So a couple nights ago, there was this show on the Biography channel called “The Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne”, which revealed that he has full blown frigging Parkinson’s.
Watching him and Sharon say that, I teared up. My entire life, Ozzy has been this wild and crazy guy who seemed like NOTHING could stop him, nothing could slow him down. And he has freaking PARKINSON’S. PARKINSON’S.
Shit.
I wasn’t supposed to listen to Black Sabbath or Ozzy Osbourne’s music growing up. Black Sabbath were all devil worshippers and Ozzy was called The Prince of Darkness and bit the heads off bats and does and peed on the Alamo while wearing his wife’s dress, of all things. They were evil incarnate, if you ask my mother (which she still maintains to this day), which of course made them TERRIBLY attractive to ten year old wanna be rebel wild child me. I remember going with my mom to the home of a friend of hers and listening to her friend tell her over a cup of coffee, “I went into Tony’s bedroom and took that damn Black Sabbath tape out of his tape player and pulled all the tape out of it and threw it in the garbage. My son, MY OWN SON! Listening to that devil music!” Something like that. It was the late 80s and we were nose-deep in The Satanic Panic. Supposedly heavy metal (which Black Sabbath practically invented) was at the root of all the evil stuff parents imagined that their kids could get into when they weren’t physically present.
In some ways, I think my generation sort of…absorbed…all this nervous energy generated by their parents from back then and it did one of two things: You either partied like a rock star to prove that you were invincible and no fake Satanic bullshit was going to bring YOU down OR you just absorbed all that nervous energy and then decided to puke it up all over your kids in the form of helicopter parenting and overscheduling their entire lives so they couldn’t get into the same sort of low level mischief that YOU got into as a kid.
But back to Ozzy having Parkinson’s. I’m going to be 42 in a little over a week and I just realized exactly how old I’m really getting. It’s bad enough watching the people you grew up idolizing grow old and die, but this…to see a man who seemed (despite his partying and all the drugs and the absolutely insane shit he got himself into and out of) so damn STRONG turned into this frail, shaking old man is just…man. It’s hard. Really hard.
Because nobody..and I mean NOBODY…partied like Ozzy Osbourne partied. He looked at other parties and went “I can do better than that.” and then went out and did more drugs and drank more booze than just about anyone. I mean, for fuck’s sake, the dude got high and snorted a line of ants off the sidewalk. You can’t get higher than that, right? I mean that is INSANE. Absolutely insane.
And his fans…including me…adored him for it. He was like everybody’s favorite drunk uncle, but better.
He doesn’t deserve this…nobody does. But eventually all that partying and booze and stuff had to catch up to him. I just wish it hadn’t caught up to him like this. Because it’s a crap way to go out.
I wish I could just walk up to him and say once, just one damn time, “Thank you, Mr. Osbourne.” but I probably wouldn’t even be able to get that out. I’d probably throw my arms around him and hug him and just sob like an absolute lunatic. Because I can’t imagine what this world will be like without his totally screwed up antics. He has been influential in all the best and worst possible ways.
