perfidy

Johnny Ramone is dying. He has been fighting prostate cancer, which has now gone nuclear and metastasized throughout his system.

"Johnny's been a champ in confronting this, but at this point I think the chances are slim," Marky Ramone said in the report. "John never smoked cigarettes, he wasn't a heavy drinker and he was always into his health. It just proves when cancer seeks a body to penetrate, it doesn't matter how healthy you are or how unhealthy you are. It just seeps in and there's nothing you can do."

The greats are dropping like flies these days. It's inevitable; death will get us all, but one of the facts of life is that some things never get easier. The Flaming Lips, one of my favorite bands, have a line in their song "Fight Test" that for me sums up everything you need to know about growing up: "I'm a man, not a boy/ But there's things you can't avoid/ You have to face them/ When you're not prepared to face them." Even if it's a rock star you never met, some things never get easier.

Here would be the time when I typically launch into an extended rapturous encomium for Johnny (before the fight has even gone out of the guy, I'm such a ghoul), but since I've been doing that too much recently so's that people might think I have a thing for rock star deaths or something, I'm going to shut the hell up for a change. We all know who Johnny Ramone is, what he did, and why he's great. Right?