Look, I'd say Charlie Sheen is my hero, but he's really more of a peer -- at least in the partying sense.
I mean, sure, I'm not making two million dollars a week during the regular TV season, but on a sliding scale I think my thirst for hookers and drugs is about equal to his. Percentage-wise we spend around the same amount on both, taking into account how much cash each of us pulls in. There's no doubt that if I were making Sheen money on that crappy show of his, I'd have built a giant Devil's Tower of blow in my living room like Dreyfuss in Close Encounters. Hell, I'd be spending money in such hedonistically ridiculous ways that by now I'd probably be keeping Slovenian children as slaves and have a giant shower right in the middle of my bedroom that allows me to bathe only in Anna Paquin's pee.
It'd be a good life.
And here's the thing: As long as I wasn't really hurting anybody but me (I was kidding about the slaves) why would you give a damn?
There's been a hell of a lot of talk recently about how Charlie Sheen needs to clean up -- how he should be required to "get his life together" so that he conforms to some intrusive, prudish asshole's notion of what a successful adult is supposed to look and act like. A couple of days ago, there was even a debate raging across the landscape of America's fiendishly shameless celebrity gossip TV shows about whether CBS should actually fire Charlie, preventing him from returning to his inexplicably popular show Two-and-a-Half Laughs until he stops drinking and fucking porn stars or some such dog shit. Like CBS is supposed to play the role of the disappointed and fed-up parent who's forced to cut its wild child spawn off to teach him a lesson. CBS is a television network, you idiots; it's not a fucking babysitter. And the last time I checked, that insipid tabloid show The Insider -- which is syndicated and distributed by CBS -- was more than happy to allow Pat O'Brien to behave like the most embarrassing grandfather ever until he pushed things so far that he made himself a national punchline. Both celebrities and those who make it their careers to stare long into the abyss of celebrities' lives sometimes act atrociously; they have money to burn and no one to tell them "no." Let he who is without sin cast the first giant rock of cocaine pulled from out of his left nostril.
The bottom line here is that it's not my place, your place or Pat Fucking Lalama's place to indignantly tell Charlie Sheen what kind of man to be. It's his life and he gets to live it however he wants. If he wants to make a change for himself and his family, fantastic; if he doesn't -- well that's fine too. He doesn't owe me an explanation or an apology just because I happen to like the guy's television show (which I don't anyway), and he absolutely shouldn't be made to dance like a monkey on a chain to appease the self-appointed morality police.
And you know as soon as he gets out of his commercially expedient stint in rehab, he'll be on the obligatory contrived apology tour. Oprah's probably already warming up the goddamned couch for him.
But once again, he shouldn't have to even acknowledge the disapproval of anyone except for maybe those few individuals in his life whose opinions he's personally bestowed value upon.
As far as I'm concerned, if it makes him happy he can funnel 25-hundred dollar champagne and bang porn stars in the bathroom at Daniel until he's 103.
God knows I'd love to.
And I'm willing to bet that half the pious and pretentious jerks now scolding Charlie Sheen feel the same way. They're just pissed they can't be him.
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