The Heroin of Praise

If improv stand-up comedy was my schtick, I'd want to be the warm up act. I'd want to be the warm up act because the laughs are real. By the time the featured act appears on stage, the audience is so liquored up they'd laugh at a knock-knock joke featuring an orange.

Imagine a scenario where, whatever your profession is, the only strokes you get for exquisite craftsmanship are a smattering of guffawing clowns predisposed to heap praise on you in a flurry of incoherent, slurred speech. What if after praising you, the admirer fell backwards because of the micro-gusts generated by a moth flapping it's wings two continents away...apparently with enough momentum to bust out some hairline cracks in a glass pane window?

The point is, as a craftsman, you'd never know if you're shit was good because your critics are pathetic, sloppy drunks.

I write poems that are mostly unread. I am an unashamed poetry hack. As ego-centric and self-absorbed as my poems tend to be, two or three times in the past 30 years, thoughtful people have praised my efforts. Something in the poems resonated -- which is enough to sustain me. I wouldn't last 2 weeks as a featured stand-up comic let alone 30 years like Emo Philips. If I delivered two hours of zany, off-the-charts creative comic energy only to be praised after my show by a pathetically drunken douche bag, then unless rock-bottom has a secret trap door, I'd off myself with hemlock tea.

I understand the heroin that praise is. I seek it. I yearn for it. I am irreversibly addicted to it. And it makes me feel weak to know that. Few experiences in life provide more of a head buzz than making people laugh. I understand the courtesy laugh. I understand the belly laugh. Now I understand immensely hollow and dissatisfying nature of drunken laughter.

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.