Keith,
Jeff Simon, who writes on arts and entertainment for the Buffalo News, has noticed the same thing I did about Charlie Sheen: how creatively well-spoken he is. Excerpt:
"I've got poetry in my fingertips," he says. And I think he's right. No professional writer could listen to Sheen's dangerous mania without some awe at the verbal dexterity involved.
There are many writers who'd be happy to call it a day if they came up with a line as good as "It's been a tsunami of media, and I've been riding it on a mercury surfboard."
What makes this particularly creative—or demented—is the insertion of the modifier "mercury." A surfboard made of a heavier-than-water liquid metal?
Another excerpt:
I'm neither a member of AA nor Al-Anon, but I have intimately known people who are members of both my entire adult life, and it is literally true that in every case their lives have benefited demonstrably from recovery in AA.
That "neither . . . nor" wording messes up the parallelism (I'm neither a member nor an organization), but I thought both "AA" and "Al-Anon" were abbreviations for "Alcoholics Anonymous," not two different organizations.
Let's try an interwebs search to resolve this. This page says that Al-Anon is for friends and family of alcoholics, while AA (= Alcoholics Anonymous) is for alcoholics. Never knew that; I learned something.
Of course "it is literally true that in every case their lives have benefited demonstrably from recovery in AA." Everyone will benefit from recovery. But this is non-responsive to Sheen's complaint (as I understand it) that only a small proportion of people who participate in AA ever recover in a reasonable length of time.
Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY)
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 