There's a reason I keep my opinions to only about fictional characters

It has to do with the fact that what one sees in the media about a fictional character is what there is to a character and what one sees in the media about an actor or artist is what the media wants us to believe about that particular person.
I’m putting in a page-break because I doubt anyone wants to see me up on my soap box. I’m hoping that at least a few people will take a moment to at least skim through a paragraph or two.
A lot of people like to pretend or are possibly ignorant to the fact that “celebrities” (for lack of a better word) are defenseless to the slander painted against them no matter what Congress has to say to that. Just because these people’s professions put them in the lime light does not mean they asked to be called a slut or anorexic or an addict. It seems to me as if people forget that Lohan, Winehouse, Bush, Parker, even Stewart are people. They have (or had in the recently deceased Winehouse’s case) feelings and lives, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers and other people they care for. All of these stories about slutting around town, shooting up, raging incompetence, and lack of a soul are hurtful.
I honestly can’t believe in an age where we en mass cry out against cyber bullying and rage against terrorists that we can support or condone what the current day media do. I just wished that once people would really, really put themselves in those “infamous” celebrities positions and actually think about how it would feel to be nominated for “Villain of the Year” and win “Worst Dressed Performer” or third worst dressed British Woman. I want people to take a moment and think of how they would feel, honestly feel to be ranked number two on Richard Blackwell’s 48th annual “Ten Worst Dressed Women” list.
Take a moment and think about how your parents, siblings, grandparents, or whomever you call your loved ones would feel about hearing stories of you doing smack from People Magazine or having an affair from the evening news. Imagine everyone who you care what they think of you finding out about a completely fictitious evil that you purportedly did and never looking at you the same way. Imagine the stress and shame at not being able to defend yourself, lest you turn into another “Charlie Sheen” or “Bill Clinton”.
Take a moment to think about people using your name as a slang way to refer to the most horrifically embarrassing and stressful moment in your life so far.
How fun does that sound?
Do you think you asked for it?
Do you think you deserve it for being a smacked out anorexic whore?
How much do you think these perfectly normal and privacy wanting people deserve it?
And on to a lower level of this gigantic one woman soap box comes something else I wonder rather a lot. I always sort of feel hot under my cheeks and embarrassed when I look up in the grocery store and am greeted with somebody else’s private life that it makes me wonder how people can enjoy prying into someone else’s life like that. It makes me wonder how someone can read about Pitt and Jolie and not feel ashamed at being entertained by someone else’s traumatic love life. I’m wondering how many people would truly revel in knowing that out there are people snickering and pointing at their picture and talking about how their relationships are falling apart.
Maybe this stems from my utter lack of curiosity about a celebrity’s private life. To me all that matters is their professional front. I want to know what movies they’ve been in, where they studied their art, what awards they’ve won… Things pertaining to their career. I don’t care who they marry or how much they weigh or what they do at clubs because that’s their business and not mine, thanks.
Which brings me back to my original point. I’ll talk all day and night long about fictional characters. I’ll holler about Sherlock’s asexuality or Blake’s whorishness because they’re not real. At the end of it I can point to passages or scripts and point and define and explicate from there because that material has been put down so that I could. I can point out out-of-characterness if someone says Sherlock would tip tap in pink dance shoes and lay a smooch on Moriarty’s naughty bits because I have diction and history and that entire character laid out before me. Fictional characters are there to be dissected and fought over. They are there so that I can. I can’t hurt their feelings or make their mama’s cry because their mamas are made of paper and ink and a suspension in disbelief.
Actors are mediums to a fictional character; they give shape and sound to a nebulous idea and create a solid organ that we can conceive but they are not ours to dissect or deconstruct. Actors are people who are generous enough to lend us their bodies and skill so that we can distill our imaginations. Yes, some are better than others at it and some of them don’t have their life all that well together but that doesn’t give us the right to turn our noses up at our fellow humans and ignore the fact that they feel and that they can see our disgust.
That’s the difference between a character and an actor, really, right there. Characters don’t know we exist. They can’t. They’re not real. Some creative man or woman or many men and women sat down and dreamt them up. They are fake; make-believe. But actors aren’t. They are flesh and heart and dreams and hopes and families and histories and laughs and hands that reach out into the night to hold our empty palms because they are human also and because they know; they understand and want to give us a brief reprieve from the isolation that is so intrinsic to the human condition. And to touch us and give us this break from reality they put on ways and means and wigs and make up and stand under lights and call out words that aren’t theirs and pretend with all their might to be this make-believe person so that we can pretend to know this make-believe person and find company in their stories.
So how can we hate them for lies and gossip when they do so much for us? How can we not thank them (of course, from a healthy distance) for all that they do for us? How can we not respect their humanity and give them the respect and privacy that we find such a self-evident right?

I'd Like To Know 1

"If you were dying, if you were murdered, in the very last seconds, what would you say?"


This is such a startlingly interesting question that I just have to try to answer to the best of my ability. (It's a quote from Sherlock, a BBC series about Sherlock Holmes.)

Now, first, just to get into it I have to know how it is I'm going to die. Because I know that it would depend on how I felt at the time and what was happening to me.

First premise: I have to be murdered, as specified in the quote. Who would my murderer be? How would they go about it? Would it involve torture? Mentally? Physically? For the sake of accuracy this is going to end up to be more than one post, possibly over a period of time so that I can get into my head each case.
First I'll focus on a death similar to the one described in the show. *****If you haven't watched it and plan to continuing to read would be a huge spoiler for episode one: A Study in Pink*****



I'm going to switch to a sort of narrative description to make sure I can answer as honestly and accurately as I could.

I'm standing, resisting the urge to pace, to move about even if it doesn't mean escape. I roll my bottom lip in and squint harder at the man before me, knowing that inspecting the identical pills would be useless otherwise the test would be easy. If there was a difference. It would be a matter of observation. But these... the way they've been separated depends entirely on which mnemonic device this fucking cabbie from hell-- Correction: from London would use. My mind, because it is idiotic and totally dependent for memory recall on association flashes to my mum talking to herself as she goes to unlock the door 'left it unlock'. And this makes me think of the lug nuts on her red Jeep wrangler. The act of washing the car was highly therapeutic. Though, any act such as washing or tidying always seems to be relaxing. My favorite had been to clean my gun, though I hadn't done it much-- Fuuuuuuuuuck

This fucking cabbie has a fucking gun. Why the fuck does everyone think that a gun is like the God of Weapons. Personally I'd be more terrified with a javeline. Or possibly like a shark tooth or a particularly rusty broken pipe. Am I really sitting-- standing here criticizing what type of weapon this loon with a pistol is using to coerce me into taking a pill that may or may not be poison. I wonder if people actually fall for this. Think that there isn't some extra trick. Obviously, this loon is marginally intelligent but not smart enough to realize that killings sprees are ultimately impractical.

See? And this is why I have no respect for murderers. They go about it and get caught and how terribly droll it is that there is so little creativity in this department of humanity. It's as if they're all smart enough to outwit another life but not smart enough to fucking realize that killing is just so damn time-wasting. The idea of concealment and the efforts one must go through and the strategy behind not becoming a suspect is just too much damn effort. Aside from that one never knows what a person will do with his life.

But fucking shit why don't I just take the fucking shoot me option. There is no way any being, outside of some impossible murder mystery would offer to take the other pill unless there was no way for them to die. Possibly a resistance to the poison? An antidote? More likely that it's only poisonous to some; like poison ivy. Shit, this bitch better not be making me consume some fucking horseradish poison ivy cocktail cause that would be totally fucking uncool.

Heh.

I'm pretty sure, self, that he's already surpassed the line of 'uncool'. Possibly even erased it for all of fucking time. Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit. At least there's more of a chance of survival with the gun. A fifty fifty shot with a pill just seems so damn anticlimactic. Plus there's no fire involved. And I don't want to seem a wuss for taking a pill instead of going down fighting. Speaking of... this guy is like ancient and English. I don't think he would know how to fight. I wonder if I can dodge a bullet.

This is going to be a fun test.

How about you give me the gun? Make sure to aim for my face; I want to make some bitches cry at least.

No. No, Tesk, that's terrible. What kind of last words are those? Aim for my face? Why not say lower my chance of survival even less, plzkthxbai BANG.
Ugh.

Well, what the fuck do I say?

"Well, shit. I'm just gonna go the gun option."
I shrug and try to think of something to say that would be decently befitting the ending of one such as I.
"Could you like make sure twenty bucks makes it into my coffin? I've got this bet going with a friend. Why am I telling  you this? You're just going to fucking leave. Ugh. My brain sometimes. Anyway, shoot me, then."

I'd make a lunge or a fall to avoid the bullet and if it missed, awesome, I live. I call the police. If I get hit and die then it could go a few ways:

• I die immediately. Probably with one last "Well, fuck"
• I die slowly from a gut wound or shoulder wound. I try to write "Fucking cab driver" in blood on the floor.
• I bleed profusely and write the above mentioned and live. I use many cusses and probably end up calling all cab drivers cunts for the rest of my life.
• I get shot in the head but retain "life" and go through the rest of my days in a near-vegetable brained or bodied way.
• I die but before I go I call the police and tell them all I know.
• I die but try to call the police but I've got no signal/battery/phone. 

Or it could go like in the show and a mother fucking flame comes out of the lighter-pistol and I'm so damned disappointed that my death show-down ends so anticlimactically while glad that I lived without the unnecessary bullet hole. I end up with one weird as fucking ass story to tell if anyone asks. And more than possibly kick the cabbie in the nuts twice and brain at least once with his lighter-pistol.