Hindsight

Last week, Marco Pantani would have turned 49 if he were still with us.  Mac Miller, yesterday, would have turned 27.


It's hard for me to watch that NPR Tiny Desk show that Mac Miller put on in the weeks immediately preceding his death and not think, at least a little, about Marco Pantani.

You might think that's a stretch, and you're right and you're not right.
And, I don't guess it helps anyone or anything for me to go pointing out all the ways that I find the two of them, Marco and Mac, strangely similar - both in life and in death.  Young men who'd made it big, ostensibly who should have been in their prime, and yet...they just...weren't.  There was a sadness in their finals days, both of them, like maybe they knew what was coming in that way that a lot of people who fight addiction know that their time is getting short.  It makes me sad in a way that I can't adequately describe.

Pantani left us with that day on the Courchevel, and a handful of others - real, genuine greatness despite his flaws.  Mac Miller left us the same thing, but in the form of music.  It's all right there if you want to see it.  For all for of its imperfections, one thing YouTube does pretty well is capture the essence of a person, even when that person is long gone.

So I'll skip the long list of similarities that would otherwise be easy (and empty) to write.  But I will say this - we should have seen it coming.  And you can almost always say that, in hindsight, about the brilliant people who inhabit this world only for a little while, the ones who were never, under any circumstances, going to stay for long.

Reach out to them, folks.  Help them dig in.

There are only two ways out, and they're both up, up, up.