Robin Williams: the terrorist in his brain
About all I can say about this piece of writing (click on link, above) is that it's extremely important.
When Robin Williams killed himself two years ago, he was, in essence, already dead. But by the time the true story came out (in the results of the autopsy, which took three months), everyone had moved on. When it happened, there were lots of editorials written about how he was a sad clown who killed himself because he secretly suffered from depression (as in "but doctor, I AM Pagliacci"). His suicide spawned a lot of fevered articles about how we really really have to stop stigmatizing mental illness because look what it can do, even to a rich and famous person (and it's REALLY not supposed to happen to them!). A few people claimed he was "selfish" and just moping over his career slowing down, throwing his life away to hurt his family. And I remember a lot of people flung up web sites and Facebook pages just to talk about their depression because they were sick and tired of being ashamed of it and hiding it, but those sites just kind of faded away after a while. At any rate, I don't see them any more.
Here is what really happened.
Williams died from the effects of a horrible disease called Lewy Body Dementia. It devoured him, mind and body, frighteningly quickly. Though the symptoms caused his doctors to believe it was Parkinson's, it wasn't. It was something so much worse that I can barely get my head around it. I have no idea why anyone should have to go through such a hell on earth, and I believe he ended it while he felt he still could.
Because no one had heard of Lewy Body Dementia and because people preferred to just see him as a sad clown and a poster boy for Reducing The Stigma, and because they had lost interest anyway, the public missed it almost completely.
Robin Williams' widow wrote this eloquent piece, this cri du coeur about the hell they walked through together, for a neurological journal. They probably would not normally publish a piece by a non-neurologist. But this woman got a closer look at the ravages of Lewy Body than all of them put together. It is an incredible piece of writing, long, but it barely scratches the surface. It is almost unbearable to read because it brings home the fact that all our lives hang by a thread, all the time. It is a powerful truth, and it continues to be powerful whether we believe it or not.
I don't have time to be writing this cuzzadafact that my hubby and me will be leaving in a minute to have brunch at a Chinese restaurant we love. We're celebrating something amazing that happened to me last night, something closely connected to my novel The Glass Character, but I can't tell you what it is yet. Let the egg incubate for a while.
It's these phony Facebook pages. Yes, I know, they are probably ubiquitous and usually involve big Hollywood stars. I honestly wonder how many big Hollywood stars have TIME to keep a personal FB page. Anyway, one day a while back I stumbled on a so-called page for Martin Scorsese. There were at least half-a-dozen sites for him, mostly fan sites you'd follow.
I got curious. Hey, what if one of them IS his real FB page? It looks like you can send a friend request. I sent.
Months went by and I forgot all about it. Today I got a notice in my inbox that, yes, Martin Scorsese was now my friend! I was absolutely flabbergasted. Soon I'd be hobnobbing with all the moguls and glamor-pusses of the Silver Screen. Yeeee-owdimus!
But then, I looked a little more closely.
The whole page looked a little "off", somehow. There wasn't much information of any kind. But it plainly said "in a relationship with Marina Filoc". I tried to find out anything about her, but could only determine she could not speak English and worked at a shiatsu clinic.
One of Marty's "posts" pictured Billy Wilder's grave with a caption that read something like, Do not say I am stupid, am only writer. There followed a FLOOD of fawning, ingratiating comments about the post, praising Marty's articulate brilliance. "Am only writer"! Look how he plays with the idiom, ignores it, turns it on its ear! Look how he stands up to the mundane rules of grammar! He is a genius! It went on and on. Oh, Mr. Scorsese, thank you for allowing me to be your friend, I love your work always, I love Taxi Driver, is my favorit movie when it come on theTV at night, etc. etc., hundreds of them.
Uh.
People.
It's not him.
Scorsese has been married to the same woman for years, and her name ain't Marina Filoc. Marina Filoc, who on one site stated that she working her English ver hard to improve, is trying to cash in by hitching her rickety wagon to his oblivious star. Surely if she's Marty's main squeeze, she's going to have lots of attention, plenty of offers for. . . whatever. I guess there are no rules against that sort of thing, against trying to siphon something off in case all that drooling drivel slops over the edge of the bowl.
But it does make you wonder how many other FB pages are completely bogus. After all, it's not strung very tight, is it? You can pretty much be anyone you want to. A 20-year-old shiatsu therapist can suddenly become one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood history, and instantly have thousands of people fawning all over her and believing her without question.
Given the level of discernment we see in the Facebook community, who's going to know the difference?
http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html
