Wednesday, March 2, 2011

(Don't) Watch What Happens


During the early days of Charlie Sheen's monstrous, fast-talking public wild-out, I will admit to being pretty blown away by it, and I guess by him. What at first seemed like The Highest Shit Ever -- complete with the amazing coke-decision to start his image-rehabilitation tour on the radio program of 9/11 Truth godfather and overall crazy person Alex Jones -- became... well, it stayed really high-seeming. The over-the-top verbosity and epically poor rhetorical decisions and general thermonuclear grandiosity, after all, being what an already jerky/cocky guy -- who has gotten away with decades of conspicuous substance-consumption, property destruction and woman-hitting -- would sound like were that guy coked to the fucking gills. In a "Christ What An Asshole" sense, it was kind of gripping and mostly amusing.

And it still is, when you read the stuff Sheen has said on the page/screen. But listening to his sad sped-up crackpipe voice going on about himself -- always about himself, always going on -- or watching his prematurely wizened and withered visage, little pet's eyes flashing around restlessly, while he's spouting all that bullshit is not really funny to me. It's hugely discomfiting and increasingly depressing, and this is true even if the bullshit itself, the "I'm an F18 with tiger blood and poetry-spouting fingertips" stuff is actually amusing on its own. (It's doubly amusing when, thanks to Buzzfeed, it is attributed to other organisms)

Again, too, because it's the internet, my revulsion is enhanced by being able to watch other people watching this. For me, the hundreds of thousands of rubberneckers who opted to Join The Revolution and follow him on Twitter -- Sheen got 810,000 followers in a little over a day -- were basically people fighting for front row seats at a bumfight, but that's the internet, and that's what you get on the internet. But as Sheen continues (improbably, I know) to pass drug tests, it's getting tougher for me to laugh at any of this. He is indeed "high on a drug called Charlie Sheen," which is why he is continuing to talk about Charlie Sheen all the time, in these amazingly grandiose and insight-free ways. Dude is having a very public manic episode, and whether it's drug-fueled or not doesn't make it any more or less amusing to me. The "bi-winning" thing is funny, on its own. When it's said by a textbook dual-diagnosis bi-polar dude acting like a textbook dual-diagnosis bi-polar dude, you wince. Or I do.

Sheen is better-spoken, better-looking and marginally better-dressed -- I'm not really feeling his bowling shirt couture, personally -- than the crazy person in sweatpants screaming shit about how the CIA can just COME FUCKING GET HIM outside my office yesterday. He is rich enough that he could never find the mountain of blow he couldn't afford. And I don't really like being on the side of those clucking news program types who are like "don't you feel bad about choosing to ingest all these substances?" because fuck that noise, he's a grown-up and can do what he wants to his body. That includes being a total epic dickhole and starring on Two and a Half Men, both of which he has successfully managed to do for years without me really noticing. Or I'd be inclined to say that, I guess, if he wasn't also socking women in the face and keeping his crack rocks so near his young kids.

But I'm going to unplug from his I Need My Meds Tour for awhile, and be glad to do it, because I don't want to watch a crazy person be crazy in this way. I have no doubt that Charlie Sheen is not a very good guy -- hitting a woman once is proof enough of that, and the fact that his kids got removed from his sprawling and no doubt very hygienic home at Eight Balls And Shaved Pudenda Estates yesterday is abhorrent. More to the point, though, I am increasingly unable to laugh at this guy as he hurtles vainly, ragingly, biliously over the edge, blathering anti-semitisms and noxious self-praise as he makes his way down to the bottom. I'm not going to sit here and Dr. Drew you about how I want him to get help -- I'd think that's probably a good idea, but I do not now and never have given a shit about Charlie Sheen. Mostly I just think that pointing at laughing at this mentally ill narcissist in mid-breakdown is maybe not the best use of a week's free time.

1 comment:

  1. i'm in total agreement. i sat through a friend's manic episode/psychotic break and it was absolutely terrifying. it was also almost exactly like what seems to be happening to sheen. the internet seems to de-shame this kind of laugher at the serious travails of others. i'm thinking about the episode where the newswoman was struck with aphasia in the middle of a broadcast that was played as comedy all over the web.

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