I saw a cable show, Celebrity Rehab, tonight, with mostly people I'd never heard of. Drug addicts, with addict behavior, not all of whom showing it, however. Heidi Fleiss flipped her car. Some bimbo flashed her cooch and then left the show. I can say cooch, right? That's not extremely vulgar, is it? I don't mean it to be. I like to pretend to be harmless, if not entirely chaste.
But it's Mackenzie Phillips. I suppose the attentive reader of these pages will have committed to memory the fact that I might once have had a little thing for Valerie Bertinelli. We will not discuss it. So I've been aware of Mackenzie. And there was that thing about her scumbag father, now resident of Hell, molesting the girl, his daughter, some number of times. Neither here nor there. Such is the world. We should distress ourselves only over what we can control. And I hadn't seen Ms Phillips since the Pro Active infomercials of a previous decade. So when I savaged her in one of my very witty pieces here, it was all in good fun. Something about a pizza-faced skank. Ha ha.
Now I feel ashamed. Because it's easy to seem. Just a matter of what we choose to show, on our faces, for the people who are watching us to see. What does it really say? It says what we let ourselves reveal. And we're all actors. Even so, watching her, in the therapeutic but televised artifice of that reality cable show, I liked her. I liked how she had aged. I liked her apparent openness and humility and vulnerability. And I recalled my silly words, which I will not change, and I was regretful of the callous indifference to her humanity that they reveal.
No apology. To whom is it owed? You? You have no right to an apology from me. If you were offended by my callowness, I commend you to the perfection of your conscience, where you will no doubt also find a perfect capacity to forgive. To Ms Phillips? Yes, but the egomaniacal pipedream that there would be any conceivable circumstance under which she would become aware of my jape, let alone give it a moment's thought -- well, I am beyond such fantasies.
Ah well. That's all. I just thought it would be beneficial for you to be exposed to the bright and crystalline clarity of my moral certitude. You are so lucky to know me. As if you did. What. You know me as Jack H, and maybe Guadalupe Maria Adolf Quetzalcoatl. I don't think I've let any of my other identities slip out. No, you don't know me, at all. So I'm safe. For now. Like you. Behind our respective masks.
J
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