Steve-O, Jackass, addiction
I love Jackass. Most of the contents. There's no real negativity in the series. There's pranks, stuff that would usually be embarrassing, many gut-laughs, a lot of pain.
Steve-O is a Jackass cast member, well-known for performing some of the more painful and stunts that would be embarrassing to most people. I'm reading his first memoir, Professional Idiot: a Memoir. His dad was an absent and careless extremely-high-up executive at Pepsico; Steve-O's mom was a stay-at-home alcoholic.
One of the more interesting things about Steve-O is that he's a classic twelve-step alcoholic: he's a person who's made his way through the Alcoholics Anonymous twelve-step program.
I think that the charm of Jackass is in us being able to not take ourselves too seriously. You can't be super-macho in Jackass: you have to embrace the fact that you look uncool. That ability to not take ourselves seriously and be OK in compromising situations, I think, is endearing. —Steve-O
There's a lot of immediate shit about Jackass that puts it aside to a lot of pop-culture events. It's naturally not only about laughter, fear, and pain; it's about friendship and love. It's easy to see that those guys like and even love each other. In a larger perspective, Jackass is a story about what happens when regular people become world-famous. Drugs, alcohol, sex, addiction, money, jealousy, hate, falling to pieces, trying to pick oneself up.
It just so happened that Johnny Knoxville and some of the people in our Jackass world staged an intervention: they locked me up in a psychiatric ward, and I was locked up long enough and exposed to the right kind of message that I realised, 'Wow, I have to do something.' I've been sober ever since. —Steve-O
One of the more wonderful things about Steve-O is that he's fairly erudite about life, like a lot of other AA peeps; you get to know what's truly valuable in life when everything you 'valued' is bullshit, when your 'friends' are really parasites and vultures or buried deep in addiction, like yourself. Getting your head out of that instead of trying to find out what barbecue coal to buy is real.
Before Twitter collapsed completely (due to Elon Musk being forced to buy the platform, something he didn't want to do, I was lucky to be allowed to reproduce an email that was sent by David Berman, the musician and writer, to a guy who asked him for advice on sobriety. I love that letter.