On joking about suicide and women

Josh Groban made a suicidal sounding tweet about playing five bullet Russian roulette.  This was worrisome to me.

I was a high school exchange student in France. A few years after I left, my French host father committed suicide.  That was upsetting, needless to say.  

Somehow, when I was there, I kept having strange thoughts drifting into my head about suicide.  It wasn't that I wanted to kill myself, as I was fairly happy there, but somehow as if I was intuiting something about suicide in my environment.  

I volunteered for a suicide prevention hotline back in the USA in the intervening years between my visit there and when he finally did it.  It wasn't that I knew he was going to do it, but somehow I knew there was a suicide that needed to be prevented.

My host father dropped strange comments that were later obviously hints, like "I won't live to be old."

Joking about suicide is supposed to be a warning sign or cry for help experts say.  You're always supposed to take such jokes seriously.  You're never supposed to just let them pass.

Josh made a friend in New Zealand who is called Diaper Wolf on twitter.  He has tweeted her several times.  She has a whole blog about her corpse.  Sometimes she seems to be intrigued by suicide.  

I wonder what drew him to her -- other than that she seems to have that physical type that all the women recently connected with Josh have had: slender with tiny flat tummies, but nevertheless curvaceous, and with long, dark, almost black hair.

He has often talked about being depressed and he has written and sung depressed songs.  Is he attracted to a woman who is fascinated with death, because he is suicidal?

@elizzzibeth tweeted that his tweet upset her, because she felt helpless to do anything about her fear that he might be suicidal.

I tweeted to Josh that I wondered if he realized how many people would be devastated if he did kill himself.  I also tweeted that I hoped that, even though we must all seem like a great faceless mass to him, he might be able to envision us enough as individuals to not want to hurt us that way.  Who knows if he saw that or what he thought of it?

He has made it clear that the adulation of older women has often made him uncomfortable.  He points out how very young he was when he started out and how overwhelming older fans felt, when he still saw himself as a kid.  He has said he wants to date women his own age.  He affiliated with College Humor for a movie -- an outfit that seems institutionally uncomfortable with aging.  Please see my earlier blog about "Coffee Town," which discusses this topic.  He retweeted a link to a video about young actresses mimicking and poking fun at his older fans.  He said the video made him laugh until he cried.  

He seems to be trying to change his music to suit a younger audience.  It doesn't seem to be working.  Sales are going down, and the older fans persist.

So perhaps hurting older fans like me doesn't seem like a big obstacle? I don't know.

I've been listening a lot to "Closer," Josh's most popular album, and trying to compare the music to that in "All that Echoes."   Of course, the ATE beat is stronger, to create a bit more rock-like feeling as Josh and Rob Cavallo have pointed out; but  I think what I'm noticing is that, while ATE continues to use an orchestra, the music is less complex and varied in the later album than in the earlier album.  I'm not a big music theorist, so it's hard for me  to sure about that either.

I suspect that older fans are more likely to be attracted to musical complexity, though I'm not sure about that.

I blogged before about declining sales, briefly, but I continue to think about that topic.

I'm sure it must be frustrating to Josh, having worked so hard on this latest album and having been so happy with it, that it has done the least well of any of his albums.  It must be hard thinking that he might have to go crawling back to David Foster with his tail between his legs.

I hope he can keep that in perspective.  It's always hard having to adjust one's expectations downwards.  He did so well in his first albums, when he was still an adolescent, it could be easy to develop an expectation that he would always do that well.  It could be easy to get despondent about not meeting that type of expectation, if one were a depressive type.

And then, of course, there is his love life or lack thereof.

To listen to him talk, he is always alone and frustrated.  That could certainly make a person depressed.

If one listened to the online fan blogs, particularly the "Pretty Woman" site, which was recently deleted, one would get the impression that he is a playboy with a girl in every port.  Is he promiscuous? Is he despondent about many failed relationships? 

He has several times said that he would never pull a fan out of the audience and have sex with her.  It's an odd sort of statement for a person who cultivates a shy, nerdy, loner image.  

When I first heard the not pulling fans from audience commitment, I took it as a statement of sexual conservatism from a sexually conservative young man.  After reading the gossip blogs, I start wondering if it was a sort of desperate statement, like someone struggling with alcohol saying he will never drink hard liquor.  

That's the problem with gossip.  It can give you a totally different impression of a person, without much hard evidence.  These bloggers claimed to have an inside edge on various tweets and to know which tweeters were friends of the women of interest; but I certainly was not in a position to check all these tweets and verify the truth or falsity of any of the conclusions drawn.

Josh recently tweeted about talking to a woman in a club in Las Vegas and there was also by a tweet from someone who apparently knew him from college, with a picture showing him partying with 3 beautiful young women.  The one who seemed to be positioned closest to Josh looked like that same physical type again.   There was something about the way they were standing so close to each other that made one think there could be something going on there.

His recent tweet said he was a lady's man.  

Sometimes the women who have been connected with him on the gossip blogs have tweeted or posted on Facebook comments indicating that he hurt them or that some man hurt them, further fueling the activity on the gossip blogs.

The morality police on FOJG always insist that Josh is highly private, that he doesn't want fans to know who he's with.  They beat (or try to) anyone who has the unmitigated gaul to discuss his personal life out of the club. 

Josh has said that he likes to be private to protect the women he's with from fan attention.  This concern certainly seems justified given the extreme hostility that some show toward these women -- especially on that "J-spot" blog, which appears to exist for the sole purpose of allowing jealous fans to vent their venom against the women who might have had a shot at Josh.  

When I was at the Americans for the Arts Awards, Josh apparently had his manager tell us to stop staring just as a potential woman of interest came into view.  There was a different woman, who seemed to be acting as a decoy to further distract our attention from the woman of potential interest.  I speculated that the decoy might actually have been hired for this purpose.  This all tended to confirm the impression that one gets on FOJG that he wants privacy.

Yet he does like to tweet when he has flirted with someone.  Could he actually be picking up women at parties in clubs?   Does some part of him want us to know that?  Is he struggling to get out of the closet in some way?

Gay people have struggled to get out of the closet and have been widely accepted as a result.

Promiscuous men have sometimes bragged in locker rooms, but are not widely accepted.  Women tend to feel abused by them.  Less attractive men -- who don't have a shot at being promiscuous -- are not happy with those who manage to seduce lots of women.  In fact, I think the promotion of monogamy is more for the protection of beta males than it is for the protection of women.

Could acceptance of promiscuous males be the next frontier for civil libertarians?  

I do feel that people like Bill Clinton and Josh are subjected to temptations that the rest of us never experience.  It's easy to sit in judgment on someone when one has never walked a mile in his shoes.  That seems to be the case of those bloggers who get so irritated at what they perceive to be Josh's love life or lovers.

The thought of Josh possibly being promiscuous scares me.  I had seven friends die of AIDS during the the '80's, before there were drugs that were effective against HIV.  Even now the drugs don't work forever and the people who take them are likely not going to live the kind of full life they might have led without HIV infection.  I know Josh can be impulsive.  I can imagine him getting careless about protection.

In any case, Josh does sometimes seem frustrated with the way his love life is going.  He has said that he wants to get married and have children.  He has said that his traveling gets in the way of relationships.   He frequently implies that he's lonely.

Frustration about career and love life can certainly make a person depressed.

So I sit here and worry, helplessly, as @elizzzibeth pointed out in her tweet, about the possibility that Josh's joking about suicide is in fact a call for help.  As I've said before, Josh is the chief of my online tribe and my avatar in the great online video game that is the Internet as well as in my personal fantasy life, in addition to being my celebrity obsession and favorite musician.

There is something about the entertainment industry that gets fans like me closely emotionally involved with celebs who are distant strangers.   This social construct continues to fascinate me as it also holds me captive.

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Addendum: memorial blog for @elizzzibeth mentioned in this blog