All Your Toupees Are Belong to Us

As a rule, I don't find celebrity meltdowns to be of much interest, but this week's Mad Men festivities are strangely intriguing. We've got Muammar Gaddafi on the one hand, positive "his people" (ahem) are very much in love with him when they are screaming for his blood; and Charlie Sheen on the other, declaring nothing less than WAR on the hand that feeds him (hilariously suggesting that his lawsuit will be figured at the princely sum of "more gold ... more gold ... all your toupees" and no thin whack of revenge for the slights performed upon his raging ego).

The invocation of war is interesting to me in particular. I've encountered people who consider infractions against their sensibilities some sort of cause for "war", and seem to have no more idea how entirely bizarre a path of logic that is than Sheen has of how he's playing. Tone. Deaf. But fascinating. The off-his-nut fury of his delivery, with the hermetically perfect bubble of un-self-awareness, is ... interestingly over the top. This is a guy with zero sense of his audience, but 100% commitment to his "passion" (see yesterday's post regarding *that* nomenclature), which he so devoutly swears Is. Not. Anger.

Uh huh.

Of course, he also thinks it's great that his toddler children are blessed with such a "rockstar" dad, and have porn stars and nannies to raise them in a great big polygamous happy home. Where their mom is doesn't appear to have held much interest for the reporters so gleefully focused on this car-wreck-not-to-be-missed shambles of a "man".

He also seems to be under the impression his brain is special and, though he's incapable of adequately choosing adjectives, clearly superior to "everyone else". No read on the room, and far gone to any ability to regard himself in any way, least of all with the slightest objectivity.

And so Charlie Sheen has declared war. He has SUFFERED, and will punish that (supposedly) billion dollars worth of people who enable his insufferable career by annihilating them. With his special brain.



The requirement that one must declare war is one so entirely outside the realm of normal human behavior I find myself fascinated by how easily this guy comes to the 'cause' ... and how heartbreakingly committed he is to this piece of off-his-nuttery. I have NEVER liked Charlie Sheen, but wishing his various children ill is beyond my capability, and what he is doing to them simply being the geriatric slut hound and adolescent wannabe-rebel that he is is actually sad. This is a man who, with all the physical appearance of a cancer-stricken eighty-year-old, perceives himself as an Adonis, and considers not at all the slightest contribution he might have to make to the world, what he might give, as a man, to any other person. He's gone, and really always has been, and the fact that he's tearing down other people - and finds that JUSTIFIED - is more than a little sickening.

Of course, these are people who - voluntarily or not - hitched their wagons to a guy whose sole claim to cleverness in the twenty-six-or-seven years he's been plaguing us with his "talents" is that line about the toupees. That show of his has been an offense against good entertainment (and even an offense against TELEVISION - which is pretty much *comprised* of egregiously offensive content-for-money) from day one, and those people will mostly find another way to make a living. So I I feel about the same level of pity for them that I felt for the chilly little number who married that WHACKO adulterer I once worked with, who - being a man of no ethics and no sanity himself - finally left her for his mistress. He wasn't a fine person in the first place, and she committed to him and to what he was - then divorced her for the newer model (... I wonder if he declared WAR on her ... that'd be typical of that manner of a "man"), there's a pretty fair extent to which I figure Chilly got what she signed up for, marrying Bat-Splat-Crazy-Unethical-Man. Likewise, following the star of Charlie Sheen. No respect for women, no respect for himself, nowhere remotely in the region of talent most people would calculate as appropriate to his gargantuan paychecks, and no interest in considering himself as a human being, nor in any other human being outside his ever-more-flaccid-and-ashen skin.

When I first met X, a very VERY slight treble in the timbre in his voice reminded me of Charlie Sheen. That's the closest I can come to saying I have ever considered Sheen's existence in personal terms, beyond simple/generational awareness of him. He used to have okay hair, but I always thought the combo hawk-package of that overwrought chin and beak of his were a bit much for the level of appeal he was apparently able to exert (on prostotutes anyway ...). So it's strange to find him at all relevant, and so the interest I'm exhibiting is sort of like that for a snake in a glass case. Though I like snakes as much as the next guy, actually.

It is Week of the Whacko Boys, people. Thursday and Friday will be positively dull ...

(I know I left out Wednesday. But tonight has America's Next Top Model going for it!)