The irrefutable fact is that Houston's death is a shame andit is a tragedy. Let's be more emphatic: it's a goddamned shame and a goddamnedtragedy. There is nothing else you can call the early death, brought on, nodoubt, by a long term addiction to crack cocaine and other chronic partyfavors, of someone as gifted as the suddenly deceased Whitney Houston. Hers wasa voice that was, when all is said and the note cards are shuffled and rubberbanded together, an instrument that was singular in her heyday, a voice thatremains singular years after that day has passed, and will likely be one ofthose voices fans, old and new, and writers will refer to in glowing terms noless than what's happened to Frank Sinatra's reputation as a vocalist. Sinatra was a punk and a sociopath much of his life, but his voice and his songs made the stream of personal offenses forgivable ; Whitney was a train wreck for years who couldn't hide the effects of a drug habit, but her voice and her material will be enough, I suspect, for the lot of us to turn up the volume on her tunes when they play. Everything else that happened will be as if nothing happened at all.

The best one can do is hope that her talent, amplyrepresented on her albums and hits, will outlive the infamy of her last decadeor so, a time of stupid, inane, inexplicably moronic behavior driven by drugs,a period where the brilliant and beautiful Whitney was turned one of the leastappealing people to make the gossip programs; she became less appealing thanchewed pizza crust. Her death is a shame and the horror of it all is that thereis NOTHING ANYONE CAN DO ABOUT IT! Those who obsessed with celebrity cultureand those obsessed with grousing the masses lack of more profound reaction havethe momentary wish that they, whoever "they" happen to be, shouldpass laws against these terrible things, that being brilliant people dying"before their time”, and the banality of the collective opinion aboutcelebrities that unbelievably few of us have met, let alone know anything aboutbesides what's allowed on a press release.

My wish would be for us to turn off our television andcomputers for a day and instead take a walk along the beach, with a book, apair of sunglasses, a nice box lunch, grateful that this day, this hour, thisminute that we are alive with the full of our senses are working just fine,that we are engaged with a world that is phenomenal even without the metaphorswe try to assign it, that we are not this day, this hour, this minute droppingdead from whatever is waiting for us and which we'll meet eventually, date andtime undisclosed.