Ozzy Will Stay Sober, But He Doesn’t Have To Be Happy About It
When your favorite party animal rock star goes sober, it’s easy to throw up your hands and ask, “Why, dude, why?” But it’s important to remember that, like most addicts, said musician doesn’t want to be sober, they just don’t want to feel like shit all the time and disappoint their fans and fucking die before they get to meet their grandkids.
Ozzy Osbourne made such a claim in a recent interview with Goldmine. The first metal vocalist, who has recently asserted he’s sober (though he might be a sex addict) and has been seen going to AA meetings, talked about his issues with addiction, and was pretty forthright about how he doesn’t love sobriety but prefers it to being fucked up:
“I am coming up on three years sober, and I’ve just come back from a meeting, actually. I’ve reached a really weird place with it. I am not really happy being sober, but I don’t want to get drunk. Someone told me that at three years sober they felt exactly the same. With meetings, you’re never alone with your thoughts. My disease will go, ‘You can take this, or you can do this’ when I spend too much time alone with my thoughts. If I listen to it, then I go back and I am alright for a tour. It only stops being alright when I am fucked up everywhere, you know…
“…I hear all the time people say that they have another drink in them but they may not have another sobriety in them. I don’t want to put myself in that situation. When I’m left to my own ways, I am going to come up with a stupid idea that makes sense at the time. I end up going, ‘What the fuck is wrong with me, man?’
“To be honest with you, I will think to myself, ‘What the fuck was wrong with me when I thought a good night was getting a belly full of booze and bag of fucking cocaine?’ You’re sitting in a fucking hotel room, jacked to the gills and the sun is rising and you’ve got to do a gig that day. It’s fuckking dreadful. I’ve got no desire to do that stuff. When we discovered that fucking marching powder it was the beginning of the end… but, we came back with the No. 1 album and we are doing our farewell tour.”
And this is why Ozzy is cool when it comes to addiction. He’s not going to feed you a bunch of Just Say No-style bullshit about being sick and tired of being sick and tired. He’s going to admit that while being fucked up doesn’t appeal to him, he’s also not a very happy guy sober. It doesn’t have to be either or, where once your life was a drug-fueled nightmare and now it’s all cheesesteak and blowjobs. It can be both beautiful and infuriating to be sober.
Anyway, we wish Ozzy the best of luck staying on the wagon. He’s a cold Dr. Pepper raised in his name. Good luck, man.
