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And The Beat Goes On

I don’t know much about her, but I do know that the media has said “she captured our attention,” and “she wanted to be like Marilyn Monroe,” or other silly things. While she was breathing, she had a lot of attention, even a pretty poor television show for a while.

But really, did anyone care? What do we know about her? Oh, that she married some rich guy, was in the middle of fighting for millions with the rich guy’s children, apparently slept with a number of weird and rather opportunistic guys, resulting in a laughable-if-not-tragic episode of one after another claiming to be the sire of her little girl, just to find out that she had left all her money to her now dead son. Unfortunately we knew much more about her than we needed to know.

We know that she had little self control, loved attention, and led a life style that was unthinking and dangerous. She apparently taught her son to live the same style of life, using drugs, being unproductive, and dying early by mixing drugs in a reckless manor in an apparent effort to escape life. Well, he did. And so did she. Perhaps her daughter will have a better chance of maturing a bit more, well, maturely.

Someone said that they knew her life would end tragically. Well, is it any wonder? She died lying on a hotel floor, choking on her own vomit, likely the result of misusing drugs of various sorts. Some report has said that her mother said of her that she liked downers. She liked them too much apparently.

Her body now decomposes at a faster pace than expected. Could we see some pictures of that? Could we see to what kind of end her life has led? No longer the Playboy bunny, the little girl playing the role of Ms Monroe, the adult who didn’t know who she was. Rather, the rotting corpse of someone who died of her own doing, the end of a self-shortened, sorry life. Maybe she did imitate Marilyn after all. Of course all our lives lead to decomposing corpses, but most of us will have been buried safely out of sight before we start causing concern at the local morgue.

Maybe her end will teach some folks about the reality of life, about the pointlessness of wanting attention, of wanting money, of wanting fame. The pointlessness of having a pointless life.

Of course the people that need to learn that lesson won’t even hear it, much less learn it. The tragedy is that none of this is new. Even before the writer of Ecclesiastes wrote his second chapter, there were people who lived and died like she did. And there will yet be others. And all of them will be forgotten; few will leave anything of lasting value.

So what remains? Fleeting pictures of a woman who’s identity changed almost weekly and which are as thin as her life was. Nothing but a little baby who for the rest of her life will have to say she was my mother.

Vanity; all is vanity, and there is nothing new under the sun.

She captured our attention? Please.

And the beat goes on.

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