Ozzy Osbourne Made Every Poor Choice You Could Ever Make. We Should Live More Like Him.
Go out and be less efficient with your life.
Peel away the first layer of the Price of Darkness, and what you would find is a Beatlemaniac. Ozzy Osbourne’s love of The Beatles, Paul McCartney and John Lennon in particular, is so well known that even I know about it. How do I know? Because Ozzy told everyone with a microphone “She Loves You” changed his life.
As an elder millennial, it is impossible to not know Ozzy Osbourne—the working class kid from Birmingham, England who grew up so poor, his original family home did not have indoor plumbing. That’s another thing Ozzy told everyone: “If you knew where I came from . . .” Those roots, that poverty, even with all the gold jewelry, millions of fans, and the reality show set in Beverly Hills, it never seemed to leave him.
For more than twenty years, long after the Black Sabbath records and his breakfast-making in a leopard print kimono, and his two solo records with the dead guitarist— Ozzy was everywhere. “The Osbournes” was a ratings juggernaut for MTV. And there he was standing on a chair at the White House Correspondents Dinner in front of George W. Bush. And, of course, there was Ozzfest, the heavy metal music festival that became an ubiquitous summer rite of passage (I never attended, but many of my friends did).
That’s what I mean when I say: It is impossible to be middle aged and not have feelings about Ozzy Osbourne. To not know things, and have useless knowledge about a heavy metal rocker who made every poor choice anyone could ever make, and still live.
I will not pretend to understand the lore of The Beatles or Black Sabbath—two bands I am aware of, but were never in heavy rotation in my CD player—but I am very aware of their influence on everyone else I love. When I got married, my husband and I walked out to Metallica’s “Master of Puppets.” In 1986, Metallica opened for Ozzy.
When my kid was elementary-age, and before Marvel was a fully realized cinematic universe, but a singular big-budget movie with a former uninsurable recovering addict as its star—she was obsessed with Iron Man. I cannot watch that movie, and not think of Ozzy Osbourne, and how art feeds off itself through the influence of other artists.
Everyone knows this, right? Art inspires other art. Musicians collaborate. Writers twist and weave tales already written and told. Nothing I am sharing here is groundbreaking. It’s really me circling around the drain of what I really want to say: Tell everyone you know about the things you love.
I am worried—because I have been inside classrooms with a bunch of teens and tweens—that adults have not told the young people in their lives what they love. I am not saying young people need to love what older folks love. What I am sharing is that Kurt Cobain’s aunt gave him a guitar, recorded him singing and was instrumental in his first recordings.
If I had a time machine, one of the stops I’d make is the day some keyboard puncher came up with the phrase “physical media” and then everyone doubled down. It sounds like an exam in gym class. Like some guy wearing a polo shirt with calves the size of cantaloupes is going to bark orders in the name of fitness awards. WHO WANTS ANYTHING TO DO WITH THAT??!!
Call it a “video library,” and treat it that way.
It’s weird to write a eulogy of sorts from a place of frustration, especially for someone who so clearly loved being alive. It is frustrating to know icons die, but robots are eager to replicate them. And we, the regular human people, are only too happy to oblige the overlords in that pursuit, handing over art to machines.
The tech industry has convinced far too many people that the only kind of life we can have is an efficient one full of productivity and data crunching. A kind of life where every human interaction is a third wheel for two machines talking to one another. Where you do not have to think for yourself or learn anything at all, where to hell with the journey or destination, you can arrive at an answer given to you from, honestly, I do not even know, it’s all very vague where the answers come from.
We’ve given our collections away, thrown everything out, lost our ability to settle down and read a page and replaced it all with screens. What is the point of loving something if you cannot share it? What is the point of being alive, if you’re not going to live? If you are not going to collect things and stuff and feelings and ephemera along the way and say, “For a time, I was here” and then hope maybe something sticks with someone younger than you because you shared it with them.
A tech company could never make Ozzy Osbourne. Ozzy was completely inefficient, loaded with drugs and booze, creatively gifted and deeply empathetic. All quantities anathema to the kind of life tech has spent the last twenty-five years convincing people is a waste of time.
Look, drugs are scarier than ever so I am not saying “Do drugs!” because I, in fact, have not done any of the drugs. I am insanely square mixed with a level of cringe that is off the charts embarrassing, but I am clear-eyed about being alive. Like Ozzy, I am not only happy to be here, I am thrilled we’re here together. Do you know the odds we’ve beaten? Do you know the stakes? Virginia Woolf wrote that it is dangerous to live even one day.
So while we are here living dangerously, go tell someone what they made meant something to you. Tell them you love it. Never be embarrassed to be a fan. Go out and be less efficient with your life. And your space. Love your stuff and let it multiply. Call it a collection, a library, whatever you want. Be eccentric. Love something bigger than you, and tell everyone you meet about it. Share it with someone. For Ozzy.
Currently
📚 Reading: The Chiffon Trenches
Long on my TBR list, I am finally reading André Leon Talley’s second memoir.
🍿 Watching: Shampoo
A few months ago I watched “Bugsy,” and it was so sexy and funny and charming and dark. And “Shampoo” is very much like that set against the Nixon years. And baby Carrie Fisher with the shock one-liner of a lifetime!
💡 Swearing by: This book light
Lifechanging.
🌴 Highly anticipating its arrival: This kimono
It’s SCREAMS Dorothy Zbornak
🎸 Listening: Mr. Crowley
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Flop Era is written by Liz Henry whose sole hydration is Diet Coke, and has made hating AI her entire personality. Only crisp carbonation will cool this human-only writing.
