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Annons
Annons
Treatment centers are places where people listen to you talk. You are given rituals and routines and structure to combat the chaotic impulses that would draw you into the abyss. Going to this center is not a sign that Robin Williams was falling apart; it was a sign that he was attempting to take control of his life. If you use the term addict to describe Robin Williams, you minimise the larger theme of his life: he had mastered control.Due to my offstage social awkwardness I used to frequent online message boards about comedy. Back in 2001 the anonymity of the internet made it possible for some of those in the community to take cheap shots at those who had died in those terrorist attacks. Yes, most of the community rallied around it. But then there were these particularly uninspiring bottom-of-the-barrel jokes, jokes solely for the sake of being dark. I’m willing to admit that jokes about death and destruction can bring an amazing amount of levity. But these were the sort of hollow, mad-grab attempts at attention that one sees now on social media and YouTube comments. Only they were on message boards, so way way longer (Thanks for giving some ritualistic guidelines to your bleakness, Twitter. It’s like an addiction clinic within an addiction).Did Cocaine Abuse Give Robin Williams Parkinson's? http://t.co/YH9Gefqgpb via @Newsmax_Media
— Adonica HowardBrowne (@ahowardbrowne) August 20, 2014
Annons
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Annons
He was likely taking medications prescribed by legal doctors who didn’t hang out in cartoon alleys. And these kinds of medications may have had frightening effects on a person’s mood. Parkinson’s itself is directly linked to depression because of the effects it has on the brain. He’d had heart surgery in 2009, which is often said to lead to hormone changes and depression. And Robin Williams was not ready to talk about his Parkinson’s diagnosis yet, likely so he would not have to read the sort of dumb speculative bullshit being strewn across the web. Sure, he had somewhere between zero and twelve layers of intense sadness to live through. This was perhaps because he was composed of blood, and bones, and had a complicated system of dendrites and synapses to manage, the smaller parts of a larger working brain of someone you might have related to as a person. If we’d really known him.Robin Williams had appeared to conquer his anxiety and ride it like a bucking dragon-steed. And for all the cliches of sad comedians, Robin Williams took on dark and frightening acting roles as often as he could. There are suddenly a lot of articles lamenting Robin Williams as tragic, but he is not. He is gone, and if he had stayed it would have been crushingly hard for him. That is how life works.If one looks past headlines and status updates, this death takes on the quiet and disturbing intimacy of any crime scene. That is because Robin Williams was real. He was what forensic scientists and police detectives sometimes refer to as a human fucking person.I did not know Robin Williams. But one time I had to follow him in a stand-up comedy show where he did a drop-in set. Walking onstage felt like being a nuclear engineer who had to enter a reactor core post-meltdown. I’d missed the big event and was expected to contain the energy as much as I could before the radiation poisoning took its toll on me. I could not assign any meaning to what hung in the air on that stage. The jokes had simply been written upon the molecules of the soil.Follow Dan Telfer on Twitter#RobinWilliams anyone who kills themselves is a coward in my book, doesn't matter if you are a robin Williams, or joe blow down the street
— A Watchful Eye (@ikihi1) August 21, 2014