Why I would have stayed in school, still have a girlfriend, and not have had a total meltdown at the end of the Bush era if Bill Hicks were still here

When I think about Bill Hicks, and what he has to say about life, politics, etc, a lot of the time I think that he is absolutely fucking crazy. And to me, that is a sign that I should keep on listening.

If I were to take most of what he was advocating to heart, and think of it as the literal truth, I'd be as ignorant as the fundamentalists that think the bible is the literal truth. A few conversations about his ideas and jokes that I have been having lately have got me making parallels between the "Bill Hicks doctrine" and the "christian doctrine".

See, I know that he had a lot of important stuff to say, but he was also a comedian, and he was a guy looking at life from his own point of view. Not applicable to all.

I know people that absolutely love him and sort of take his ideas and apply them to their own personal philosophies and actions. I'm one of them, but I'm not a Hicks fundamentalist. So when I tell some of my most respected friends that MARKETING and MONEY are what makes the world go around, they call me a sellout.

Random friend: "Ian, you think Bill is the Bee's fuckin' Knees, why do you talk about the importance of money? You are a sellout. You contradict yourself."

Ian: "NO. Shut up. You sound like a fucking retard."

He didn't want us to take his word for it, he only wanted us to think for ourselves. I think if he said that something was shit, and someone could find a real reason to why it wasn't shit, he would be proud. He talked in black and white, but he never thought in black and white.

That's a good lesson to learn: Think for yourself, and think all the time.

In reality, there is very little black and white. Just look at the color spectrum: Black and white is either the absence of color, or the presence of all colors. But most of the spectrum lies in between. Does the world work that way? YES.

Anyways, here is how he affected me personally, a sort of letter to the dead:


Dear Dead Bill Hicks,

At the end of the George Bush reign of terror on the world I was pretty much a basket case. After he invaded Iraq, got reelected and then proceeded to use fear and Jesus as an excuse to shit on the entire planet, I had given up on my fellow man, become a severe alcoholic and pill popper, and had proceeded to spend my days on the outskirts of society, yelling at Fox news and Rush Limbaugh, and had become nervous, imbalanced, apathetic and pathetic. An asshole to everyone I new.

Since I was a teenager I had always had this vague idea that I was somehow going to make the world a better place through music, politics, philosophy, activism, you name it. I was always involved in some political, animal, or environmental cause, drifting from one interest to another trying to find my “vocation” in life to somehow make a lasting difference in this world. Or I was trying to get laid.

I had been deeply, deeply inspired by Bill Hicks as a teenager and on into adulthood, but somewhere along the way I completely lost that drive and inspiration. That partially was due to my complete disgust at the Bush administration, and how he seemed to be, in my eyes, hell-bent on destroying as much of the planet as he possibly could. And you know what? I was right. Now we're stuck trying to clean up the mess of some of the sickest assholes to ever grace our "government".

When I realized that America and the rest of the damn planet may actually get back on it's feet, that we might get a person in the white house that doesn't act like he’s Godzilla and that the world is his own personal Tokyo, I started working my ass off to get that black guy into the white house.

After a while, a caring person can go mad with frustration if he sees everything he knows and loves, (i.e. the planet and most of the people and animals on it) go to into hopeless oblivion. And by the end of 2008, I was so stricken with fear at the thought that McCain and Palin would take over the White House and somehow justify polluting the world at insane levels, or probably set off a world war, that I managed to throw away the one thing that still had any meaning to me: my girlfriend.

As I began to recap and realize the reality of all the crazy shit that had actually gone down in the world in the years since Bush had been elected, and what damage had really occurred, I became utterly hopeless, sank into a barrel of personality defect, and managed to lose everything in my personal life, and she dumped me. With good reason.

That sucked. So I, for the first time in my life had a complete mental breakdown. I bought a gun, did some STRANGE SHIT, and somehow managed to come out of it on the other side spiritually and mentally healthier (long story) and now I’m back as the pragmatic idealist that I once was.

And now I stumble back on your philosophy and I think to myself that your death at such a young age is a modern tragedy. We could have really, really, really used you for spiritual and psychological (and fucking funny) comfort through those dark, terrible eight years of fundamentalist bullshit.

If you were still around to keep on evolving your philosophy, guiding and inspiring us, I may have had the psychological resilience to have kept on going through anything, maybe even the end of the world.

Bill, if you thought things were bad in 1994, you should see the 2000’s. But I thank god that while you were here you still got to say a lot, and that we still get to watch as you evolved from a bitter, hilarious comic into a bitter, hilarious humanitarian. Thank You.


Ian