Twitter threw one hell of a wake last night. (It was good enough, in fact, to make you wonder if the eulogy published on The Atlantic earlier in the day might not be a bit premature.)
Rob Ford was the main draw for me, as I scrolled down looking for reactions to the early news that he was going to seek help. But the Raptors were also lighting up the court in a playoff game against the Nets, there were two Twitter parties being thrown by people I know and many more people were tweeting about the Mom 2.0 Summit. My feed was on fire.
But the news kept on keeping on, like a giant flood of bad trips that we’d all blacked out but could recognize as soon as we heard about them. The mayor at a dive strip-mall bar, the mayor gay bashing, the mayor making crude comments about Karen Stintz, the mayor digging deep into his repository of ethnic slurs and coming out with Dago.
Oh, it was rich. And then, KABLOOEY! Another crack video! It was too good to be true. It was horrible. Of course, it’s horrible and tragic for the man himself and for his family. But what a narrative. And in the midst of all of this, another story broke. Peaches Geldof’s hitherto sudden and unexplained death was discovered to be a heroin overdose.
I’m struck by the poignant inevitability that marks both these stories. We could see Rob Ford’s ruin coming from miles away; even Jon Stewart expressed genuine concern for Ford’s well-being between cracking crack jokes. And the idea that Peaches might have just died for no apparent reason didn’t sit right either, did it? As I wrote a couple weeks ago, “… my hunch is that when an otherwise seemingly healthy 25-year-old dies, something isn’t right.”
This sense of inevitability doesn’t make it any less sad, though. In part that’s because addiction, ruin and death are always tragic. Indeed, the knowing itself can make it all the more heartrending, as in literature where the ending is foreshadowed. But these weren’t fairy tales.
As much as I couldn’t believe Peaches death could be explained away by natural causes, part of me hoped it would be. And maybe Rob Ford could get it together after all, right? I mean, the man shrugged off an epic crack scandal and held onto his political base. In fact, at one point I was worried that he was getting it together; losing weight, showing up at work and managing to sound almost half-decent on Jimmy Kimmel Live. What if he gets reelected?
But there are very few surprise endings to addiction stories.
I am very sorry for Peaches’ family. I am just as sorry for Rob Ford’s wife and children. For their sake, as well as the city’s as a whole, I hope Ford will take the other well-worn path to recovery. I hope he is able to work through his personal problems quietly and that the people around him who have been propping him up and pushing him foreward will allow it.
If Rob Ford steps down and the Raptor’s manage to not give up anymore 26-point leads, then we may yet have a reason to celebrate in this city. I’ll be on Twitter waiting for it happen.