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The Ozzy Files


by j jackson




Everyone else is jumping on the Ozzy bandwagon.
I too might as well jump.
I'm a big Ozzy fan.
I've been a fan for a long time.
I awaken this morning with an idea for an Ozzy album title. I plan to see if I can find a Website where I can send him this idea: (Two separate albums, one released right after the other.) Ozztracized / Ozztercized (like the blender, and he could maybe make a deal with Oster to feature a blender on the album cover, whirring some non-descript concoction that once was whatever.)
Last night, I dreamed I was dating Ozzy's daughter. I knew that watching that show would have consequences. We're in some kind of a huge auditorium, more like an amphitheater, actually a complex of buildings, sort of like the Hoosier Dome, but more like the Monroeville mall, outside at the back in the parking lot, but as if we're in the mall, which is also inside the sports-like complex. We're also on some kind of a camping trip, and I say to Kelly that I have to take a shower, and she says, "Yeah. I know." I haven't had a shower for a few days, and I don't have any deodorant. I say, "Oh. Do I smell?" [rai, after awakening later: She says, "Oh, not really. A little bit, but it's a manly smell."] [This is residue from yesterday when I was outside talking to Steve and wondered if he noticed that I hadn't taken a shower in a few days.] We're at some kind of a massive festival, like an indoor state fair or something, except that it's not so hick, but more hip. Ozzy is sitting in the seats near the front of the empty audience area and we--Sharon, Kelly, and I--come up to him. Sharon says to him "Now, this is going to upset you." He looks up at her in that noncommittal way of his, as if he's far off and confused and must return to deal with the everyday world. Sharon tells him that Kelly and I are dating. He isn't pissed at all like I thought he'd be. He's just kind of oh, okay.
Kelly and I are going to give blood. We have to walk up a huge metal staircase. One small flight up, we come up to a nurse. I have a handful of blood donation forms that I'm supposed to pass out to the touring company. The nurse asks me what I'm doing with all the blank forms. She thinks I've stolen them and am up to no good. I tell her I'm in charge of the blood donations for my group. She asks what my group is and I tell her it's the Ozzy tour group. Her attitude toward me immediately changes and she becomes impressed, friendly, and accommodating, whereas before she was being a benign, distant bitch.
At an afternoon rehearsal before the big show that night, I am backstage (the stage is in the center of the dome, the backstage area being a curtained off section of the huge stage complex in the middle of the floor, which was where the metal staircase was that went up into the heights of the "dome-like" structure) acting a little bit nervous and drinking huge amounts of orange juice to calm me down (but the sugar is actually making me more hyper; but it makes me feel better). In between sips of juice, I'm singing a song, accompanying myself on an acoustic guitar. I only sing the first line. Just as I'm being called out onto the stage, I tell Sharon, who's running the show, or at least the rehearsals, that I gotta pee, but she says "Well, you can't do it now," and she hustles me onto the stage. I come out on stage. No one is there except the crew and people who are running the show. I walk up to the mike as if it's actually the real show and I say, in an English accent, "I wrote this song last year." And then I continue in an American accent. "And Ozzy liked it so much that he put it on his new album, Ozzmosis. Kelly cheers and applauds from way out in the middle of the audience among a vast sea of empty folding chairs. She's the only one who's making any noise. All of the others are hardly even paying attention. I begin to sing the song. I start with the guitar playing the same music as on the Beatle song with the false starts. (I've Just Seen A Face? I'm Looking Through You?) Then I say, again in an English accent, "Okay. Take two." Then, still in an English accent, I say "That's me little joke." But no one is paying any attention. I start to sing the song, but I awaken, not able to remember it. I get pissed off because I can't manage to reconstruct the lyric line and the melody that I'd been singing over and over backstage. It was something like "I'm not me..." but the music eludes me completely.

Anything associated with Ozzy Obsbourne is a media event.

Cheney's wife "embarrassed" by attention Ozzy gets at WH dinner.

What's the world coming to when Ozzy Osbourne is invited to the White House correspondent's dinner anyway?

"He's hardly someone to be applauding - not a role model," Matt Drudge reports that Mrs. Cheney said. She says she did not say it, but Drudge won't budge. (Does he ever?) He was at the dinner. "I stand tough behind the story," he is reported to have said.

Mrs. Cheney has a hang-up about Ozzy's past, and about his lyrics.
Someone explain to her how morality has nothing to do with words.
She also has a thing against eminem. (She needs a real Slim Shady.)

Ozzy may look like a slob when he's lying around the house on his new MTV program, but he sure dresses up nice, doesn't he?

Other links to Ozzy WH news:

"Great & Powerful Ozz...At the White House Correspondents' Dinner, a Heavy-Metal Taste of True Celebrity" (The Washington Post) This is a great article, full of wit and wisdom.

"GLENN Close will never forget her introduction to Ozzy Osbourne at the White House Correspondents Dinner. The star of 'Fatal Attraction' and 'Dangerous Liaisons' has a cast on her right arm, having broken her wrist in a horse-riding mishap. Upon learning that Close was being treated with the powerful painkiller Percoset, 'Ozzy offered to buy some off me,' the actress revealed." [article is no longer available online]

"Ozzy has left the building -- finally. Washington is still dithering in the wake of Goth rocker Ozzy Osbourne, whose dark star rose above the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner on Saturday night to fixate press and politicians alike." (Harper on Media)

And then there's Ozzy's wife. Sharon Osbourne is a perfect example of the sharp businesswoman who insures her future through hard and intelligent work, a model for the postmillennial female struggling with a business world that is treating women more as equals every year, which means being less patronizing and more caustic toward them, which the less perceptive women still attribute to gender discrimination, which is no longer any where near to the truth. This cuntry is turning into a hive of busy workers who expel the drones as soon as they're past their serviceability period. Maybe this is the way it's always been and the male-oriented point-of-view I am stuck with is causing me to misperceive the situation too. But the way I see it, women are far more equal than they think they are. And Sharon Osbourne is the living. breathing personification of this equality.
Modern women (who tend to come from the more affluent segments of society) complain that their husbands, after they achieve some degree of success in the careers, divorce them in favor of younger, trophy wives. It may be true, but they don't see the other side of the coin, which exists across all strata of society. It's certainly been an ongoing habit of a certain segment of the married female population to leave their husbands, or more likely, to kick them out of the house, when they lose their jobs and become morose and subject to depression and loss of self-esteem. So much for the support of a good woman. Maybe, male domination has been a reaction against this evolutionary motive of the worker bee. That is to say, if men had not adopted a domination over women, the women would have expelled them from society at an early age, after their usefulness at procreation and as a sexual gratification toy had ended. Women, then, can be seen in this light as projecting their negative physiologies/psychologies onto the convenient hook of male domination. And the problem is, it's getting worse as the society orients itself toward the female.
Hey, it's just a theory. [It's these kinds of writings that cause people to accuse me of being misogynist, when all I am doing is simply trying reporting facts and get at a deeper truth.]
Truth is hard enough to get at in the best of circumstances. Add the changing cultural mores and you have miasmata of overlapping definitions conflicting for attention. One of those is Ozzy's new-found popularity among a younger generation. I kind of resent all of the popularity that's being heaped on Ozzy now, although I don't resent Ozzy for it. I'm glad for him, and for his genius of a wife, who's obvious engineered the whole thing. But it's that old "where were you way back when" attitude. This is my superceleb. Go get your own.

A tribute to the popularity of Ozzy and the Osbournes on livejournal.

I'm tired of all this pandering of attention. It wears me out trying to keep up with the changing culture. But I only feel this way because I'm tired in general. I haven't had a good night's sleep in days. I feel distant and out of it. I walk past the full-length mirror in my office and I catch a glimpse of myself in passing. I'm walking with my shoulders slumped, leaning slightly forward, my hair is mussed and its length is waywardly insisting itself over my shoulders, I stumble slightly as I walk. I look like Ozzy walking around his house, half-heartedly doing minor household chores.
I never previously would have believed it, but I realize that I'm a fan. I've been in denial for a long, long time. I hate fans. They wallow in their pathetic admiration. But I probably feel this way because I don't have any. I'm a fan of people with whom I have a correspondence. And I'm a fan with a lot of people with whom I do not.
I've always been so cool [well, not always. I used to be a little bit of a nerd--but even then, I was cool, in the sense that I stood off and let others get hot about things while I maintained my distance, and in the sense that I always strove to present a cool persona, despite what my true self beneath might have been. As a matter of fact, I may still be doing this. What is cool anyway, but this very practice?] [I forgot what I was going to write about. Oh, yeah. Fortunately, I've been working from my notes. This is why I write down everything I want to write about, so that I won't forget it before I actually do the writing], and it's not too cool to be a fan. But I'm realizing that I've been a fan all my life, a dedicated fan, of a lot of people, unknown, and famous--and infamous. (I have this natural propensity to emulate people I like. This is an ordinary human function, but in me, to me, to this person who wants to think he's so independent, it seems to take an extraordinary turn as I latch onto people and their ideas and adopt them as my exclusive role models for a period of time. I've been as hopeless as an air-headed groupie. More lately, I've been less like this, but when I was young, I was very hopeless. But then, most young people are.]
Anyway, the point is, I am a fan, I realize, and rather than continue to deny it, I've decided to come clean and to admit to the extensive fannery in which I am caught up. To this end, I've started a new Web page: idols, which I'll add to as I think of those people who've influenced my psyche, life, and art--and subtract from when I realize that they are just a passing fad in my ever-absorbing mind; but then, if they are only a fad, nevertheless, they are an influence. Ozzy is my latest realization.

Headline:
Ozzy Makes A New Friend.
Dateline:
Hollywood

Shock-rocker Ozzy Osbourne and self-proclaimed "unknown" writer j jackson get together at a dinner party in Beverly Hills after Ozzy reads j's online episode about a dream he had about dating Ozzy's Daughter, Kelly. j states: "By this time I thought I'd have my teeth bashed in." Ozzy, the ever-lucid conversationalist, mumbled some- thing unintelligible. Later, he said, "I really like his writing. He writes like I fuckin' sing, all over the place." j sat idly by, nursing a cramp in his foot as Ozzy handled the media, who didn't seem the least bit interested in Ozzy's new friend.


Ozzy Osbourne is a symbol of baby boomers' misspent youth.
Parents fantasize a youth they almost or never lived.
Children understand, empathize, misspending their own.
It's a point of convergence. Go with it. Take advantage of it.
Don't question it. It doesn't happen all that often, a function of
The Fourth Turning, occurring once every ninety or so years.

Everyone fantasizes now having been like Ozzy, growing up with him, hearing his music in the background of our lives. But do they feel like I do about him, as a old fan, or is it just nostalgia for former times?
[I've been thinking about nostalgia lately. Nothing exemplifies the phenomenon more than the movie The Way We Were. Women love this film, because it evokes in them those teary episodes they so much love to engage themselves in. Is this healthy? Some psychologists believe it is. I don't. At best, I think, it's self-indulgence. It could also be an unhealthy attachment to the past. I never feel these feelings, but I realize I could, if I so indulged myself. Frequently, I see myself on their verge. I could easily tip myself over into them headlong. But why would I want to? To feel sorry for myself? To purge myself of a past I've already left behind? No. I'm perfectly happy living without the awareness that there were good times in my past that I have gone beyond. I don't have to feel these bittersweet memories, so I don't.]
Ozzy, or rather the times during which his music was originally popular, could easily become nostalgia for me. But he is not, nor is he the past. If he had not become re-popular, I doubt very much if I would have attended to him at all. And his family is very much the present. It's a social phenomenon. It's a passing postmod fad. But, for me, it's a link between past and present, one more chance to compare how far I've come from the time when I was out among the populace and now, when I hardly go out at all.

People on 'ludes should not drive.
 
Sean Penn as Spicoli in
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
When I have something I must do that requires me to be sociable or just to go out during the day, especially when I am on a nighttime schedule (sleeping during the day) or on a split schedule (sleeping four hours or so twice a day), I begin to feel put upon. It's that old feeling of stress, not so much at the fact that I have to encounter an external world that is likely to impose itself on me as because I must adjust my sleep schedule and/or my mindset to accommodate the mission. If I need only adjust my mindset, if my sleep schedule is "normal," then it's not so difficult an ordeal. Under these ordinary, day to day circumstances, I can cope, especially if interruptions to my work do not happen so often. But if I am sleeping days, then I must force myself onto another schedule, and even with the help of melatonin, I end up going out go out with "sleep lag."
But when I do not have something to do that requires me to interface with society, when there is nothing pending, then I can breeze through life without a care that I must be in bed by a certain hour, get enough rest, be at my best during the day so that I don't feel like Ozzy Osbourne looks as he walks through his house as if he is lost, forlorn, and has ingested one too many Quaaludes and is about to fall forward on his face if he makes one misstep. It's so nice not to have to feel this way, to allow my physiology/psychology to drift, to seek it's own (un)natural rhythm, to work through the night if I am motivated and to go to bed late in the morning after watching stupid movies on AMC or taped episodes of The Osbournes, as I catch up with all that I previously missed.



brief afterthought

"Sharon Osbourne's cancer has spread beyond her colon and the wife of the anarchic British rock star Ozzy Osbourne will start a three-month course of chemotherapy at the end of July, she told People magazine in an interview released Thursday." (CNN)
[article]

This is so sad. But if anyone can survive, Sharon can. But I'm more interested in the description of Ozzy as 'anarchic'. C'mon. He's living in a mansion in LA. Does that sound like an anarchist to you. I guess some people never outlive their pasts.

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