Charlie Sheen: Anna Nicole Smith, Part Deux

Until the real news became too big, disastrous and fatal to avoid within the last few days, our country’s news media was saturated with the hyper visage of Charlie Sheen.

On one hand, I appreciate the inspiring spectacle of an artist living without apology. Sheen indulges every whim and refuses to live life on anyone else’s terms. He has been confronted by the hypocritical false morality of Hollywood, which shrilly attempts to shame excess while enabling it, and he has exposed it and spit in its face.

On the other hand, he is someone who at one point had legitimate gifts and has squandered his talents in an endless streak of waste and self destruction. He is being endlessly played and used by the very entertainment industry vultures he claims to detest, and in the process he has become more of a running joke than a call to arms.

I’m far from the first person to draw the analogy, but I cannot help to think of Anna Nicole Smith. Her slurred bimbo antics were hilarious television fun. Who wouldn’t enjoy seeing such a well-endowed woman embrace the American dream until it suffocated in her ample bosom? It was all shits and giggles until her 20-year-old son died of a drug overdose while visiting her in the hospital. Not even her death a short time later could stop the shameless and macabre tabloid feeding frenzy, as speculation over the paternity of her latest bastard child made Maury Povich look staid.

We’ve seen this movie before. And as entertaining as Charlie Sheen’s bombast is, it can only turn from laughing at him to being ashamed of ourselves.

The Discontent of Our Winter

Just in time for the spring-like weather we’ve been having recently, here my latest ‘Notes from a Polite New Yorker’ column about special hazards of a New York City winter.

If you’ve been in New York for the past two months, you were sick of snow weeks ago, and now that the snow is rapidly melting, a minefield of poop and garbage awaits us on our sidewalks.

I’m heading to Las Vegas tonight to see Penn & Teller, do some gambling, take in the sights and not get married. I will return with a full report of what I see and do there. Wish me luck.

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New York City has all the things that the rest of the country has, just first and more intense. So it has been with this year's wallop of snow. New York City has gone more than 50 days covered in snow. The 2010-2011 winter is far from over yet is already one of the most infamous in our city's history as far as winter weather.

The New York City area got a big blizzard of snow beginning the night after Christmas. We haven't seen a day without snow on the ground since.

We're not unique in getting a lot of snow, and many parts of the country have had it worse. But city life creates more and more interesting hazards and obstacles than South Dakota or even Boston.

Some of our more specific winter hazards include:

Yellow Snow – urine soaked snow left by animals and humans. While New York has a lot of dogs, I think it would be assumptive to blame dogs for all of the yellow snow in the city. Homeless, drunks, the atrociously lazy and desperate urinators coping with New York's dearth of public restrooms are also to blame.

Dogs are also not the only ones to blame for:

Turdcicles – the frozen (mostly dog) poop left by people too lazy to clean up after their dogs (and homeless people). The snow storms left lots of chances for them to simply kick snow atop the offending waste. With snow levels receding, these treats are left like mines on our sidewalks.

Quickslush - Another winter hazard that is especially plentiful in New York City is what I call "quickslush." Just as quicksand is a watery death that resembles regular sand, quickslush is a puddle of icy water and melting snow that resembles asphalt in appearance because of its rough choppy surface. You think you're stepping onto a shiny spot of street only to go ankle deep into a freezing puddle of slush—quickslush.

Plough Walls – these are the walls of hardened snow kicked up and shoved aside by snow plows. They are a particular menace to people with cars, since they will either have to shovel their car out of a wall of it if they're parked on the street or break through it if they have a driveway. They also make things tougher for pedestrians, as the curbs at crosswalks are often packed with these plow walls.

Snow Patios (aka Redneck Valet Parking) – the assemblage of lawn furniture or other household items used to reserve parking spots. I have not personally seen any shoveled spaces being reserved with lawn furniture. I like to think New Yorkers are above these kinds of childish practices. If you are going to reserve a parking space with a lawn chair in New York, be prepared to sit in that lawn chair until your car arrives or kiss that chair goodbye (though sitting in that chair is no guarantee either). If your car is there already, on the street and waiting to pull into the spot, fine, consider it reserved. But putting lawn furniture in a parking space to reserve it is really only giving the gift of lawn furniture to the lucky commuter who finds the spot when you have to go back inside your apartment to use the bathroom (unless you are responsible for some of the yellow snow problem).

Garbage Everest – an enormous mountain of snow piled very high with the idea that it will soon be removed via dump truck by the Sanitation Department. Doubtless it includes within it all kinds of garbage and other debris pushed into it by plows. The Sanitation Department also takes it upon itself to close down streets without any plan or warning when they want to remove these mountains. And they do this by parking a big truck that should be plowing snow at one end of the street to unofficially close it. This doesn't mean the street is completely blocked and you have no way of knowing if the truck is trying to block the street or is just being driven by an idiot or both.

I'm telling myself to enjoy the cold misery now, because the discontent of our winter always leads to a punishing sun of New York City summer, and that is always more miserable than winter.

Suckered by The Strand

I recently went to The Strand book store to spend a gift certificate I got for Christmas. The Strand is one of New York’s finest book stores, really a rare store filled with all kinds of book at discounted prices. I spent hours there many weekends when I first moved back to New York. I don’t make it there as often now, but I always ask for a Strand gift card for Christmas and often get one.

On my most recent visit I noticed a novel for sale on one of the many tables dedicated to discounted fiction. The novel is “Daughter of Fortune” by Isabel Allende. Reading its back cover, I found it interesting. The novel is about an orphan who goes to California during the Gold Rush of 1849. It promises intrigue, violence, and history of the old American West. The price was right too and I added it to my purchases.

When I got home and began putting away my books, I removed the Strand’s price tag on the Allende novel only to find that the price tag had been strategically placed to cover up an “Oprah’s Book Club” symbol!

I’ve been Oprah-ed by one of my favorite book stores!

Oprah Winfrey is TV’s most successful phony. She’s exploited the tragedies and private grief of myriad citizens while claiming to help them. There is not a sincere bone in her corpulent body. To read a book soiled with her logo is to join the sad herd of stultified hausfraus who hang on her every scripted, insipid word.

The Strand knows that its clientele are more intelligent than to count themselves among Oprah Winfrey’s legions of slack-jawed buffoons. I am confident that they knew the Oprah label would repel more of its customers than it would attract, and so they cunningly placed their price tag to completely conceal this mark of the TV beast.

I will still read Isabel Allende’s novel. But if I am to read this book in public, I must somehow obscure the Oprah label. Perhaps I should create a sticker of my own that will reclaim good books from the cultural slag heap that is Oprah’s book club. “Scumbag Book Club – Polite New Yorker Approved,” may soon grace the covers of our finest books.

Saying Goodbye to an Old Friend

I told people I was taking a year off from drinking. That year is now over but I’m not going back.

Quitting drinking was something in the back of my mind for a long time. I even took extended breaks from drinking for months at a time here and there, though sometimes book-ending these periods with serious benders. I pulled off these periods of not drinking just fine. It was the drinking life that gave me trouble.

I found a book I had read about when it was published called "Drinking, A Love Story," by Caroline Knapp. It’s a very good book despite some of its mushy emotional female content. Knapp points out that if you are someone who thinks and worries about drinking a lot, that’s a sure-fire sign that you should quit. That idea really stuck with me, because so many times I found myself doing my own form of alcohol calculus (if I have only four beers and then maybe have a soda so I’m not too drunk; if I start with a mixed drink and then switch to beer I’ll be OK) that continually left me short-changed. In Knapp’s book she recommends Pete Hamill’s "A Drinking Life," which is a brilliant memoir about growing up in New York. Drinking features prominently in Hamill’s book, but it’s a great New York memoir first, and not really a book about drinking at all. He does detail his decision to quit drinking, though, and mentions that he saw himself as acting out his life instead of living it.

Knapp’s and Hamill’s books were filled with a lot of things I recognized and encouraged me to give up the ghost on the drinking life.

I’d like to say that there was a big clarifying event that forced my hand and made me swear off booze, but the truth is I got tired of it. I got tired of waking up with a big headache, a lot less money and the painful fear that I had done or said something stupid enough to lose friends in the process. I got tired of waking up angry over the crappy state I was in and having no one to be angry at but myself. There were plenty of times when I drank a lot and didn’t overdo it and had a great time and patted myself on the back for that, but those times were being outnumbered by the times when I set out to pace myself and ended up in the zone where you’re on a great drunken roll and you just have to have that next sweet drink, and eventually you’re too drunk and you hate yourself for it.

I would be the worst kind of hypocrite to denounce drinking altogether. I dedicated too many hours to the fine art of consuming alcohol to stab that old friend in the back like that. There have been too many good times spent with the stuff, too many good memories forged with beer and whiskey to look upon them as anything but old friends. But sometimes friends outlive their usefulness.

Drinking is only as good as the help it gives you to do the other things you want to do, to have the real adventures and the real good times. It’s not the drinking that really makes for the good time; it’s the courage to meet women, the fun of joking and speaking very frankly with your friends, to blast through the social awkwardness that might cripple us. If drinking is still a help and a healthy supplement to life itself, then great. But for me it turned from a stepping stone to a stumbling block. I spent too much time worrying about drinking to make it fun anymore.

I have generally kept quiet about quitting drinking, because in my opinion it shouldn’t matter. Being defined by your drinking is a dead end, but so is being defined by your not drinking. It’s true I don’t go to bars much anymore on my own, but I won’t refuse to go to if I’m invited to hang out with friends there. I understand that my friends aren’t trying to force me to drink, they simply want to hang out and bars are the usual way to do that. It would be the most arrogant, self-centered crap to ask all of my friends to rearrange their lives on my account.

One thing I will absolutely not do is join Alcoholics Anonymous or any other 12-step program. I know many good people who are involved with these groups and joining them is certainly preferable to drinking yourself to death, but the 12-step program is back-door religion. It tells its followers that they are powerless and can find salvation only in the inane catch phrases and prayers of its program. By some measures it is a cult. Your own free will is your highest power; anyone who tells you otherwise is only feeding you another form of poison.

So far I’ve made out fine without any prayers, group hugs or other nonsense. For me, quitting drinking was pretty easy. Instead of drinking something with alcohol in it I drink something without alcohol in it. I always was a big soda drinker, and I’ve resigned myself to enjoying that vice if nothing else. I’m the only person I know who sneaks non-alcoholic beverages into concerts.

I could tell you that drinking soda is just as much fun as drinking beer or bourbon, and that if you quit drinking you’ll be high on life, but that would be bullshit. But a lot of people have the attitude that I once had that life would be impossible without drinking, and that’s bullshit too.