wall" was, and suddenly all anyone wanted to talk about was where they were when they first saw the moonwalk, or heard "Billie Jean," or danced to "I Want You Back" or made out to "The Way You Make Me Feel." Suddenly, for the first time in more than a decade, it was cool to be a Michael Jackson fan.

This was what Margo Jefferson, the author of that book I'm reading, said in her remembrance of Michael Jackson on Salon: "Suddenly, death has restored Michael Jackson to cultural respectability. Death gives us an easy way out of the unanswered questions and uneasy feelings. But (and this is the good thing), death also restores our total pleasure in his artistry. It makes me happy to see masses of people revel in the ache and charge of the music again, in the brilliant dancing, in the reckless splendor of his showmanship."

On Friday, the top 15 albums on Amazon were Michael Jackson albums. The top 15. Every block of this city seemed to be tuned into the same blissful frequency: "Ben" followed by "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough" followed by "Smooth Criminal." You have no idea how I love this music.

It's going to get darker, I know. This is the dance party weekend, before his entrails get dragged out and smeared across every cable news channel. But right now, it's like the speakers to my iPod are hooked up to the sky.

People keep asking how I am. And the truth is that I feel, weirdly, elated. Maybe I should feel bad about that, or guilty, but I don't. Death has restored our total pleasure in his artistry. And I feel like something I loved very deeply has finally returned.

"I was a fourth-grade nothing when he electrified my ears. Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa. I’d been listening to show tunes when I discovered him, yelping out his soul. In my life, I have spent many years wishing I were someone else, but I have never wanted to be anyone—ever—more than I wanted to be Michael Jackson. Do you remember? Help me sing it."

In 2003, I wrote about Michael Jackson for The Morning News. He died today.

his morning, only 20 minutes after my story about "American Idol" posted, I got an email from a friend. "Adam Lambert is fucking divine," it read. Now, that's what I call morning news. Should you want to read more about my thoughts on "American Idol"'s season finale last night, you are in luck.