Pop star Michael Jackson back in 1987.

Not that I make a habit of reading autopsy reports (because they give me the heebie jeebies), but when cnn.com posted the MJ autopsy report, I had to look, just out of curiosity. I figured there had to be something either eye-rolling or salacious in the report.

So, I read through most of it-I stopped when it looked like there were photographs approaching, because a) I have no desire to see Michael Jackson’s body without clothes on and b) I have no desire to see Michael Jackson dead.

So, based on what I read, here are a couple of interesting observations I made:

1) That Pepsi accident was a lot worse than he let on.

Those of you who were alive when the incident occurred might remember that MJ was basically in the hospital overnight when the brother had third-degree burns ON HIS HEAD. Regardless of how severe the incident really was, there had to have been some reconstructive surgery involved, as well as some permanent hair loss. So the fact that Mike a) wore a wig and b) appeared to be losing-or appeared to have lost-his hair doesn’t surprise me much. The wig is one thing-he’s been wearing one at least since the early Nineties (check out the “Remember the Time” video), but I have to assume that the hair loss was a direct consequence of the accident. Male-pattern baldness is hereditary. Doesn’t Joe have a full head of hair? Jackie, Marlon and Jermaine certainly do. Actually, something tells me that if Jermaine was to go bald, it would be a national emergency. Then again, MJ also had lupus, which can cause hair loss.

2) He really had vitiligo…BUT…

The coroner’s results indicated that he had skin patches consistent with vitiligo. I’m still on the fence about this one. If you read J. Randy Taraborelli’s biography “The Magic and the Madness”, he suggests that the vitiligo may have been a consequence of skin bleaching. There’s no doubt that Michael bleached his skin. During the 2003 raid on Neverland, tubes of a skin bleaching agent were found (they’re in the police report) and there’s an apparently true report of Michael having been treated by Arnold Klein back in ’93 because he attempted to use a bleaching agent on his testicles (gross). Either way, if the vitiligo was hereditary, there’s still no explanation for the extreme skin lightening. I KNOW people with vitiligo. If you want to use makeup to even out your skin tone, you have the option of using makeup matched to your complexion. Why did Michael decide to go with opaque white makeup as opposed to using makeup that maintained his natural brown skin color?

Do I think Michael was a race traitor? No. I think he was confused. He obviously took great pride in being black, but then you have to look at actions, like his facial reconstruction (what black person has a chin cleft?), the fact that he wore straight-hair wigs for the last 16 or 17 years of his life, and the fact that he “fathered” two very obviously Caucasian children. Let’s be real folks. I’ve encountered MANY mixed-race people in my life. I have NEVER met one that didn’t have curly or kinky hair. If you have direct genetic material from a Black person (particularly one who was as dark-skinned as Michael), you are not going to have skin that fair nor is it likely that you’re going to have perfectly straight hair, as Prince and Paris do.

3) He was too lazy to go to the bathroom to pee.

Which isn’t weird-at least not to me. When I was growing up, I had a relative who kept a cut-open Clorox bottle by the bed that they would pee in, and then empty it in the morning? Why was that done? Because there were children in the house and they didn’t want to stumble through the house, flipping lights on and off, making noise and waking everyone up in the middle of the night. Michael had three young kids. Maybe he just didn’t want to disturb anyone by running to the bathroom at 2 AM.

4) People that comment on Michael Jackson posts on the internet are CRAZY.

Seriously. I consider myself a huge Michael Jackson fan. But some of the folks out there are BATSHIT INSANE. The anti-media tone of some of the comments is downright laughable. I was reading comments about Rolling Stone’s article detailing the autopsy report, and a ton of commenters went off on RS, saying that they made up a report from the hospital saying that Michael had no nose. Actually, that’s not what they said. They said that Michael, when he was taken to the hospital, was missing the prosthetic that he applied to the tip of his nose. Big difference between “no nose” and “prosthetic tip”, yes?

Can the media be unfair? Absolutely. Were they unfair to Michael in some cases? Definitely. Will they be unfair to you if you don’t give them ammunition? Most likely not. It’s common knowledge that Michael himself leaked the hyperbaric chamber and Elephant Man stories to the media in order to give him a certain mystique. It’s obvious that he had some major work done on his body and refused to address it (wouldn’t it have been so much easier to admit that either the Pepsi accident was worse than initially reported or that he had alopecia related to lupus than to just deny he’d ever had anything done?). If people were to run a DNA test on Michael’s kids (specifically the older two), I’d be willing to bet strongly that they’re not his. Even if he was not a pedophile (and I honestly don’t think he was), wouldn’t a normal person, having already been raked through the coals (and having spent a shit ton of money) in a previous incident, keep children out of his fucking bed going forward? You’ve got to pin at least some of this on Michael for not being entirely forthcoming and also for making dumb decisions. What pissed me off about the J5 reality show (despite the fact that no one cares about a reunion that doesn’t feature Michael and the brothers were insulting our intelligence by thinking that people would) is that there was a constant playing of the media blame game, ESPECIALLY by Jermaine. Dear Jermaine-the media didn’t make comments about Michael wanting to be white and attribute them to you. The media didn’t record “Word to the Badd”. The media didn’t get a woman pregnant at the same time your wife was pregnant by you, and the media didn’t marry your brother’s former wife. There’s a lengthy history of Jacksons not taking responsibility for their own actions. Let’s not even mention Nipplegate.

Ultimately, the report really didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. It just reinforces the fact that Michael was troubled…and more than a little strange.