An open letter to Lindsay Lohan

Dear Ms Lohan,

You are young and cute and (based on my recollection of a single screening of “Mean Girls” years ago) talented. You even have freckles.

The world is your oyster. Do you have any idea—at all—how lucky you are?

You’ve also been in trouble for years for fucking around with drugs and alcohol. You’re so out of control, I hear the cast of SNL led an intervention attempt. That would be like Axl Rose pulling you aside and telling you to see someone about your anger management issues.

It’s a big red flag. Big big.

And now you announce on Twitter, “Regrettably, I did in fact fail my most recent drug test,” then immediately affirm you’re “working hard to overcome” your drug problem.

No, you are not. If you were working hard, dear, your pee-test would’ve come out clean.

You can’t both be working hard to quit something and be continuing to do it at every available opportunity. You can be one. You can be the other. But you can’t be both.

Take it from me. I’ve quit some shit in my time, myself. Right now I am wrestling with shaking the fabulous, life-giving products of Pepsi® off my back and it is a bitch.

But no amount of spinning is going to convince me I am working hard at kicking caffeine. Caffeine is working me hard; that is a true statement. 

When you’re trying to get clean, it’s important to know what is true and what isn’t. That’s why God invented 12-step programs, so when we start buying our own lies, there are people sitting around in a circle, chain-smoking like their lives depended on it, to call us on our shit.

I never went the 12-step way to rid myself of my demons—or neutralize their effect on my day-to-day life—but honey, they could save your life.

Most celebrity rags-to-riches-to-rehab stories don’t end like Robert Downey Jr.’s, they end like John Belushi’s. With a bloated corpse and a toe-tag and everybody saying “Lindsay Lohan, huh? I’m not surprised” before clicking to the next headline.

And I really doubt there is cocaine in the next life, whatever belief system you’re operating on.

As I see it, you really have two options; choose to live and stop doing the cocaine, or choose to die…at which point you’ll have to stop doing cocaine anyhow.

So if you’re gonna have to quit the drugs one way or the other, why not do it while you’re still alive? That way sex and rock & roll, at least, are still on the party menu. Oh yeah, and fame and fortune and every creature comfort modern science can pull out of its ass and offer up to our highly-valued celebrity caste.

It all starts with you admitting you are not “working hard” at all on your sobriety. Once you admit that are not working hard, the real hard work begins.