Another Feast for TMZ

I am waiting for a guy to install a garage door opener, so I figured I might as well blog.

Prince is dead. I guess everyone knows that now. Someone found his body yesterday, in an elevator at his home. Everyone is speculating about what happened to him. The world is overreacting, as though a president had been shot.

I figured I might as well weigh in with some observations. I don’t know what got him, but it looks a lot like opioid addiction, which is something I know about.

The mainstream news outlets are saying Prince was hospitalized on Friday, April 15. He was on a private jet, flying to his home in Minnesota. He had just performed in Atlanta. The jet was about 50 minutes away from its destination, but his situation was considered so urgent the flight had to be interrupted as soon as possible.

The plane landed in Illinois, where, according to TMZ, Prince received an injection of a drug that counteracts the effects of opioids. In other words, it looks like he overdosed and needed emergency treatment to save his life.

The official explanation is that he was feeling poorly because of a stubborn case of the flu. Does a flu relapse respond to treatment for opioid overdose? I’m not a doctor, but I’m willing to guess that it doesn’t.

The next day, he appeared in Minnesota in front of a small crowd. People are interpreting this as a move intended to assure the world that he was okay. He didn’t perform. He spoke to the crowd. He said, “Wait a few days before you waste any prayers.” That remark has the press buzzing. It sounds like a reference to suicide.

TMZ says that on April 20, Prince was photographed in the parking lot of a Walgreen’s drugstore near his home. They say he was sweating, and that he appeared agitated. He was pacing, as though he were feeling impatient.

I have decades of experience with a relative who is a painkiller addict, so the Prince facts remind me of a picture I have already seen.

People who are addicted to opioids get very impatient when they run out of drugs. They get pushy. They get whiny. They look for ways to manipulate others into getting drugs for them. I can’t say I’ve seen such a person sweat, but I’ve seen agitation, faking pain, and insistent demands for treatment.

People will wonder why a person would stand in a drugstore parking lot instead of going inside. His behavior makes sense if there was a reason why he didn’t want the employees to see him. You can’t say it was because he was avoiding the public, because if that were true, he would have hidden in his vehicle. He wasn’t afraid of being seen by random people, but he had some reason for staying out of the pharmacy.

It’s harder to get painkillers than it used to be. America has long been full of drug pushers with medical degrees who were eager to write prescriptions for money, but as time passes, awareness about drug-seeking behavior increases, and things tend to tighten up.

A famous addict could have a hard time getting prescriptions filled, especially if he lived in a suburb or the country, where druggists might be familiar with his problems. A person like that might rely on straw man purchases, which means he would get other people to get prescriptions and then have them buy drugs and give them to him. Elvis used to do that.

Buying painkillers for someone else is a serious crime. How would you get another person to commit a felony and buy drugs for you? That would not be easy for most of us. But what if you lived in a cocoon of your own creation, where you always got your own way? What if you surrounded yourself with sycophants who did whatever you told them to do? That’s supposedly how Prince lived. By show business standards, he was reclusive. He stayed in a compound, and he kept layers of people between himself and humanity.

Prince was not healthy. He needed to have both hips replaced, but he refused because he belonged to the Jehovah’s Witness cult. Jehovah’s Witnesses are non-Christians, and they have some odd rules. They won’t accept blood transfusions. Prince wouldn’t have his hips fixed without an assurance that no blood would be given to him. He probably had a lot of pain. It would be normal for a person like that to develop a taste for painkillers.

Let’s add it up.

Prince had a painful medical condition. He had recently been treated for a painkiller overdose. He had a strange get-together, and he made a cryptic remark about something that would happen in a few days that would make prayer for him a waste. He was seen pacing impatiently in a drugstore parking lot the day before he died. The details of the death itself–a sudden collapse–are consistent with an opioid overdose.

It would not be a big surprise to learn that he got someone to get him some pills while he waited in a parking lot, and then he took too many, possibly intentionally.

Of course, he was a 57-year-old black man, so it’s completely possible he had high blood pressure and died of a stroke or heart attack.

I find him an interesting figure. To me, he has always been in the same category as Michael Jackson, Elvis, and Madonna. He seems to have been a moderately talented, charismatic, troubled person who received inordinate adulation from the public. I think people like that are controlled by powerful spirits that crave admiration, and I believe Satan gives them favor so they can corrupt young people.

The folks Satan sets up as top-tier musical idols with god complexes often die humiliating or gruesome deaths. It’s as though Satan resents all the years he had to spend doing nice things for them. It seems like Satan gets tired of them, puts and end to them, and then rotates new dupes in.

People will disagree if I say Prince was only moderately talented. I’m talking about the music he produced, not his ability to play instruments. He appears to have been extremely good at picking up instruments and playing them well, but his songs were generally monotonous and shallow, and his singing was very ordinary. He created bubble gum music for teenagers.

He was an excellent showman, and he was good at shocking people. Those were the areas where he truly distinguished himself.

I never liked his music. It sounded pretty much like all other dance music to me. I also found his effeminate persona creepy. I can’t understand why any man would work hard to appear feminine. He came across like a prison “girlfriend,” desperate to attract other people to himself sexually. He seemed to reach out to everyone, including normal men, in order to get them to lust after him.

Some effeminate men are funny and likeable, but to me, Prince seemed phony, somewhat conceited, and gross.

Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t believe in salvation through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Like Mormons, they believe you have to qualify through works. They are not Christians. What happened to Prince is not good. For that matter, what he did while he was alive was not good. He lived for the trinkets that are available on earth. He has come to a very bad end, and he may well have missed out on salvation.

It will be interesting to find out what actually happened to him.