On September 16th, 1977 Marc Bolan drove his car into a sycamore tree. I've seen that tree - cycled past it one day in 1999 - and almost 35 years on it is still a shrine to his memory, adorned with trinketry and tinsel as befits an early exponent of glam rock. Fans come from far and wide to pay tribute and yet he remains dead! How ungrateful is that?
But at least he was famous and a kind of pandemic, socio-religious self-pitying mourning disease seems to set in when famous people die. Fuck it though; they're still dead, stay dead and this kind of pathetic outpouring is not cathartic it's just plain wrong. An example of just how wrong this can get is the over-the-top reaction to the death of the average-looking, dull-as-dishwater, royal-by-marriage head-the-ball, Princess DiaFayedFuckwit some twenty years later.
At least Bolan left some enduring music, but who remembers Princess what's-her-face now, eh? Exactly. Nobody. As pointless in death as she was in her over-privileged, under-appreciated life.
But whether or not you can remember a single useful thing about her, she's definitely to blame for the maudling, mewling, hand-wringing, garment-rending bunch of shrine-builders you've all become. Everywhere you look there is some overstated eulogy to some idiot who forgot the green cross code; some bunch of withered blooms marking the spot where Gary's mobility scooter ran out of battery in the path of an oncoming UPS truck. Gary: Father, brother, god, legend... tosser forgot to charge his scooter.
If you gotta mourn, you gotta mourn but, for fuck's sake, stop being all continental about it. Grow a set, stiffen the upper lip, stifle your sobs and take your grief indoors where it belongs.
When I go, what remains is up for medical experiments and as much as you'll all want to you are forbidden to even remember I ever existed.
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