Do you know what’s worse than being offensive? Being boring.
And do you know what is really really seriously truly boring? Making that joke about Amy Winehouse. That joke I’ve seen made by several smug douchebags in every little corner of the internet. That joke about how it looks like she really should have gone to rehab after all hur hur hur lol snigger. Do you know what, diddle brain? Not only are you laughing at the death of a drug addict, you are doing so in a way that thousands of other Twitter users have done before you. It’s the joke equivalent of a Panini with sweet chilli sauce: been there done that and left 2007 behind, thank you very much.
What’s even less funny about your pathetic little joke is that actually, Amy did go to rehab. Repeatedly and unsuccessfully. She cycled in and out of treatment for alcoholism and drug addiction in the years before she died. And despite being a multi-millionaire with access to the very best medical practitioners, she died. Addiction is ugly and cloying and consuming and just ‘going to rehab after all’ isn’t the cure-all that it’s made out to be. I wish it was. I bet that Amy’s parents, Mitch and Janis, wish it was.
I’m scared of addiction. Being the daughter of an alcoholic will do that to you. I can’t laugh about the death of Amy Winehouse without thinking about my mum having to change the sheets on a nightly basis because Beefeater Gin had turned my suit-wearing, law-case winning father into a middle-aged bed-wetter. I can’t even look at a picture of Amy Winehouse without thinking about how my mum likes to warn me that the children of alcoholics tend to go two ways—the not drinking at all way or the Beefeater-Gin-Adult-Bed-Wetting-Way. I worry when I feel like a drink on Fridays after work. I worry when I wake up with a hangover. I worry when I remember that in second year I was kicked out of the Big Kumara for vomiting on my own face, even though it was really funny at the time and it’s still kind of funny now, especially when I remember that the food specimen in question was a chicken fettuccine from La Casa Pasta. I worry that I’m 23 and there’s every likelihood that by the age of 27, the age that Amy died, I could be making acquaintance with plastic bed sheets.
I’m scared of ending up like Amy, and at the same time, I’m scared what it says about my personality that I can so casually use her life as an example and a warning when she was a singing, walking, breathing person with a mother and a father and friends. Amy Winehouse deserves better than that. Rest in peace, Amy. I’ll always remember that really good song ‘Valerie’, a song that I used to dance to in 2007, the year that I also happened to throw up on my own face.