What the fuck universe? I’m tired of opening Facebook every morning at the train station and seeing someone who died. The last 30 days has been a bad time to be a celebrity, particularly if your British and I am a fan of your work.
First it was Lemmy, the Motorhead frontman who prided himself
on how much he could drink and toured right up to the end, passing away from an
aggressive cancer just before the new year.
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| The Goblin King watches over my babes |
Now Alan Rickman.
The voice of God. The bad guy from Die Hard. The Sheriff of Nottingham. Most
famously, Snape. This is a really long list, so I’ll end with that one since
almost everyone but me has seen all the Harry Potter movies.
All three great. All three taken by aggressive cancer before
the world was done with them.
Bowie was perhaps the biggest shock to me. As a child I
remember finding the Goblin King oddly attractive. As an adult I decorated my
twin’s bedroom around a Labyrinth movie poster with the Goblin King prominently
looking down over them as they sleep. Through the years his music was a constant. Always pushing boundaries. Rarely making a song that
wasn’t likeable, danceable, and somehow new and fresh. Bowie told us it was OK
to be weird. It was OK to be different. It was totally OK to want to turn
your younger siblings into goblins and become the Goblin Queen.
A sorry not sorry to my younger sister, who totally would have
been made a goblin if I had the opportunity.
Motorhead was one of those bands that would have been
prominently featured on a soundtrack of my 20s (which would have been a box set).
From hanging out in a punk/industrial/metal bar to seeing Motorhead perform
live at one of the shittiest venues in Chicago with the man I now call Husband,
they were pretty much a constant. I just assumed they were immortal. Lemmy
Lived a hard life with all the smoking and drinking and playing music so loud
that my ears were ringing for two days after the concert. I assumed because he
wasn’t already deaf and dead he’d live forever.
Movies were always a little better as soon as you knew Alan
Rickman was in them. From the brilliantly evil Sheriff of Nottingham in the Kevin
Costner Robin Hood movie I can’t decide if I love or hate, to the neutered
voice of God in a Kevin Smith film, and his epic death in Die Hard you never
got the same thing from Alan Rickman. Sure, he was a bad guy in a lot of
movies, but he was a different bad guy. Since I’ve never actually seen the role
he’s most known for as Professor Snape I have no opinion on that, but I can
only assume he played the role brilliantly like all others.
Here’s to hoping that we don’t lose any more greats this year.
Here’s to hoping that their legacies and deaths prompt more cancer research to
help the millions of people currently fighting. #FuckCancer
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