ask not

I'm wearing tired like it's the hottest new fashion. My furnace was whistling like a tea kettle last night. My stove stopped working temporarily the night before. A snowmobiler was zooming around in what sounded like my front yard at midnight. My phrase for today is quoted from this shirt at the Engrish.com store: "Elvis is dead. Sinatra is dead. And me I feel also not so good."

And Heath Ledger is dead. I usually don't get all into celebrity news, but this one makes me sad. He kept his nose clean. He stayed out of the tabloids. He did a good job in all of his roles. His career was growing. And he was only twenty-eight.

I used to say of him, "He won't age well." At the time I was thinking of sagging jowls and graying hair; but I suppose it could also mean that he never seemed meant for old age. Which apparently turns out to be true.

And I was just talking the other day with Leigh Ann and we were reminiscing about his debut in Roar. And how we'd been following his career from the start. Two days later, he snuffs it.

I dunno. I didn't cry or anything. But I do feel sad. Now when I watch those movies of his that I own, I'll be thinking about how he's dead. And it will be weird.

And I feel really badly for his two-year-old daughter. Most people don't remember back to when they were two. She'll have such a strange way of reconnecting with a father she probably won't remember -- pop in his movies. Or maybe she won't.

Meanwhile crappy celebrities are blitzing their way through Hollywood in drunken drug-fogged orgies and schizophrenic breakdowns and callus promiscuity. And those are the ones that get noticed, and those are the ones that keep on living. Death is never fair, but this irony is pretty rancid. Although I guess one might say, if one were optimistic, that the really messed up ones need more chances. If one were less optimistic, one might retort that the really messed up ones are wasting the chances they have, and keeping your head down doesn't get you off the mortality hook, and that never makes sense. Not that many people really deserve to die anyway. But death is what we live with.