Different Celebrities, Same Sad Song
Patrick Stewart says:
When I feel most helpless and cutoff, uninspired and untalented, neither angry nor manic nor sad, but simply trapped and redundant in Time’s baffling inertia, it helps to sit and recall the relationships I’ve bravely forged and enjoyed with the blessed Gaps in my knowledge. It helps to remember my age-old decision to believe that it’s my relationship with these gaps that most defines me and that it only serves to boggle my mind to imagine what I’d be without them. (The condition of my mind being boggled is as self-evident as it is mysterious, and any and all doctrines or beliefs I’ve held witness to can claim at least partial responsibility for this condition.)
Christopher Knight (Peter Brady) says…
In these moments, I can almost convince myself that knowledge has done very little towards my happiness. It may be true that knowledge yields a certain kind of power, but then, power has done very little for me, too, I can contend, with a waning tinge of hypocrisy. (My show grossed me millions.) It’s my current lack of power that brings me true solace, namely, NOT being Peter Brady anymore. I steadfastly maintain at last, and I no sooner partake to wondering in reverie at all the things I don’t have, can’t have, choose not to have, and most importantly, cherish NOT having.
Film Actor Kevin Spacey chimes in…
It’s at this point that my mind’s would-be artist mercifully plunks me into a wonderful and illustrative, self-serving, metaphorical concrete-walled room of ignorance. The initial and expected anxiety (the usual suspect) therein passes, and when I summon myself to ignore the pointless yearning for all that may lie beyond these opaque walls, I take to scrawling on its interiors.
Film Actor Wilford Brimly says…
And to my decision’s content, my own animal heart’s renderings, valid and true, blind and ridiculous, begin to take form! My subsequent roles of tarnished pawn in a stalemate universe, of sludge-fiber peasant, flat-screen drama-queen projection fall away, or rather they converge and snap-focus into an existential relevancy, resplendent in its cocoon of sharpened singularity, devoid of simulacrum, irony, and the wet and dominating tennis-spectator eyes of living death. I don’t get any older, and I never die!
Pat Benetar says…
All this, my ignorances afford me.
Bruce Willis says…
It is with these thoughts enshrined that I allow myself to convey to you the following story. (If you can withstand further preamble.) For I would never have the courage to do so, were it not for the concrete walls that dub me king and lock out your sardonic criticisms, your inevitable boredoms and vexations. This is my world. And you may enter and be thankful for in it you may see the sacred scrawls unfettered by the pain, fear and guilt postures that inevitably arise out of the acute awareness of one’s own ignorance. Here, I make no apologies for moonlighting, for having no depth of influences, for my losing record in the nefarious game of pop-culture nihilism, for my zero-level aptitude for disciplined, coherent listening, as evidenced by my failed marriage and jaded children.
Bob Dylan screeches…
Come gather round children…welcome to my ignorance emporium!
Bert Reynolds, sans toupee, opines…
Mind you, I am not the dangerous and ugly kind who clings to his ignorances as if it were knowledge. I admit to ignorances fully, like Socrates. “Ignorances” in plural, for the singular is unspecific and misleading, such as cavity baffles the intended “cavities.”
Eminem, sans rhyme…
Like a retarded version of philosophy’s wandering martyr, I examine every notion, search for fallacies of logic and premise. Retarded, because I am tragically unaided by an obvious and basic font of relevant knowledge that surely could have helped me in this vain pursuit, and furthermore, I am notoriously unaccomplished at such acts as wandering, much less martyrdom. The knowledges I lack include many of which that you are perhaps privy to, or could choose to be, if you are more suited to learning and nursing your interests to a respectable respiration then the molasses-minded pen-wielding clod you reluctantly grant audience to herein. (And nary are they who don’t fit into this category, see Billboard’s all time leaders.)
Charles Bukowski agrees in a rare moment…
It is a mixed blessing at best, to discover, after years of jaded, melancholic apathy, hedonistic sloth and opiate-driven escapism, that there are after all, many things of interest in this world from which one can derive lasting meaning and purpose.
Tony Randall comforts himself by saying…
On the one hand, it’s better late than never, regarding the prospect of happiness. The realization sets in that many meaningful and purposeful pursuits, almost by definition, need not take place in an ivory tower, or some exotic locale, or among supportive colleagues and adoring fans. Such realizations cannot be communicated easily – the represent the very oddest of couplings. But having experienced something of the like, I contend that it transcends mere cornball cliché, mere aphoristic dogma, and becomes a self-evident, visceral, existentially relevant truth.
Meryl Streep whispers…
At this point, purpose and meaning lie waiting in nearly all directions. Gathering them is like gathering Oscars from an abundant orchard, quantities merely dependent upon the time available to the task.
George W. Bush
On the other hand, when such an epiphany is stumbled upon late in the game, all while the subject is embroiled in petty responsibilities with no end in sight, a profound sadness can result. This is largely due to the realization that dedicating oneself to the happy exhaustion of delving into the richness of it all is no longer an option. This is the category I find myself in as President of this great nation.
Todd Bridges of TV’s Different Strokes…
This discovery, at best, takes place in two realms, the internal and external. The self-image and the summation of the world’s qualities, and the diseased interplay thereof, are subject to appreciable, positive changes.
Gary Coleman…
What you talkin’ ‘bout Willis?
TV’s Tom Bosley defends Todd Bridges by saying…
No, Willis’ point is valid…it can be a joyous combination, the reconciling of external and internal conditions, especially for one who has seldom felt congruence of desire and reality. One who has led a life of unhappy days brimming with animal obsessions and occupations concerning sex, food, sloth, inertia, whim, money, the ill-defined philosophy of pop-culture nihilism; one who has suffered “failures†dictated by impartial laws of causation and nature; in a world where sybaritic longings are miserly rationed and rarely answered. When desire is seemingly counterbalanced by an equal, opposite subterfuge standing between the self, and the realization of the primal wish.
Jeff Goldblum apparently agrees…
You mean the person who, heretofore sensibly abandoned “childish” hopes and sought comfort in all manner of anaesthetized stupor, never venturing to flex muscles of potential, never realizing the joy of doing so for the sheer sake of it. I know that person well. He is Seth Brundel…never experiencing himself as Brundle Seth.
Tommy Lee…
Such a person will indeed experience a rolling fanfare of liberation and peace upon learning that purpose and meaning are in reach all around him!
Pam Anderson…
But cursed with a bum liver and waning energies, and an ever-increasing chasm of ignorance trailing as far back as memory allows, a discovery within of a passion for truth, knowledge and kindness for its own sake, presents an extraordinary existential dilemma.
Bill Gates…
The objects of new desires are now perceived as highly attainable to the average man, inasmuch as time allows. The opportunities are lined up ad infinitum, in books of all manner - various art forms, ideologues, philosophies, a variety of new and interesting people, and the Internet especially, which lures with grand promises of omniscience and ubiquitous communication with like minds.
Osama Bin Laden sums it up by saying…
But sadly, the cards have been played, and such a person must live out his days in a special kind of agony, knowing full well the opportunity that was squandered, knowing that earthly responsibilities exclude him from the happy exhaustion of truly being himself in the world.
(A fictional account.)