Philip Seymour Hoffman

I didn’t like everything he was in, but he was often the best thing in it.
And I find myself hoping this was just a stupid drug overdose.
I don’t know.  Maybe it’s because of the way I think, but when I heard that they found him dead with a needle in his arm, I wondered whether it was a form of suicide.  Because I could easily see myself as a celebrity, tired of being looked at all the time, just wanting to quietly slip from the universe, and thinking, Tomorrow is the Super Bowl.  Hardly anyone would notice then.
It’s probably not.  Probably it’s just the same dumb stupidity that catches too many drug users, that cycle of acclimation fighting with their body’s requirements for survival, and one day you step off that Michael Jackson way where you need the big drugs for the big high and hello, you’re gone.
I dunno.  Part of this is because I’ve been pondering a blog on mortality for what I’ve come to think of completing a death triptych written by other bloggers, and that’s had me staring hard into the abyss and trying to haul out words.  It hasn’t been going well.  And I think it’s useful, dropping a bucket into that blackened slosh and seeing what coherent thoughts I can congeal out of body-rooted terror, but there have been some nights where I don’t know that I can do this.  There are some emotions that you can’t share, and even if you can share them, there’s little sense in trying to pass on that experience because there’s not a goddamned comfort to be found in those shattered rocks down at the bottom of the cliff.   I’m a closer neighbor to emptiness these days, and it’s a chill no coat can warm.
But Hoffman – he seemed lonely, a lot of the time.  And I hope this was just some dumb accident, not him staring in the needle at 3:00 in the morning, thinking that if he had to make headlines, let him be buried underneath bigger ones.  I hope he meant to live, and accidentally pushed the wrong toxins into a struggling system. I hope he had friends.  I hope someone was there for him.
I hope he was loved.  Not beloved, but loved, because any celebrity can tell you there is a vast and howling difference.