Showing posts with label drug addiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label drug addiction. Show all posts

Thursday, August 17, 2017

My 600 lb. slide





I can't bring myself to write about this video, although I suppose I should, to put it in context. It looks mean, on the surface of it, to post a video of a massively-obese man falling off a golf cart. But this isn't just any man. (In fact, we're still trying to figure out if it's a man at all.) This is Steven Assanti, self-proclaimed superstar of My 600-lb. Life, and the biggest loser as far as compliance with the weight loss program is concerned. The man is a hurricane of dysfunction on every level, and is as crude and obnoxious a human being as I have ever witnessed, on TV or anywhere else. 

I am ashamed to say that I watched this episode AGAIN the other night, knowing exactly how vile Assanti would be. And I waited for the golf cart scene, waited for it because of his Dad's reaction as he stood there watching. He said something like, "He's fine, he does this all the time." And, in fact, he WAS fine, being extremely well-padded. The fall wasn't so much a fall as a well-timed slide. 






This planned accident ploy was a tried-and-true way for him to score narcotics from the hospital, a worse addiction even than food. The sad thing is that ratings go through the roof whenever they show the Assanti episodes (this was a four-part thing!). I know it's a sideshow, and I should be above all that, and only watch National Geographic Channel like my husband, but damn it, this is fine stuff. First-rate entertainment. It makes you feel so much better about your own life.

I have set Steven's famous slide to a musical score which I hope will enhance the experience for you. And made this little animation from screenshots of one of his rants. He is still very much a presence on YouTube, even after having several of his channels (including the infamous FatBoyGetDown) deleted. He now goes by the name of "K Smith".





Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Beautiful Ruins: Liz and Dick on the rocks






Beautiful Ruins
Jess Walter
HarperCollins
EDMONTON - The wistfully lovely dust jacket for Jess Walter’s latest novel — tiny blocks of houses piled on top of each other on the teetering summit of an oceanside cliff — should have a protective plastic cover, not just to preserve the picture but to keep out beach sand and lake water. But in this case, “beach read” is a compliment.
If summer readers want high entertainment, they’ll find it here, for Beautiful Ruins has a quality of spectacle, the epic journey of people who enthrall us with personalities that are bigger than reality. But because Spokane-based author Jess Walter knows his way around a novel (The Zero and, most notably, The Financial Lives of the Poets), his extravaganza teeters atop a bedrock of hard reality, speaking uncomfortable truths about the frail, often narcissistic nature of identity.




The gorgeous ruin on the cover is Porto Vergogne (“Port of Shame”), a tiny Italian fishing village completely isolated except by boat. This is a misty Brigadoon of a place that does not appear on the map and which some people say does not even exist. Presiding over the one dingy hotel he inherited from his father is Pasquale Tursi, a dreamy young man waiting “for life to come and find him.” The cramped, uncomfortable place seldom draws guests, but on a certain day in 1962, all that changes — and so does Pasquale — startlingly, and forever.
If the dreamlike atmosphere of the Hotel Adequate View is not cinematic enough, it’s about to burst into Technicolor with the arrival of a lovely young woman, Dee Moray, a movie star, they say, working in Rome on the set of the most talked-about picture in decades, Cleopatra.




Yes, that Cleopatra – the overbudget epic, the disaster-in-the-making already guaranteed a huge audience by the raging scandal of Liz and Dick. Moray is only marginally connected to the movie, and has come to Porto Vergogne — or rather, has been sent there ­­— because she has just been diagnosed with “cancer” (i.e. a scandalous pregnancy).
Just as we sink into this complex, delectable story, suddenly there is a jerk away from the romance and bubbling eroticism of 1962 to present-day, and a completely different scene involving the nasty world of Hollywood deals and pitches. Michael Deane, a producer in his seventies from a different sort of Hollywood, looks “prematurely embalmed,” a stooped old man “with the face of a nine-year-old Filipino girl.” He signs a ludicrous deal for a movie called Donner! about the cannibalistic Donner Party of 1849, just to get himself out of a studio contract.






As we’re batted back and forth in time and place like the balls in Pasquale’s imaginary cliffside tennis court, threads begin to tie the different scenarios together. An elderly Italian man appears to confront Deane, not with a gun but a dog-eared business card that Deane gave him 50 years ago. Pasquale has never forgotten Moray, the lovely blond actress who spent just a few days at his hotel in 1962, and demands to know what happened to her.
The answers are not so simple, because by then several more storylines have leaped to the forefront, most taking place in different times and locations. As if that weren’t enough, there’s Richard Burton drunkenly spouting Shakespeare as he tools off by boat to the Hotel Adequate View.





Performing, posing, spectacle, disguise, the subversion of the true self ... it’s all here, especially in the story of Moray’s son, a mediocre rock musician who seems to be on a rampage of self-destruction. But like everything else in this novel, his existence is intimately linked to that surreal dockside arrival in 1962. Though the switchbacks in time and place can be disorienting, what pulls us back into the book’s core is the characters’ earnest search for real happiness, an intrepid desire to embrace “the sweet lovely mess that is life.”

Margaret Gunning is a writer and reviewer based in Port Coquitlam

Friday, January 14, 2011

OK, Ted. . .

















So I guess I was right about Ted Williams. After the homeless hero insisted he wanted rehab, needed rehab, was all ready to go to rehab, Dr. Phil laid out the plan: get on the plane right now, and fly to Pleasant Valley or wherever, where he could recover in privacy (recover in privacy, after just giving away where he'd be for the next 30 days???)

Then it started. The gaunt, glassy-eyed Williams, the most famous panhandling junkie in the world, the man who was loved and adored because he was homeless but still had a special gift (impossible!), began to shift around in his chair. He started wiggling around like a kindergarten kid with ADD.

His eyes shifted. He began to make excuses. I can't exactly transcribe his bafflegab, except to say that he wasn't going to get on that plane because he had to go to Columbus "to see his grandchildren and girl friend" first.

Columbus, where he skulked the streets, breaking laws and scamming citizens.
This was beginning to sound like an episode of Intervention, in which many of the addicts have "yeah, but" syndrome: Yeah, I want to go to rehab, BUT I have to take care of some things first (i.e., score some dope).

The headlines are saying he's either on his way to recovery, or has checked in. I hope so. Dr. Phil reluctantly let him go to Columbus, and my heart sank. Though he was escorted by the friendly man from Heavenly Hills or whatever that addiction spa is called, I have no doubt that Williams will give everyone the slip.

See, he'd rather drink and use and panhandle than have all that pressure on him to succeed. He doesn't know anything else. He has never been taught anything else. Dr. Phil revealed that he had missed, not one, not two, but three important appointments, just didn't show up. Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding: he's not reliable! A man who's been living on the street for years isn't reliable. Didn't anyone think of that when they handed him all those absurdly inflated opportunities?

I hate to have to say it, but I am very doubtful that Ted Williams will find long-term sobriety and/or recovery (and the two are not the same!). What happened to him was flukey and not really planned, in spite of that infamous piece of damp cardboard. He wants to run. He looked ready to bolt yesterday on Dr. Phil, his eyes full of primal fear. He just wanted to get the hell out of there. Rehab? Can this guy get through even one day sober?

If you watch Intervention, and I stopped doing so some time ago because they all seemed like one big fat dysfunctional family (most of them bankrolling the addicts' drug or alcohol habit "so we'll know where he is"), you often see an end caption saying the person was thrown out of rehab after a few days for using. Then at the very end, the producers desperately put together a happy ending, saying the addict has two weeks clean or something like that, and has moved back in with the family, now completely recovered and with all their generational conflicts resolved.

I think Ted Williams misses the street, where he at least had some sense of control. The wraith with the feverish eyes I saw yesterday was probably quite drunk on Grey Goose or whatever that rotgut is called, but also terrified. Terrified of capture. Terrified of giving it all up.

Though this is a compelling story, it's also a revealing one. And, as usual, we aren't learning a thing from it.