Like everyone else on the planet, my addiction to celebrity addictions has reached a crescendo. It’s all consuming. Picture a group of four civilized thirtysomethings gathered in the big city for a night of gourmet Thai food and a good catch-up. Two girls, two guys: could be unused Will and Grace footage. Except the hairdresser is leaning intently over a tabloid that features a close up of Michael Jackson’s latest facial bandages. The restaurant manager reaches for Ebony- it’s got the MJ makeover pics, and we decide that’s probably as good as Mikey’s ever gonna look. The actress is circling all the known addicts in Life and Style with a purple Sharpie. The writer muses out loud that even squeaky-clean Nicole K’s husband is an addict. None of that, of course, is anywhere near as important as the story of the century- the public downward spiral of Brit-Brit Spears. This week’s latest chapter has on the edge of our seats: did Brit’s mom really sleep with K-Fed and the new sinister-looking Arab hottie? Cause if it’s true, it would explain just about every damn thing that’s wrong with that poor girl.
Sure, I’ve been worried about my escalating compulsion to watch the latest breaking stories of Hollywood’s filthy fallouts on late night TV. Worse is the guilty knowledge that even the cheapest glossy rag is a waste of my hard-earned money. But I’ve already given up drugs and sugar, so I cut myself some slack- so long as I am still stopping by Book City for fresh Canadian poetry volumes, Discover Magazine, and cookbooks, so long as I am completing my non-celeb writing assignments, so long as I am eating and sleeping and taking regular baths and changing the kitty litter…
I’ve railed against a machine that drove Diana into the long tunnel from which she never emerged. I’ve lambasted a world that thinks it’s okay to take zoom shots of Britney’s panties, which prove, evidently, that the girl is not, today at least, pregnant with Adnan’s baby. But I’ve also defended the insatiable public appetite for destruction, for who wore what when and where, who took what drug at which party, and who is zooming whom. I agree with Camille Paglia, though I am not nearly so articulate as she, that the stars are the stars: humans always have a pantheon of gods and goddesses, from antiquity into the modern world, who reach unknown heights and plunge to sordid deaths. Greco-Roman mythology reads like the rags read today: Hercules was insane and murdered his wife and children. Arachne hanged herself. Zeus kills Semele while Dionysus is still in her womb. Murder, suicide, madness, incest, torture, revenge, drugs, secrets, prostitution: it’s all there, and it’s there in every mythology of the world, not just the much-studied classics. It is no mistake that Diana is another name for Artemis, Goddess of the moon, the hunter and the hunted one. Celebrity is our modern day mythology. It isn’t going to go away.
Camille said, “Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperial sex theater, supreme temple of the western eye. We live in the age of idols. The pagan past, never dead, flames again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom.” Whether or not it’s reprehensible, it is absolutely human. The gods are half human, and half celestial. With one foot on earth, and the other in heaven or hell, we look to them to play out the psychodramas in our own life, not, as many assume, to revel in their lives because we do not have one of our own. And perhaps this familiar tendency is not unique to humans, but to other animals. I’ve long believed my cats talk about my peeps and me when I’m not home. Surely I’m mad, but scientists have discovered that dolphins gossip- no joke. See, I told you I’m still reading some science here and there!
Perhaps at this point in history, post-Diana, where paparazzi is a household word and a lucrative career choice, where we are practically standing in gas-station bathrooms with a woman named Britney that we don’t even know, it would be a good time to stop berating ourselves for our very human hunger and see if we can create a future direction for our celebrity addiction. Can awareness of our need for this kind of theatre help us create a better world?
We feel guilty for our rabid obsessions with the mad, the mental, and the maxed-out. We shake our heads and say, ‘Why can’t they leave that poor little girl alone?” The nastier among us may think, “Crazy rich bitch, who cares.” I’m not down with that- though I might trade in my humble rental for a couple of million, I’m sure that a few good friends and a few peaceful hours to read a novel might be everything in the world that Britney Spears wants tonight. Still, if her world changed tonight, if she left her house and there was nobody outside, no cameras flashing, no headlines, the shock would kill her. We malign her for seeking out that attention, but we are all victims of our environment. The Amish children who leave go back home for the most part. People commit suicide when they lose a shitty dead-end job they’ve been grumbling about for years. We know what we know. Britney knows nothing else. It is not her fault that she has fed on the flash and the adrenaline for so long.
Regardless, the media vulture is not going to go away. If it did, Britney Spears would drop dead. It seems we are waiting with bated breath for that to happen- there is more than one contest up and running where whoever guesses the date and time of that event wins. Humans are a corrupt and bloodthirsty lot. We love a car crash; we love a bullfight, boxing, wrestling, and movies like Hostel. We love war. We are greedy and fat and neurotic and we beat our wives and children. We keep slaves and we sell our daughters. This bloodthirstiness is nothing new. It’s a given. I find it horrible and disgusting and sick and sad, but it has been true from the very beginning. While I applaud every single action anyone makes toward peace, goodwill, equality, generosity, and compassion, none of these noble gestures erase the fact that we are rotten to the core. We can’t afford to be sentimentalists: realism gives us a better foothold for change. For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. And even that glory, if you learn about Him in the Bible, is a vicious, savage glory, warmongering and smiting left and right.
Perhaps there is the other side to the story. The side that has to follow every anguished cry of Our Lady of Madness because her cry is ours. Perhaps we are hoping for her to ‘get help’ because it illustrates our own struggle, the fumble to find ecstasy, or just peace of mind for crying out loud. In the midst of success, we may feel isolated. In the midst of marriage, we may be terrified we made a poor choice. We may fear our parenting skills. We may be scared of our drug use. All these stories do is play out on a large screen scale the same trials and woes we all have. From what to wear to dinner, to whether or not this week’s shrink appointment is going to make a rat’s ass of difference to the astonishing emptiness we feel. Britney was crying in the chapel, and so are we.
While the narrow philosophies I was raised with would tediously refer to Hollywood as ‘glorifying sin’, perhaps instead it illuminates the best and worst of our obsessions. We sneer this week about how ‘everyone’s going to rehab since Heath jumped ship.” Did you ever think that the public travails of Anna Nicole Smith and Lindsay Lohan made it amazingly easy for the rest of the world to start tossing up the word ‘addiction’? I think it’s amazing that in the fall out of this particular tempest- the unexpected death of a very talented actor, and our fear that brilliant new songstress Amy Winehouse is at the edge of that abyss, people are looking at their own issues and saying “no more bullshit. I’m going into rehab.” We can only try. Trying is everything. Maybe rehab won’t work out for Winehouse, or for Eva Mendes, or for Delta Burke. But maybe it will. Maybe Winehouse hopes to make an even better album instead of dying. I sure hope it works out for her because I’d love to hear it.
The thing is, there is no specific solution. It’s romantic and naïve to think humans have ever had one. We are incredibly contradictory, and though solutions have been thrown around since the beginning of time, (some of these bright ideas have included exterminating the race of enemies, bringing slaves to build our countries, torturing mental patients, castrating women…) we don’t have any fucking solutions. We only have our tricky history of violence and obsession, mixed with our amazing contributions and discoveries. We will never evolve to our full potential, because, just as technology has made us into magicians who can chat over breakfast with friends across the world, our natural greed has scourged the earth. On the smaller scale, we must have witnessed in our own life that sometimes finding Jesus worked, and sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes therapy or rehab worked, but sometimes we lost the fight and buried a loved one. Sometimes a new medical breakthrough saved the life of our child or gave us back mobility. Sometimes it didn’t, and helpless, we watched cancer or AIDS or diabetes take someone from us.
We can’t know how things will work out. It isn’t personal- when a hurricane sweeps through a city and demolishes it, it isn’t personal. I wasn’t a better person just because the hurricanes have not so far struck Toronto. You aren’t a better person than Britney just because you take your Prozac like a good little girl. Don’t be so sure that nobody at your church knows about your secrets. They do: if only because they share them.
It all takes us back to square one. We are going to do what we are going to do. Good and evil will always rival inside of us, a tug of war that never finds resolution. So that means we keep on striving to become better, but don’t fall off an imaginary pedestal when things- big surprise- don’t necessarily work out. We can’t stop war, but we keep trying because it’s the right thing to do. We can’t stop every violence or poverty in the world, every disease or despairing heart, but we can help one child, we can give one homeless man a banana and a coffee. We can’t win over all of our bad habits, but we can probably change a few of them. We can’t eradicate all of the darkness inside of us, but we can strive for light. After all, as Oprah said, to do less than your best is a sin.
www.thegirlcanwrite.net
Lorette C. Luzajic
I hope you will visit my site above and explore my writing. If you think your friend will like me, please pass me on! You can order my poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos online through indigo or amazon.
Say Goodbye to Hollywood
January 24, 2008
Addicts we know and love: Amy Winehouse, Lindsay Lohan, John Belushi, Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, Elton John, Michael Jackson, Eminem, Drew Barrymore, Johnny Cash, Elvis, Judy Garland, Stephen King, Sigmund Freud, Billie Holliday, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charlie Parker, River Phoenix, Ernest Hemingway, Sir Winston Churchill, Jerry Garcia, Etta James, Wynonna Judd, Whitney Houston, Chris Penn, Ray Charles, Dionne Warwick, Fergie, Bo Bice, Ozzy OSbourne, Boy George, Anna Nicole Smith, Mary Kate Olsen, Samuel L. Jackson, Anthony Bourdain,Little Esther, etc etc etc etc etc.
While all eyes this week were on Amy Winehouse smoking crack, giving Britney’s train wreck a rare moment of relief from our scrutiny, Heath Ledger’s overdose news came out of left field. Details won’t surface for days, but rumours of a secret heroin addiction are already flying. Whether Heath was a sleeping pill popper or a junkie doesn’t matter: it goes to show that the consequences of drug use can happen to anyone at all, even bright stars with umpteen award nominations under their belt. Ledger was an absolute hottie who took risks in his craft and shone in the controversial blockbuster Brokeback Mountain. My heart goes out to his family and friends.
Though I can’t and won’t deny that once I was a party girl who might have thought Amy’s whining about rehab refusal was ‘wry and cavalier’, when the beehive-headed eccentric came out with that hit, it made me sick to my stomach. Sure, the timing was not all that wry- everyone around me was dying and going mad. I thought it tasteless to even joke about addiction like that. I’ll never be the anti-drug mafia: we’re going to do what we’re going to do, and we are wired to seek pleasure. But acting careless about it instead of reverent seemed a slap in the face to the millions of people who are in trouble because of acting carelessly once upon a time. I didn’t know much about Amy’s personal life, but she seemed robust and healthy and I couldn’t blame a sister for trying to make a giant hit. The days of celeb-rehab were raging, so the timing was right even if I felt her commentary should have been “I wanna go to rehab, too.”
Now that I actually saw with my own eyes a once-beautiful young woman sketching around her apartment smoking something sinisterly from a glass pipe, skeletal and tight-faced, I am deeply saddened. I’ve seen people straight out of that scenario, and they were smoking crystal meth, not crack, though with either it is very possibly too late. I hope not. I’d like to see a few more survivors than just the amazing Fergalicious, who once was so paranoid from the meth that she thought spies were in her laundry hamper.
I think that was the worst part, watching a video that brought back memories that seemed normal at the time. I made a painting once that said, “My life was a nightmare of spies and hospitals.” And so it was. Just for the record, I was not on meth: have you ever seen a fat meth user? And so what if I wasn’t? I have my own stories that would make your skin crawl, and so do you. It’s not a game of who’s on what. It’s a game of life and death. And I watched the life pour out of a whole handful of beautiful people with so much promise, then I buried them.
Last week I attended yet another heartbreaking funeral for the beautiful Miss Emily: after several years of meth-induced psychoses, she died alone on her birthday. She essentially starved and exhausted her body and brain. No one chooses this, folks. This is not about the choice to defy God or the family. It’s not about sin or evil. It’s called addiction because the person can’t stop even if they want to. And by the time you’re an addict, you want to. It’s not a joke. Do you think Miss Winehouse WANTS to look like that? Get off your high horse and get your hand out of the Dorito bag. We are wired to alter ourselves, via anything we put in our body, whether cigarettes or chips or crack. Then we get poisoned. Somewhere between the putting in and the dying is a fine line, and I’m still looking for it, quite frankly.
Growing up, my church was vehemently anti-Hollywood and anti-rock music because of the vast amount of ‘sin.’ It’s true that the entertainment industry is filled with drugs and alcohol, but there are two good reasons for that. One is the stress that comes with so much freedom, the emptiness that comes from a superficial society and its demands on your looks and your lifestyle. It’s obvious to me that a poor girl like Drew Barrymore is no more a ‘sinner’ than you or I. No eleven year old girl can be called evil for being a drug addict. Fuck off, right wing religious mafia. Grow up and get with the program. Try reading a few science manuals, and then read your Bible again so you can try acting like Jesus and show a little compassion. The other reason is that it’s visible. We all see that Lindsay Lohan chugged champagne from the bottle on New Years, then called her sponsor. No one saw me and my mom getting loaded on good Niagara wine after Emily’s funeral.
Why the church didn’t use the opportunity to teach different ways of stress relief and exploration, or to teach the facts about drugs and alcohol and compassion, I don’t know. I can tell you all right now, there is no difference between the ‘evil drug addict’ and you. It’s always blamed on ‘bad company’ as if there are a few ‘bad apples.’ Until we see that those bad apples are just the same ones that got bruised or fell of the truck along the way, we can’t even hope to relate to each other and help each other. I’m guilty myself of that ultimatum: it’s me or the drugs, sailor, sister, brother, husband. And boy did I feel bad when they chose the drugs. Now I know there was no choice. It was nothing personal. It was not about me.
The answer? If you thought I’d have one, I’m sorry, I don’t. It’s easy to yell ‘get help.’ But ‘help’ is still floundering and drowning in well-meaning counselors, judges, doctors who have no idea what they are doing. Miss Emily had help. Her helpful shrink prescribed Dex to help her cope while they discussed her issues. That’s almost the same drug as meth! Britney Spears’ drug tests seem to turn up normal, leading to the notion that she is buying clean piss. Thanks to invasive photographers and my own gossip gluttony, I’ve looked right into Miss Spears’ purse and seen the Adderall she’s likely been taking since postpartum depression. And Adderall is also a meth-similar stimulant that causes extreme paranoia and may explain why Britney is going crazy and thinks her walls are bugged. No one ever talks about the help she’s already had, they just keep yapping at her to ‘go for help’ again and again. “Help’ used to be a lobotomy. It often still is prison. So where can help be found?
I don’t know, but the only starting point I know of is love instead of admonishment. And hope.
Hope might be the most dangerous drug, but not so lethal as its absence.
www.thegirlcanwrite.net
The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos
by Lorette C. Luzajic
order at indigo dot ca or amazon dot com.
There’s Something in the Meth
January 14, 2008
Ever hear a paranoid meth freak tell you that there’s something in the methamphetamine? I heard this time and time again. Dude, yes, there is. There’s meth in your meth.
Of course, there must be someone manipulating the stock for mind control purposes, for alien abductions, for attic laboratories. One roommate felt ‘violated’ by the recording devices hidden in stuffed animals. One user was sure that there was ‘something poisonous” in the meth he was using.
If you’ve watched a friend, roommate, parent, or child go mad from methamphetamine, you know there’s no hysteria in the meth hysteria today. It’s not reefer madness, it’s real. And help is hard to find once those neurons that let you hope and think and feel are destroyed. There’s a generation of human shells walking around. Dead men walking.
Sure, you can blame it all on people stupid enough to try the stuff, but cut some slack for those who made an impulsive choice. Have you tried alcohol? Good thing it’s not quite as lethal, at least not as quickly. I tried it twice, way back before Marko died, always up to try another good time. I didn’t have one, so I didn’t revisit it. I’m lucky.
Today another 25-year old girl was found dead, one of the few survivors from the old circle of friends ‘upstairs on Parliament Street.’ Five years of intensive psychiatric care, and a shrink stupid enough to prescribe Adderall for her addiction problem! Adderall, like Ritalin but worse, hardwires the mind to need speed. It’s nearly the same thing as methamphetamine, just not quite as strong or fast acting. The poor girl, once a vivacious, beautiful dreamer spent five years as a mere skeleton, checking the walls for bugs (both kinds), refusing to eat, scratching holes in her face. She died alone after one last hurrah. I’m speechless, but sadly, I’ve been in this place before. Marry, then bury. What can stop this? I’m not sure.
In all the recent press about poor little crazy girl Britney Spears, my heart has gone out for a pop icon I didn’t really care for before. With the immense pressures of fame, her impulsivity which I among many share, her disastrous marriage, and her serious postpartum depression, there’s only the money to assuage the emptiness. I always joked that I would like to ‘try’ and see if money could help my instabilities. All I am saying, is give cash a chance. Well, my dear Ms. Spears has illustrated its helplessness in restoring self-esteem or happiness. Her latest irrational incident holding her son hostage allegedly was a nightmare scenario of her losing her mind, muttering that K-Fed had planted the bugs in her home. DOES THIS SOUND FAMILIAR? Not one person, including her medical spokespeople, has ever pointed out the paranoia and madness that comes from the Adderall. COULD HAVE BEEN THE METH IN THE METH. While her alcohol and Ecstasy use have been greatly examined, has anyone thought that the treatment might be the cause?
I researched so many treatments, police and psychiatric programs, medical and naturopathic care, and drew a big blank. Even the seasoned psychiatric staff at Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and the judges in drug court, had no bleeding idea how to talk to, care for, or protect the meth addict. The drug-induced rage you hear about in zombie flicks is science fiction for the most part, but not when it comes to the meth in your meth. It’s terrifying for the few who are able to put the drug down and go on, they may or may not be better off. Many effects of the instantaneous brain damage are permanent. Which means you may always be convinced your wife is part of a CIA plot. Or you may always be unable to feel an emotion because you have no more dopamine wiring.
I likely wouldn’t be so reactionary if I weren’t still doing the body count. And it’s not about ‘my circle.’ Truck drivers, ministers, and dieting housewives are constantly making the news for their descent into meth. Apparently, it feels so good at first, and then after your first three-day bender, you’re already certifiably insane and you’re just waiting it out until the end. You might starve to death before you overdose.
In some ways it’s the Government Liars’ fault for being so hysterical about other drugs and not arming people with reasonable facts and choices. Everyone who grew up in the Just Say No generation can’t trust the information they were given. Obviously, marijuana didn’t cause murderous rampages, so the info about meth must also be outlandish. It makes you feel terrific and thin and able to complete two double shifts, a bonus if you need the money, as most blue collar North Americans do. In fact, job efficiency and productivity is the main reason the drug is becoming an epidemic in Thailand and other Asian countries. Life’s a bitch, then you work, then you die.
Please pray for E. and her family and friends. If you have any strategies or information or an inspirational story that might help, please share it. I feel incredibly hopeless today. The madness is not just far away in the hills of Hollywood, safe for a greedy gossip gorge. It’s close to home, mine and yours, too. Let’s pray for each other and share any answers or hope that we can.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adderall
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17808933/#storyContinued
http://todaystoronto.com/content/view/100/88/
My review of Toronto author’s book about meth.
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Astronauts-Wife-Poems-Eros-Thanatos-Lorette-C-Luzajic/9781847287335-item.html
The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos.
