Daniel Baldwin Schadenfreude

Have you ever watched “Celebrity Rehab”?

I ask because during the negotiations for the rental of this house in Lake Oswego, I got an email from our contact at the property management company with which we were dealing.  The email extolled the virtues of the lovely family-friendly nature of Lake Oswego, its fabulous schools, and its established neighborhoods.  The email included links to local restaurants, parks, shopping, and museums.  And then the email closed with the proud news that, “One of the Baldwin brothers, Daniel, just moved into our Lake Oswego neighborhood.”

Huh?

Daniel Baldwin?  That would be the cocaine-addicted porn-crazy Daniel Baldwin who I watched for most of a season of “Celebrity Rehab”?  The man who got freaked out when Mary Carey the porn star jumped into the facility pool (doesn’t every drug treatment center have a pool for inappropriate frolicking?) because he claimed that her huge breasts were going to trigger his drug use issues?  The man who eventually left the show (and rehab) early amidst allegations that he and Mary Carey were exchanging inappropriate (I understood that to mean nude) photos of themselves with their forbidden cell phones after lights-out?  That Daniel Baldwin?

Excellent!  We want to live where the celebrity rejects go to live!  Daniel Baldwin would make a fabulous neighbor!  Sign us up!

So we moved here.

Seriously, though, “Celebrity Rehab” is an awesome show.  Nothing puts your own life in perspective like watching people who had a shot at stardom face the fact that they have totally fucked up.  Totally fucked up.  It makes you feel all warm and fuzzy about your own less than stellar accomplishments.  As in “Yes, the fact that I have no actual income at this moment is worrying, but at least I haven’t turned to drugs and prostitution.”

These people are so badly fucked up, and so incredibly out of touch with reality that they have agreed to do a reality show about how fucked up they are.  Can you imagine being in that place?  Me neither.

High fives on that!

And it makes me feel (relatively) young and beautiful.  Turns out that a privileged life of celebrity paired with alcoholism, drug addiction, and poor decisions is  . . . incredibly aging.  Have you seen MacKenzie Phillips?  Or Heidi Fleiss?  Oh my god.

So as I stare annoyedly at yet another wrinkle or grey hair, I can take solace in the fact that I am a much more youthful and attractive version of myself than I would be if I had spent the past 10 years doing meth or crack cocaine.

More high fives!

Plus, the show offers such totally amazing moments as this:  On last night’s show, Kari Ann Paniche (former Miss U.S. Teen, drug addict, and sex addict) offered paintbrushes to Tom Sizemore (former promising actor) and Mike Starr (from “Alice in Chains”), and asked them paint a bikini on her half naked body.  She then took off her top and lay down, urging them on excitedly.  On camera!  Mike Starr took her up on the offer, and Tom Sizemore ran away like a baby as Dennis Rodman watched from the background.

Heidi Fleiss runs away from rehab and totals her car, almost killing herself and her passengers; MacKenzie Phillips is bitched out by the former Miss. U.S. Teen; the staff (some of whom seem to have some major unresolved issues of their own) want some patients sent home and others beaten up; and a massively steroided guy named Joey Kovar (not sure who he is) weeps about not wanting to be like his dad.

All on last night’s episode!

It is a train wreck of massive proportions, and it is AWESOME.

It is incredibly addictive (and how ironic is that?).  The season finale is next week, and I can’t wait.

And yes, I realize that taking joy in other people’s misfortune makes me a bad person.  And yes, I realize it is not politically correct to think that these people are just insanely stupid to have thrown away their lives.  Addiction is a disease.  Yes, I know.

But it makes for delightful television viewing.

In other news, we closed the short-sale escrow on the house in Vallejo today.  It was an anticlimactic (in that no money will be transferred into our accounts) and surprisingly emotional end to a hellish four months.  Sigh.

I’m glad to be done with it and to be able to finally put that chapter of our lives behind us.  But it definitely is a bittersweet moment.  Tinged with anxiety.

Imagine that you are walking along a path that you have chosen, and while you are worried about what is ahead, you are confident that you are up to the journey.  And then you look behind you to see that the path behind you is falling away to nothingness.  Ahead of you is the path you have chosen, and behind you the sidewalk is falling away as it is consumed by the nothingness.  And suddenly the path ahead of you looks a lot more frightening as you realize there is no going back.

It’s kind of like that.

But . . . I have not yet offered myself up to our Lake Oswego neighbor Daniel Baldwin for naked on-camera bikini painting.  And . . . I have thus far refrained from doing crystal meth.

So things are looking pretty damned good.

High fives!