But lately the news has me so saturated in gloom. Despair. Desperate for God's advice as to how to make it better.
I remember before I left for Ballarat watching a disturbing video with my father of jazz-pop performer Amy Winehouse in Belgrade. While the internet frenzy was upon her I felt adversed to jump on the ridicule bandwagon. I felt horrible for her. Here, in front of our eyes, was a woman in the due course of self-destruction and all most of us could do is watch. Most laughed. I felt helpless. I knew it was the end. I just knew it was the end.
When I read on Twitter a few nights ago about her death I stayed awake the entire rest of the evening. I cried. I wrote, erased. Wrote, erased. Cried some more. Tried to talk to friends for comfort. I knew this woman not, yet still felt that because I could not be in a position to comfort her that I failed her. We as a society failed her. She didn't want help. And yet we still failed her, somehow.
Perez Hilton (the only time I'll admit to reading that slime news) reported that it may not have been drugs directly, but a side-effect from body toxins or possibly a combination of many different elements that caused her body to have seizures. She died from the seizures. As someone with so many epileptic friends and family, that was also not easy to process and digest.
A man in Norway senselessly murdered nearly one hundred people in a rampage shooting. A man in the southern US murdered both his parents in an ecstasy rage and then threw a party the very same night while the corpses decomposed in a locked bedroom in the back of the house. A little girl in Arizona was found dead in a trunk of a car after a game of "hide-and-go-seek" went awry. A Chinese train was derailed and killed a bunch of people and now fowl play is suspected. Cancer is killing everyone every day. A woman in Ballarat was screaming her face off at a gentleman which led to some physical altercation that I quickly ran away from, cowardly. Since I couldn't help Amy Winehouse, how could I have helped this couple...they too, probably would not accept any help.
And I still cannot sleep. How can I be so excited about the joys in my life while I feel so much pain and torment for the families of the people so painfully lost?
And for Miss Winehouse, in particular, who if we looked deep down inside we all can relate to her in some ways. Anybody who ever feels so passionately so for something and gets easily distracted by an outside influence. Anybody who has ever had or knew someone with even the slightest bit of addiction problem. Anybody who ever lost a job and had to recover from the misery of the rebuilding process. Somehow, we all, if we looked, would find some similarities. Does that not shake you?
What do people do to free themselves of the pains of the world? Is its observance keep you humble? Draw you closer to faith? Is ignorance bliss?
So much to think about takes away from things to think about.
I guess the moral of the story is the old cliche about not wallowing and making every day count. At any given moment we could perish for reasons expected or unpredictable. I urge people to believe in something. And while none of us are saints we must as a society find our way back to good. Back to right. Do our part as individuals to not be vicious and malicious toward people all the time.
No more burning bridges, and no more letting go. No more irrational conversations and no more "f you's." It is about time that people had enough, and stand up for having had enough.
C'mon Earth. Pull it together.
You shouted you stammered
You nailed when you were hammered
Crafty, you kept them guessing without any clues
Aggrandizement they gravely gain can't justify what you had to lose
A fortnight of benders
The poor sight it renders
Dependence is not unlike cancer.
But somehow everyone has an answer.
No no, Amy, you can't see
But you weren't just another self-fulfilling failure. See,
To say, "gas is to propane as you were to Joplin or Cobain"
Is not that easy.
Reckless, riddle, ridicule
Is what we all hate in ourselves but in order to be fooled
We whip and snip, jump ship, and move the chain.
Find the next victim and start all over again.
So
That is about as much as could possibly be done for one night. God save us.
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