And the E! coverage is as insipid as always.
Yet, I’m tuned in.
I am shamed by this.
To my former colleagues at E! who are manning the master control right at this very moment, I wish I were you. I miss doing live television.
Ron Baer, Julie Baer, Steve Scudari, Mark Rich and anyone else I missed — you guys rock! You’re looking good here on the air in Virginia.
Following is my opinion and my opinion alone and is not based on any scientific study or thesis, just my own individual observations over the years. So don’t go off on me and tell me I’m wrong – I may very well be. But this explanation fits based on what I know and represents one of many scenarios. There. Now this essay has been sufficiently disclaimed.
It’s not about cowardice. It’s about relief.
I could never defend suicide as a rational, reasonable solution to anything. No reasonable mind could possibly draw that conclusion, so don’t think for a second that I condone suicide as a remedy for what ails the suffering mind. I do not. But I do understand it.
Committing suicide, in my opinion, has more in common with curing a headache than it does with cowardice.
When your head hurts, you seek relief by grabbing a bottle of ibuprofen or aspirin or something. The goal: to make the hurt go away.
Suicide is similar in that killing one’s self becomes the only relief available. Unfortunately as we all know, the consequences are far direr than grabbing 800 milligrams of ibuprofen and taking a nap.
It’s all about relief. It’s all about making it stop.
When one is in the depths of depression, sleep becomes a blessed relief from the past, the present and the future – all of which during the waking state appear hopeless. Only in sleep is there a blessed unconsciousness. Only in dreams are there precious few moments free of the hopelessness of the waking state. That eight hours becomes the focus of everything else one does during the waking state: “I have to go to work so I can get back to sleep and not hurt for awhile.” Or: “I need to hurry up and finish dinner and get everything settled for the evening before that moment when the real, oppressive, and horrible existence fades from view into the darkness of sleep and the freedom of dreams.” These are the things that go through one’s mind as the drudgery and the misery of a hopeless existence weigh heavily upon each and every day.
Then sleep. Blessed sleep. The relief of unconsciousness and of dreams. Even the unconsciousness brings relief. Especially the unconsciousness.
And that’s where the problem comes.
Once the unconsciousness of sleep and the perceived unconsciousness of death become equivocated, the rational barriers between living and dying break down. The attractiveness of that relief that is only temporarily found in sleep spills over to that which is perceived to be in death.
You see where I’m going with this.
It’s not about being a coward. It’s about needing the hurt to stop. Unfortunately, there’s no medicine which can mitigate that kind of hurt. And it’s tough to see a rational way out for such a visceral experience.
Regardless of how you feel about it, Robin Williams and others who commit suicide every day aren’t cowards. They just want the hurt to stop.
So please stop accusing those who commit suicide or attempt it of cowardice. “Tough love” doesn’t work here. It’s not helpful to anyone least of all them. Instead, consider empathy, compassion and offers of help and comfort. There are other ways to make the hurt stop and it starts with all of us.
http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/
Even though I was part of the entertainment industry for over a decade, I never had occasion to meet Robin Williams. Even working at E! Entertainment Television, where big name stars routinely roamed the halls, Mr. Williams was not one of the ones I encountered wandering about the building. (I did ride the elevator with Lou Diamond Phillips once. I also walked past Raquel Welch one day grotesquely stretching every muscle in my neck just to get another fraction of a second’s glance at her beauty, which really was um… substantial.) But I think Robin gave me one of the biggest and most memorable laughs of my life while I was at E!.
In those days, E! routinely covered movie premieres. People from E!’s talent pool would camp out on the red carpet and conduct the usual interviews live on the air with the stars as they proceeded to whatever venue was hosting the premiere. This was pretty early on at E!, and we didn’t have a lot of the technological bells and whistles that the major networks had. In fact, it wasn’t too long before this that E! got its very own steerable satellite dish. We hadn’t yet installed a delay and dump button. (We didn’t do that until one of our hosts said “I’m sweating like a fucking pig!” before she had been cleared by the floor manager.)
Anyway, down the red carpet comes Robin and he stops to talk with one of our reporters. It was a routine interview with the usual questions: Who are you wearing? What was it like working on the film? What do you have coming up for your next project? Of course with Robin, nothing was ever routine and I honestly don’t remember how he got started. I assume he was going off on one of his riffs when he said “tits” live on the air just as plain as day. Realizing that he’d just said “tits” on the air, he raised his voice, looked straight at the camera and gleefully said “Tits! Can you say ‘tits’ on E!? TITS!!!”
Of course, it was insanely funny to hear this on the air as long as it was Robin Williams and not Joan Rivers. I remember the entire master control room where I worked erupting in raucous laughter. There was no delay, no dump button, and no way to stop what was then still a verboten word from making it out on the air. But because it came from Robin Williams, who knew without a doubt that he was doing something naughty on the air and that probably (correctly) that there was nothing that we could do about it, all we could do was laugh. And that was OK with us.
I saw Robin in concert here in DC just a few years ago. I wound up sitting in the front row of the audience that night. He was funny enough, but he didn’t look as though he was having a lot of fun up on stage. But I surely did.
One final thought: I saw Disney’s “Aladdin” probably five times in the theater when it was first out back in 1992. I remember seeing it at least three of those times at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood. (Still one of my favorite movie houses, along with the original Egyptian Theater in Hollywood.) First of all, it was a genuinely great movie on its own merit, but much of the draw for me was the strength and magic of Robin’s performance as the Genie. For years I listened to the soundtrack album and again, much of the draw was his voice performance.
Robin sir, you will be missed. But not forgotten.
Anyone who’s ever read this blog past the first few pages has heard me mention Jeff Tobin a few times. Jeff is one of my oldest friends, mostly because he’s 16 hours older than me. We were both drum majors in our all-scholarship military school band and went to the same college afterwards. We also shared short but colorful careers in radio.
This is from JeffreyTobin.com, Jeff’s professional site and blog. Jeff brings up this radio “war story” whenever we see each other, which is far too infrequently. ‘Preciate the write up, sir!
And if you’ve not subscribed to Jeff’s blog, do it now. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
I’ve worked in broadcasting in some form or other since I was in my teens, and I learned early on that one must always expect the unexpected.
It was the late 70′s at radio station WKST in New Castle, Pa. My best buddy from school and I had continued our close and wonderful relationship through college and into the broadcasting world at area radio stations.
We knew each other well. We were a team and trusted each other implicitly. We still do, these many miles and decades later.
Dan Wolfe was live and on the air on a sunny Saturday morning. From atop a downtown building, he described for his audience a community parade as it passed by. I was back at the studio in the control room running the show from behind the scenes as Dan listened to the broadcast through his headphones.
“Here comes the high school band!” He described the view as the audience listened to the music. “And there go the WWII veterans all marching in formation…”
He heard the music of the bagpiper regiment grow louder as it approached the grand stand. But he could see no bagpipers. He looked up and down the street, but there were no kilts, no drum major, no drums. Nothing. Still, the music swelled in his headphones. How could this be?
Suddenly I heard an almost imperceptible chuckle in his voice: The little giggle of which I’d become so fond over the years. Dan realized the music wasn’t coming from the parade at all, it was coming from the studio! I was playing a recording of bagpipers and carefully feeding it into the mix.
Dan didn’t miss a beat. He described in great detail the approaching phantom regiment – the bagpipes, the colors, the regalia. And off they marched into the mind’s eye of our listeners. There never really were any bagpipers, and no one was ever the wiser.
My little joke was not a test of Dan’s abilities, but an investment in trust. I was confident that Dan would manage the situation. He was able, and he handled the unforeseen with the panache of the consummate professional he was.
And we grew closer together, both personally and professionally.
This week at my office, I demonstrated that same trust in one of our current employees, handing her a substantive project I knew she could handle. Like Dan, she rose to the occasion, taking the project on as if it were her own. It was. And she didn’t miss a beat.
If you want to move your organization forward, first develop trust. When trust is established, you can hand off responsibilities that express that trust. In this way, a test of skill is no longer a test; it becomes an empowerment… an empowerment for personal and organizational growth.
“Handing off the bagpipers” to an employee is a gift. It’s a gift that makes everything stronger: The employee, your relationship, and the organization.
I could post a zillion photos that I took of the President during his visit to my workplace on Tuesday July 15th, but I’m only posting two from that event here, one of which is not of the President.
My friend and co-worker, Taylor Lochrane, shared research details with the President during his visit on July 15th.
Federal Highway Administration’s Robotic RABIT Concrete Bridge Deck Assessment Tool. This thingy can evaluate the condition of a concrete bridge deck in about one-eighth the time required by more conventional methods. I have no clue how this works, but it does and it’s cool.
While yes, the President was at Turner-Fairbank on July 15th, I was also afforded the opportunity to photograph our Secretary of Transportation, Anthony Foxx. Foxx became the 17th United States Secretary of Transportation on July 2, 2013 and gave the introduction to Mr. Obama’s speech on the economy. This was Secretary Foxx’s first visit to our research facility.
When I was in Pennsylvania covering the RABIT’s appearance on a rural bridge, I happened across these helmets in the community fire station in which we held some informational briefings about the robot. I thought the lineup of these fireman’s helmets made for a good photo.