Flea Circus Violin

The most compelling Charlie Sheen quote is now rendered as two dogs conversing in a New Yorker cartoon. I want to turn my head.

Dude has parlayed addictive behavior into a Television series of ongoing media events & interviews.

I was banging seven-gram rocks because that's how I roll.
~Charlie Sheen

Bi-polar genius or tragic figure?

In The United States of Charlie Sheen, Umair Haque posits that Sheen is an apt metaphor for the American economy. That's rich. But, who am I to question a dude whose good ol' boy business admonishments appear in the Harvard Business Review?

I can't decide which Richard Brautigan quote encapsulates my captivation by Mr. Sheen's existential theater.

The future held only two directions: They were either going to open up a flea circus or commit themselves to an insane asylum.

Or

There is a passion here that would drive a deaf saint to learn the violin and play Beethoven at Stonehenge.

What is it about Sheen?

Parallels might be drawn to Lindsay Lohan, but those are superficial. Lohan is, plain and simple, a mildly pathetic person out of control. Ms. Lohan, like most of the celebrity fuel logs that People Magazine burns, seems to have the intellectual curiosity of a matchbox full of pocket fuzz.

It's not just Sheen's wildly aberrant behavior, or the high-wire feats of drug abuse that I find compelling. It's that the joke might be on us.

Mr. Sheen has wittingly created performance art. His performance is intended to reveal (and mirror back to us) an apparent truism about the human condition -- our collective "ambulance chaser" inability to turn away from passively observing the aberrant.