We’re heading off to a parade that’s taking place right outside our house (as if we could avoid it). Hope everyone has a great day.

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’” ~Jack Kerouac

In the wake of Michael Jackson’s sad passing, I’ve been thinking about a question that has preoccupied me for some time—whether fame contributes to happiness in any lasting way, or whether it actually does the opposite, ushering in anxiety and depression. Statistics suggest that, contrary to the creed of aspiring reality TV stars, high visibility is far from a foolproof happiness tonic. Jib Fowles, author of Star Struck: Celebrity Performers and the American Public, has noted that famous people are four times more likely to opt for suicide than your average Joe or Jane.

My personal experience with this issue—much smaller in scale than Michael’s, of course—is that as I began writing for more prominent publications, my anxiety over what I’d written (Would someone be grievously offended by something I say? Would I somehow get a key issue wrong?) increased. I’m gratified knowing that people may gain some new knowledge or insight from what I’ve written and that I’m reaching more readers than I did before. But since the stakes seem higher, I’m also more fearful of making a misstep. On balance, am I happier than before? That’s a difficult question to answer.

In the end, I think the fame-happiness connection may be one of those hot-stove issues. Just as kids are convinced the stove won’t hurt them until they blister their fingers, fame-seekers are often convinced that notability will confer happiness, that they’ll be the exception to all the tales of Hollywood discontent. That is, until they taste real fame for themselves and directly experience everything—good and bad—that comes with it.

What I haven’t gotten a handle on is why these pharmacological alternatives have yet to take off in a big way. The antibiotic resistance problem is getting worse; as I mention in the Fast Company piece, 70% of infections are resistant to at least one antibiotic, forcing many doctors to prescribe expensive antibiotic cocktails to vanquish ever-wilier bacteria. Yet antibiotic-alternative companies have hit various roadblocks in their quest to bring a finished product to the marketplace. One reason may be that companies operating at the bleeding edge of biotech tend to be small and scrappy, making it a financial stretch to pull together the resources needed to shepherd a new therapy through multi-stage clinical trials. What do you think? On the face of it, these companies are rushing in to fill a very obvious vacuum, so why is quick success elusive?

It all makes me wish science was better at making biologically-based age determinations–the human equivalent of slicing a tree open and counting the rings. Forensic scientists routinely estimate how old children and teens are by taking X-rays. They zero in on how completely bones in the wrist and knee have fused, since the various stages of fusion correspond with well-defined periods of development. A dental exam can also provide clues about age–how ground down molars are, whether wisdom teeth have started to come in. But these methods are only accurate to within about 18 months, and since the IOC is trying to figure out whether the girls in question are 14 or 16, that just doesn’t fly. Still, I’ll take imperfect science over the claims of a totalitarian regime any day. He Kexin, get thee to a radiologist!

YouTube user JoeGuruTX sums things up better than I ever could…

Ur-ballads—the heavyweights of the genre, the ones I put on repeat until I start to feel lightheaded—must have some combination of the following elements:

1. Shamelessly Gratuitous Key Changes. Admit it: you too get a tear in your eye during the triumphant final verse of Sergio Mendes’ Never Gonna Let You Go. Oh, the unalloyed earnestness! The way the key shift, like, mirrors the song’s emotional progression! Or something! Much to the delight of suckers like me, Mariah Carey and the Backstreet Boys kept the key-change torch burning well into the ’90s with gems like Can’t Let Go and I’ll Never Break Your Heart.

2. Shamelessly Gratuitous A Capella. The only thing that warms the cockles of my heart as reliably as the gratuitous key change is the gratuitous final-verse a capella chorus. Exhibit A: Eric Carmen’s Make Me Lose Control. (Vaguely related side note: I listen to Kansas’ Carry On My Wayward Son solely for the twenty-second a capella intro.)

3. Judicious Guitar Accompaniment. I like Stairway as much as the next person, but I remember people falling asleep during camp slow dances halfway through the 45-second guitar solo. Thankfully, many of Zeppelin’s Reagan-era successors nixed the extended hammer-ons in favor of the short-and-sweet approach.

To clarify, I don’t listen to stuff like Never Gonna Let You Go ironically. I drink it down, every drop. I’ll leave you to ponder what that says about me while I go back for another hit of Even The Nights Are Better.