I have a lament somewhere on this board when I was ready to post after his death. The big thing for me is that, sadly, I had sort of prepared myself for the day for a long time, and especially so when he seemed so far gone and without anyone around him to convince him to change.
But it also happened when I got older, got married, had other things going on, and music, while it still makes me feel the same way, can't be the same part of my life that it was before. I'm older, and like standing room only shows less. While I am at a time in my life I can afford to go to concerts, despite how expensive they are now, I can't justify the cost for what I am getting in return. I'm not going to hear about a secret acoustic show at Tower Records and, on a whim, decided to drive 2 hours to see the band perform and meet them.
Point being, it made me sad, but not the way it would have had it happened before he was kicked out of the band in 2013.
The larger "sad" for me now is how we treat drug addicts, not just in this country, but in a large part of the world. Scott failed himself, for sure. But society failed him, too, and fails all other addicts. If you really start to take a look at what the worst parts about drug abuse are, they can be traced back to black markets and using the criminal justice system to deal with the fallout. Society shamed Scott for being a junkie, yet tended to deify those who lost their life young to drug and alcohol abuse. As Scott once sang, "Dying with your face on a t-shirt isn't all that original." For surviving--for trying, several times, to be clean--he was the joke. That isn't to say that, perhaps, the result wouldn't have changed if policy and attitudes changed, but I think he would have had a better chance at making it.
