Young gun no more, Mr Sheen

What does the average 45-year-old male do on a Thursday night? Watch a bit of telly? Play a bit of sport? Pop down to the gym? Hell no. Real men go on a 36-hour drug and alcohol bender with a plethora of skanky porn star strippers and end up in a hospital emergency department. Just another day in the life of an average joe, aka Charlie Sheen.  Mr Sheen has headed off to rebab again, to try and clean, wax and polish up his act.

Charlie Sheen is the star of CBS’ hit comedy Two and a Half Men, which premiered in 2003, and has been in the Top 10 of U.S. television programs ever since. Despite the fact that it is a cheesy American sitcom, I very much like Men, with its misogynistic comedy and double entendres. Charlie plays Charlie Harper, a self-gratifying jingle writer, who lives in a Malibu beach house with his freeloading brother Alan, and Alan’s son, Jake. Charlie’s character is exactly like Charlie in real life, except Charlie in real life is just a bit pathetic.

I bet you didn’t know that Mr Sheen, the actor, has quite a bit in common with Mr Sheen the cleaning product. It’s true. They both sweep clean surfaces containing white puffy stuff, and they both spend time trying to clean up their act, only having to go redo the whole process when they mess up their house/life again. Clean and polish surfaces as you snort with Mr. Sheen, indeed.  But the cleaning brand, Mr. Sheen, wants to distance itself from its namesake, as it notes on its Wikipedia entry:

“Mr Sheen is a brand of cleaning materials (chiefly floor and furniture polish) to be used after visits from Charlie Sheen.”

While cleaning brands are well-known for their disinfectious humour, I don’t know if that entry was entirely necessary.  But I can certainly understand if they want to differentiate their product from the cheaper, trashier brand; in the event we got the two confused.

Charlie Sheen has been a little loopy for years. I’m not an actual psychologist, but then neither is Dr Phil. But I do possess the psychologist’s bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychological Disorders, and I know how to use it, so let’s do a little diagnosing. I’ve never met Mr Sheen, and I haven’t done a differential diagnosis, but I’m gonna go with drug-induced psychosis, based loosely on the fact that he has a nasty little habit of snorting alot of cocaine on a pretty regular basis. You don’t need to be a psychologist to know this idiotic behaviour does not bode well for your psychological health (See: Britney Spears and the hair-shaving brouhaha).

To be diagnosed with a ‘Substance-Induced Psychotic Disorder’ you must meet certain criteria, one of which is prominent hallucinations and delusions. Hmm, that sounds an awful lot like our Charlie. Let’s look at the evidence. How about this gem from Charlie Sheen commenting on the September 11 attacks:

"There was a feeling, it just didn't look any commercial jetliner I've flown on any time in my life.….but did it sorta look like those buildings came down in a controlled demolition'?"

Yes Charlie. It probably looked a little unorthodox to you because commercial jetliners flown by pilots who are not terrorists do not tend to fly intentionally into scyscrapers.  I have no doubt that Charlie is well-regarded at AA meetings for his Homeland Security credentials and construction industry expertise, but this sort of analysis doesn't really wash on Planet Sane.  And this from the same interview:

"It seems to me like 19 amateurs with box cutters taking over four commercial airliners and hitting 75 percent of their targets: that feels like a conspiracy theory."

Even Osama bin Laden would think Sheen's conspiracy theory was whacked. Disregarding the fact that al-Qaeda couldn’t wait to tell us that they were responsible for the attacks, a flushing toilet is going to look like a conspiracy theory to someone who has been snorting cocaine for most of their life.