For the last 24 hours, I have been acutely remorseful about watching Michael Jackson’s head on fire. I watched the video online, and now it’s being played on CNN, in an endless loop of mock horror and shock. Even Mark Geragos was disgusted, noting to Larry King that beheadings were available on video but weren’t appropriate for TV viewing.
It’s wrong to observe personal suffering in such a dispassionate context, and I feel debased by doing it. I’m so sorry! If only I could expunge it from the record of my sins.
Less sensationally, Dash Snow died this week, nearly a year after making me angry by his mere existence, and I’m sorry about that, too. I still think he was a pretentious, attention-seeking hipster, but I mourn his death all the same.
Dash Snow was 27, and probably knew it was the magic number for those who think “Live Fast, Die Young” is actually good advice. His downtown hipster friends are shocked, even though he was a heroin addict. No Diprivan here, just the usual method of going out.
Why do people have to become drug addicts and create such misery for their loved ones and such devastation for those they leave behind? Why can’t anyone save them? Why do people enable them? Why do they want to escape their lives when it’s the only one they’ve got? Why stick that first needle in your arm, you motherfuckers?
It’s a terrible mystery to me but I still want everyone who knows a drug addict to do whatever they can to lead them to safety. Rat out your friends and co-workers and children and spouses and sisters and brothers. They’ll be mad, but that’s okay. Make them mad.
A real artist and a fake artist, both dead now, dead as a doornail, no matter how the news media recycle their stories. I wish they’d let me rest in peace.
I quite share your view about drug addicts. And I love checking your blog and finding actually worthwhile topics being discussed (not that I don’t thoroughly enjoy your mad rantings about shoes and stupid celebrities too 😉
I watched the video too. It was horrible. I wish I hadn’t seen it. I told Lewis about it last night, so he wouldn’t watch it. My husband is a sensitive soul.
Yes, we don’t need to see that video replayed a thousand times. Enough already. BtW: I worked for the director of that video. He was a horrible man. Absolutely awful. One day while he was ranting and raving I literally threw down the towel (which happened to be a stack of papers) and I walked out. My hate for the director has always caused me to blame him for MJ’s hair catching on fire. (I wasn’t there so I don’t know if it’s true or not, and probably isn’t true, but in my head I feel he is totally responsible for MJ’s pain and suffering.)
As for drug addicts. You never know who they are and they could be your next door neighbors or your kids’ friends’ parents, who happen to drive your kids and theirs around while high. It’s sad this drug addiction!
Cool writing as usual SW.
I was stuck in the waiting room at the Honda dealership for hours yesterday. The TV was on a station that looped the same news program every 15 minutes. I must have seen that video eight or nine times. It was sickening. The red scalp was really alarming and painful looking.
I vacillate between resenting drug addicts for hogging every public restroom in Manhattan and begging on the streets, to a bizarre (for me) outpouring of empathy and pity. The TV show ‘Intervention’ has done a lot for the empathy and pity. Rarely do they feature an addict who’s so douchey that you can’t feel for him/her and his/her loved ones. This Dash character, though: it’s difficult to think that he became ‘homeless’ and addicted to drugs for any reason other than he was trying to be cool. I’m sure someone loved him, but what a dick.
Fuck. I have a friend who I cut off because his drug addled ways were really messing with me (I hired him for a job and he fucked me over royally among other issues). His other friends (who decided that I shouldn’t be included in the intervention because I ‘ditched’ him) have done absolutely fuck all. I don’t know what to do, we’ve grown so far apart it doesn’t seem like it’s my place. But I know if someone doesn’t do something it might be too late. Then we’ll all never feel the same. I don’t even know how to breech the topic. We don’t talk anymore. Sister Wolf, you have my email address, please advise, if you have the time.
Addicts are just really hard to deal with. Yes I’ve tried stirring it up, “ratting them out”. It just makes it harder for them for a while and they resent you for it. You can try so hard to save them and you can want it so badly but in my frankly shit experiences there’s absolutely nothing you can do to save an addict except for keep telling them you love them, that you’re there for them when/if they try to stop and don’t be a sap (sucker in U.S?) or they’ll bleed you dry. I know it’s brutal but I regularly asked myself: if they die tomorrow have I done everything that I could to let them know that I love them. In the end that was all I could do. In the end they died. Fucking hell. But they died knowing that I loved them. For me that’s all i could do.
The showing and reshowing of the MJ video is gruesome, disgusting, and exploitive. The media outlets should be ashamed of themselves.
Dash Snow was a good graffiti writer (as Mr Bex informed me) but he was just an idiot with a drug habit.
Mie -Thanks!
Jill -Mine insisted on watching it even after I urged him not to.
Deni – I just saw an interview with him; UGH, WHAT A DOUCHE!!!!!
Mark -He did seem like a horrible tool, and yet….such a wounded, self-destructive one, as we now know. I can’t bear it when a young person ODs.
Aja – xo
Moda – I’m so sorry. Sometimes people will not stray from their course when determined to destroy themselves. Still, trying to help is better than not trying. xo
HelOnWheels – It’s almost beyond belief how much they continue to show it!
Bex – Just an idiot with a drug habit =still someone’s son, still a person in pain.
SW: Very true. I feel for his family. At the same time I don’t condone th e taking of any kind of hard drugs, and while I am unclear of how he fell into the habit, it was still his choice to partake …Read theJan 15, 2007 article of New York Magazine with Ryan McGinley..these are (were) some fucked up kids……I don’t care how famous you are, if you feel the need to smoke weed, do coke or heroin, you ain’t shit to me.
Bex -Believe me, I was disgusted by his notoriety and his antics. And no doubt he started using to romanticize being a rebel. I’m reacting as a mom, mostly.
I can’t help being most sad for their respective kids.
My reaction to drug addicts is equal parts empathy and anger.
The best way to fight drug abuse is legalizing weed. Here, in Holland, the numbers show lower rates of drug crime and abuse since you don’t have to go to the dealer that sells crack too, you just simply go to coffee-shop, look at the menu, make your choice. Alcohol is not allowed in coffee-shops.
I don’t smoke any more, but I also never used chemical drugs or ever had a need to go the dealer. Now I’m on pure insulin!
As a fellow enabler – I think it is just as easy to deny you need help as it is for the addicted. I stopped protecting and rejected them eventually, cut them out of my life and then accepted them back when they were over it.
Don’t know if they are still angry with me for rejecting or enabling. But if they are then I can be angry back at them for using in the first place. So we are even!
xx
Yeah, so many “stars” died this year: I´m still in shock over Lux Interior´s and David Carradine´s death, even though they weren´t drug addicts or 27 years old…
Concerning addicts: the concept of co-dependency might not be fashionable anymore, but I still believe in it – you can´t help someone, who doesn´t want help and there is no use in destroying yourself by urging them to do this or not to do that. On the contrary, that behavior rather pushes them away. I completely agree with with everything Moda wrote: Just let them know that you love them and that you´re there, if they want help. I´m afraid that´s all you can do.
Iheartfashion – Yes, I do feel the anger as well.
dust – So, you don’t view weed as a “gateway drug?” I certainly don’t. I think the majority of pot-smokers will never end up using hard drugs. (and I’m glad you only need insulin, xo)
hammie – I know you did what you could. I like the being even part!
Judit – Co-dependency is alive and kicking! I am not sure that one can apply the same methods, of even philosophy, to every situation. Saying I love you might not be enough, But turning your back on someone may be your only way of protecting yourself in some instances. In my own life, I have been able to help, but I’m aware that some people just will not be saved.
what a waste. and creepy in that NY’r article when McGinley shows off his catalog of Dash Snow’s work, saying “you never know what’s going to happen to Dash.” ugh, art dealer mentality.