DAY 2: DEAR CRUSH

Dear Marshall,

I have spent the last month trying to separate the man from the personas that you have created. I have read up on your story, listened to lots of your songs, am planning on watching your movie, but I think people continually evolve. You caught my attention with your most recent songs Not Afraid and I Love The Way You Lie. I understand that Airplanes 2 is also a recent recording. When I compare those songs to the earlier songs, I can see how much you've grown. Although, Lose Yourself, which is from 8 Mile, indicates that you were already beginning to move in this direction.

I understand why the songs that launched your career were so angry (Slim Shady), and contrite (Eminem), and moderated (Marshall Mathers). You explain that in Lose Yourself. "What if you had just one shot, one chance, would you take it?" You needed all of that to take your shot, and it worked. You were punching through the floor, instead of walking through the door, because you weren't invited into what was an all-black hip hop club. You had to work 10x harder to prove you were as good as they were. And you did it. In fact, I think you exceeded your own expectations. I don't think anyone knows what the downside of fame is going to feel like until it arrives on their doorstep. You weren't prepared. Your wife wasn't prepared and no one is writing a handbook. By the way, I am a writer. If you want to work on that project together, that would be totally cool. HOW TO DEAL WITH FAME: A BEGINNER'S GUIDE. I can see that wouldn't be your kind of title. HOW TO DEAL WITH FAME: KNOWING WHEN IT'S TIME TO TELL PEOPLE TO TAKE IT THROUGH THE MIDDLE FINGER. Yeah, the title is a little too long. We can work on it.

Anyway, the music was awesome. You were being paid to do what you loved. You had lots of anger issues from your childhood and it was therapeutic letting it out. But then the fame itself generated crap all on its own. Your marriage went to hell twice and that made for more anger than you could handle. You started doing drugs to take the edge off, because it was all just too much. And you had to have been thinking, "When did the dream turn into a nightmare?" And still you wrote because you had to or you would explode. The hate was so intense. The only love you had in your heart was for your daughter and your ex-wife was making that relationship hard on you. Nothing was coming easy.

Life was teaching you so many lessons and they were all bad. Trust no one. Love no one. There is no such thing as loyalty. Everyone screws you over in the end. Count on no one but yourself. The public will love you as long you are successful, but they will turn on you like wolves. Everyone is out for number one, so you better be out for number one, too. Screw forgiveness. You tried that with Kim and she just screwed you again. Fool me once, shame on you . Fool me twice, shame on me. Friends are only your friends based on your success rate. You really are in this thing alone. The only person who loves me for me are my daughters. That is it. That is the only part of my heart that is open. Everyone else can keep the hell out because I don't trust you, don't need you, don't want you, and don't believe you. The need and want part might be a lie, but the don't believe part is true, and makes the need and want part too scary.

I know a little bit how you feel. Friends have let me down. The last three relationships I have been in have been horrific. Well, two out of three anyway. But they were all very painful. You do that enough times and you get scared of even trying again. It's easier to have superficial relationships than to have a relationship with someone real. A real person has the capacity to hurt you. You and I are a lot alike. We are both on this road of reclamation; we are in the process of reclaiming our lives. You have already come so far by going to drug rehab, for you and no one else, and owning that. However, in order to really gain any ground, you have to go all the way. You have to spend some time digging out your pain, looking at it, and letting go. That is how you get your life back. Eventually, you will meet someone, hopefully not in the fame business, who is a real person and you will be cautious about the whole thing, but you will let her in. And it will be a beautiful day to start out the rest of your life. I am hoping for the same kind of thing for myself. It's not healthy going through this world alone. However, it isn't healthy jumping into something before you have mentally and emotionally "cleaned house."

Wishing you much happiness,
Robin


image blatantly ripped off from Miss Angie at My So-Called Chaos

COULD YOU BE THAT HONEST?

I had a plan for the next few days. I was going to do my one word and fifteen minutes writing exercise so that I could really put the hammer down on my book. I have been reading instead of writing and it actually worked. On my way to the library yesterday, the light bulb came on. I love those moments. REVELATION. Of course, that also meant I figured out how/where I screwed up again and I am going to have to go back and fix that shit. But, it makes it possible for me to motor through it. Sometimes it truly does work to let something sit on the backburner and let your subconscious work on it. It isn't being lazy. It is working by not working. Or working on something else. I don't know, but it worked. That doesn't mean I haven't worked on the novel at all. I have, but it has been frustrating going because I knew something was off. Now, it will be easier.


Several things have jettisoned my plan. One was Misery's comment on my blog from yesterday. She, too, wrote about Eminem's new video. I suppose that is great minds thinking alike. Except that we didn't actually share the same opinion about it...exactly. I am a very new Eminem convert and am not at all familiar with the old stuff. She said I needed to have a listen to his song KIM and that might make me feel differently about him. I went to my music player. I decided video would be too distracting and had a listen. It was a horrible song. Abuse at its worst. Kim was his wife, the baby was crying, and, in the end, there was the distinct implication that he killed her. She was crying and pleading (or some woman was, probably not the actual Kim), and he was vicious. So, then I went to Wikipedia and read all I could. His whole bio. It broke down each of his albums, what songs were on them, and what the general concept was for the album. Amazingly enough, each album did have a concept. Eminem writes his own music and the album reflects his life... whatever it is at that moment in time. It also broke down his personal life so you could compare and contrast the two.

Well, that is something to think about right there. I am not sure that I could be that honest if I was as popular an artist as he was, and my life was what his life was. In other words, if I was abusing the shit out of my spouse, I don't think I could write about it, then put it on my CD. I am pretty sure this song was written in between their marriages. Stop and think about that one. They married two times. He wrote this horrible song about her and then she married him again.


Back to the writing what he's living.... every single important thing that he is living is flowing from his brain onto the paper. Then it goes onto a CD for the whole world to know. Abuse. Drugs. Missing his kids. Fighting with the record label. Political opinions. Opinions about other celebrities. Pretty much everything he thinks, it gets put on the paper and then on the CD. And it isn't just the stuff that makes him look good. In fact, a lot of it makes him look like shit. I think that you really start to see the turning point in his later music, but he still falls down. WHEN I'M GONE is an excellent example of him indicating that he doesn't have a handle on anything. His priorities are all messed up and he knows it. I listened to several. I think that LOSE YOURSELF has a great message, but I think that he was still in "the hole" at that time. I am not sure how AIRPLANES 2 fits in. It doesn't feel like the old Eminem. It feels a lot more like the stuff on this new album. I think maybe he recorded it during his hiatus? I don't know on that one. Maybe someone who knows more about rap can answer that one. Anyway, he released a Greatest Hits album and then took some time off. He needed that time away from that mad business of making album after album. He'd either gone through rehab or knew he needed it... not sure which. All of those were the milestones that led him to where he is now: RECOVERY.


The big question always is can you maintain it? Show business, the music industry, and all of the people that make money off of you want to suck you dry. Can you keep your priorities straight when you're in the middle of the hailstorm? It's easy when you're not in the middle of a tour, making videos, and having your songs topping the charts. It's easy when you're not being nominated for awards. Now is when it gets hard. Everyone is juggling all the time. The reality is that everyone's load is always too heavy to carry all at once, so we juggle. When we are moving at a comfortable pace, we can juggle slow. That way the balls are easy to catch and we don't have to put too many in the air. His pace just picked up and the musical powers that be just threw about ten more balls for him to keep in the air (on top of the ones he already was juggling). No one can do that forever. You have to know your limits. Marshall Mathers is about to find out if he really knows who he is. I hope that he really is Not Afraid To Take A Stand because he might have to (figuratively) kick some ass. That means saying "No," when you're being pressured by, what feels like, the whole world to say "Yes."

I just read that the definition of adulthood is no longer caring what other people think. I plan on writing an entire blog on that at a later date. But it seems a fitting way to end this one today.