TMIDO
Trust Me, I’m Dr Ozzy, by Ozzy Osbourne – That loveable madman Ozzy Osbourne is back with his second non-fiction book (he’s caught up to me – I released my second non-fiction book earlier this year). And while I don’t really like the title so much, it’s good fun to read even if it’s not as informative as his autobiography (how could it be? this is a book for curiosity-seekers, not for Black Sabbath fans). I thought that Ozzy wouldn’t make a believable commentator on medical matters, but he argues convincingly that his vast experience as the victim of a mind-boggling range of accidents and abuse, most (but not all) of them self-inflicted, qualifies him to dispense some level of advice. Nearly every entry has a sort of “I once suffered from the same malady, and I got over it by…” tone to it. Most chapters will contain a short intro, a series of brief questions from readers, with Ozzy providing his answers (which are sometimes shorter than the questions), along with a pull-out box giving interesting factoids on related topics, a handy graph/table running through various maladies. Nearly every answer has a pithy final sentence to it: “if you keep taking coke, forget about our cholesterol – chances are you’ll kill yourself before anything else can”, “take it from the Prince of Darkness: cigarettes are evil, man” or “tea might not be very rock ‘n’ roll, but it’s magic potion to me.” At the end of each chapter there’s a quiz, with the answers and scoring at the end of the book. One chapter, perhaps the most fascinating of them all, has no reader questions at all, but goes over how Ozzy had his genome sequenced and what was learned from it. The chapters are grouped by topics, such as sex, drugs, sickness, death, diet and exercise, hygiene, self-medication, human relations, mental health, etc.
Naturally, the book is hilarious, although in truth it doesn’t really pick up until about page 120, after which there were several points that made me laugh out loud. The back cover, with Ozzy’s “medical certificate” from the University of Rock ‘n’ Roll of Aston, Birmingham (signed by “Dr Malory Practice, IOU”) is hilarious, as is the disclaimer (including the fine print in the “Important Safety Information” section – “Trials have shown that a low dose of DR OZZY is no safer than a high dose of DR OZZY”), and even the table of contents itself (Chapter 3 – Pruning: Cleanliness Is Next to Ozzyness; Chapter 4 – Family, The Other F-Word: You Love ‘Em to Death, but They Drive You Fucking Mental; Chapter – 10 Sex, Romance & Ballcare: Dr Ozzy’s Guide to the Bats and the Bees). In some cases he references an activity, like buying cocaine or purchasing a rifle, with a footnote that says “might not be legal where you live” – no shit, sherlock! The book is co-written with Chris Ayres, who co-authored his autobiography, and there is probably also a real medical practitioner around as a consultant. A phrase on one of the early pages says “The Doctor Is In… sane“. No more fitting words were ever spoken. But he’s not the only one who’s bonkers, as we’ll see.
And so, actually, it’s the people who write in from North America and Europe (but also other parts of the world, including China, Dubai, Ghana and Japan) with questions who are the real stars of the book, and there are hundreds of odd cases. Like the 65-year old who asks Dr Ozzy’s advice about how to rebuild his flagging libido, after going from a daily bonk with the missus to only two or three a week (get some perspective, Ozzy says – most people don’t get it two or three times a week); there’s the girl who is debating whether to sleep with her mom’s younger boyfriend (Ozzy proves himself a hero and gives advice that only a guy would give); the dumbass whose son has told him he’s gay, whose reaction is that it’s the friends he hangs out with, and an escort might bring out his closet heterosexual; someone whose son masturbates all the time (“Ask him if he’s been making any model planes recently, because you’re finding glue all over the place… with any luck he’ll be so embarrassed, he’ll never dirty the carpet again.”); a guy buys his wife a vibrator as a gift, only to have it become his competitor for her affections (ha ha… serves him right); the guy who’s concerned about passing stool after he has his pre-breakfast cigarette (If you’re a smoker, why the fuck are you wasting time worrying about your bowels – what about your LUNGS?”), and many more.
Fittingly, the first question is how to cure a hangover. The other questions and conundrums are a scream: “my doctor has told me that I have high cholesterol – does that mean I should stop taking cocaine?”; “What’s the most effective treatment for the hiccups?” (“Extreme pain, combined with the element of surprise.”); “What’s the best way to get rid of warts?” (“Antifreeze and fire. I don’t recommend it, though.”); “My wife has signed up our son for football practice, piano lessons, and yoga. He’s two. Is this insane?”; I think my foot/finger/leg might be broken, what should I do?; “Every night I go to bed with my dog Ozzy (named after you)…; how do I convince my wife going on an ocean cruise is a terrible idea?; I cry when I urinate; what’s the point of washing your hands if the doorknob of washrooms is filthy (check out the accompanying blueprint for an anesthetic-secreting door handle)?; “Dear Dr Ozzy, like Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun, I have a third nipple – should I be worried?” (“Only if it starts talking to you”); “Dear Ozzy, when my girlfriend takes Ambien, she turns into an insatiable sexual freak. In the morning, though, she has no memory of it. Is it wrong for me to go along with this?”; “This might sound strange, but I’ve noticed that when I stare at my testicles for a long time, they seem to move all by themselves… is this normal? It’s freaking me out!” (“It’s normal.”). So many people, each with a complex problem.
During a discussion on dreams, he describes how he didn’t sleep for 40 years, he’d just stay awake for three or four days and then pass out, sometimes in the central reservation of a 12-lane highway; he addresses fear of flying (“they say you’re more likely to die in a car crash on the way to the airport than you are to die in a plane crash, but not many people lie at wake at night worrying about the drive to Heathrow”), strange smells from down under (“It would help to know if you’re a guy or a girl… the Prince of Darkness ain’t exactly a world authority on female anatomy”), butterfly phobias (“what else are you scared of – rainbows, puppies and sunny days?”), wearing the wife’s clothes (“you’ve got two choices: pluck up the courage to tell her now, or get caught later… she might not even care… here in Los Angeles, there’s a whole society for cross-dressers – they’re all builders and postmen and delivery boys or whatever. They get dressed up in their fishnets, go out clubbing, come home, then go back to work the next day in their overalls like nothing happened.”), vertigo (“I thought I had vertigo for 40 years. I went to the doctor and he said, ‘Mr Osbourne, the problem is that you’re drunk. Very drunk.’”), people who hate manly bear hugging, people who can’t get rid of pesky lodgers, people who don’t know how to make eye contact, body odour, body hair, asshole bosses, asshole co-workers, asshole neighbours who play Elton John at full blast on Sunday mornings, married man’s guilt after being in a private booth in a strip club (“One thing I wouldn’t recommend is confessing to your missus – believe me, it’ll only make your life worse”), threesomes, lip biting, fetishes, extreme abstinence (“As a 30-year-old devout religious Roman Catholic virgin male…”), bad head, getting beaten with birch leaves by your girlfriend’s Russian ex-military father after getting blasted on vodka (?!?!?), yellow froth during ejaculation instead of semen (ewww!!!), cigarette scare pictures (“I swear, if someone invented nicotine today, it would be in the same class as heroin – and I say that as someone whose smoked cigarettes AND taken heroin. When they start printing those kinds of horrific pictures on the cartons, you’ve gotta ask yourself why the hell are they selling that shit in the first place? At some point they’ve either gotta ban the things or let people get on with killing themselves.”), imbibing by soaking you feet in a tub of vodka, and dozens of other hairy topics and tales.
The box articles are great: crazy cures throughout the ages (“In Egypt, they reckon that being buried in the sand during the hottest part of the day can cure rheumatism, joint paint [sic], and impotence. If you stay out there long enough without water, it can also cure being alive.”), the 430,000,000 hiccup man Charles Osbourne (no relation), food to avoid, times when exercise is bad for you (like Jim Fixx, the first fitness guru, who died while out for a jog at age 52, or soccer goalie Bert Trautmann, who broke his neck jumping to stop a shot… but kept right on playing with his broken neck), beauty secrets through the ages, operating instructions for children (“Most strollers nowadays come with a beer holder and an ashtray; in an emergency, they can also be used to carry milk bottles and wet wipes”), DIY Surgery – What NOT to Try…, a long discussion on solutions for the dirty bathroom door handle conundrum (best solution – get rid of the doors), bouncing knees, mercury poisoning, night sweats, animal bites, urinal “performance” anxiety, the unlocking of the “Osbourne Identity” (Ozzy’s genome project), asshole bosses, crazy historical figures (Joan of Arc, Pythagoras, Charles the Mad, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lord Byron), crazy mental illnesses (such as “Walking-Corpse Syndrome”, when sufferers think that they’re dead, and that life is a dream they’re having from the other side), old-fashioned treatments… to avoid, sex in the animal kingdom, what every man should know about his anatomy (blue balls, etc), nutty cures (like Sigmund Freud’s cocaine cure), downers of note, LSD factoids, a list of the most unlikely ways to die, a list of the most likely ways to die and supercentenarians.
The tone of the book is a bit different than his first book – I still like how he uses the word “ain’t” all the time. He’s also toned down his swearing a bit, although he does confess to quickies with the nanny in the sauna (?!?!?!).
The chapter on the decoding of Ozzy’s genome is fascinating. Scientists approached him to learn the secrets of his indestructible liver (they might do the same with other medical miracles such as Keith Richards and Lemmy Kilmister), a concept that was hard for him to decipher the meaning of at first. Being the clown he is, he pretends to mix up the words genome and gnome (the garden variety, of course), adding also that “the only Gene I know anything about is the one in KISS” (ha ha). There were several findings from the research, one of which is that Ozzy is related to Stephen Colbert – the two gentlemen’s mothers’ lines go back to a pair of sisters who lived a few thousand years ago, probably near the Black Sea; this is considered a recent relation as “most randomly chosen people would have to go back about 90,000 years to find a common ancestor.” So much for six degrees of separation. Other relatives of Ozzy’s of similar extraction are Henry “Skip” Gates, Jesse James, the last Russian Tsar (Nicholas II), and George I of Britain. He also had descendants from Pompeii who survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Ozzy finds out that he’s got neanderthal DNA, leading to several bad jokes. And they found something that was never-before-seen: a regulatory genome segment that metabolises alcohol. He also has both the warrior gene and the worrier gene (whereas most people either have one or the other). “Being a warrior – the crazy, Alamo-pissing, bat-eating Prince of Darkness – has made me famous. Being a worrier has kept me alive when some of my dearest friends never made it beyond their mid-twenties.” But there’s more to this tale:
Before Dr Nathan left, I told him my theory. He frowned, nodded a bit, squinted his eyes. Then he said, “look, Mr Osbourne, after studying your history, taking your blood, extracting your genes from the white cells, making them readable, sequencing them, analysing and interpreting the data using some of the most advanced technology available in the world today – and of course comparing your DNA against all the current research in the US National Library of Medicine, not to mention the eighteenth revision of the public human reference genome – I think I can say with a good deal of confidence why you’re still alive.”
I looked at him.
He looked at me.
“Go on then, I said. “Spit it out.”
“Sharon,” he replied.”
Ha ha ha… I wonder what input Sharon had in creating this book.
Some of the stuff is not so interesting (but funny nonetheless):
“Well, Mr Osbourne, your PTPN11 gene is normal-ish – so you don’t have Noonan Syndrome.”
What’s Noonan Syndrome?” I asked.
“A type of dwarfism.”
“So I’m not a dwarf?”
“No.”
“Oh. That’s a relief, then.”
A few themes persist: get medical advice from a real doctor (not “Dr Ozzy”); addiction is serious; valium sucks (“When I finally got off it after 25 years, it was the worst withdrawal I ever had from anything.”); medical marijuana and LSD are worth looking into under some circumstances; stop making excuses; “If you think it might be the booze, it’s the booze“; don’t take too many pills; go for cosmetic surgery if it makes you happy or improves your life (Ozzy and Sharon have both had many procedures) with some obvious caveats – never suggest to your partner that you’ll pay for a boob job if you value your life or sanity. Ozzy gives his recipe for a potent Hot Ozzy, which will blast your oncoming cold into oblivion (along with your brain), and names off all of the pills that he took ten times the prescribed dose of, including his wife’s sleeping pills. Many of his experiences come with the caveat that he doesn’t remember a treatment very well because he was blasted out of his mind at the time (“Dr Ozzy’s memory of events between 1968 and the present are not entirely reliable” is how the disclaimer is phrased). Many of the anecdotes of this book have been told in his autobiography I Am Ozzy, and there’s still the lingering sense of regret at going berserk and killing his chickens, hitting a bloke over the head with a bottle while drunk in a pub, and telling Brian Wilson that he was glad his brother died. We also learn how he was addicted to morphine (with each drug a new abuse).
Sometimes, of course, he screws up, like when one guy asks how to treat a scalded tongue, only to be given sensible advice about how to prevent a scalded tongue (wait, I know this one: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!!). There are also some typos in the book, like when he says “Stephen FuckHawking” (I think he was trying to say “Stephen Fucking Hawking” – it’s still terribly disrespectful to the genius astrophysicist; other times Hawking is mentioned as an example of a genius Ozzy keeps it real). There’s also the matter of Chapter 10, which has a sub-heading one (“Sex”) and sub-heading four (“Romance”), but no sub-headings two and three. Chapter 11 is the same: sub-heading one on page 224 is “Uppers”, sub-heading one on page 229 is “Downers” Odd.
Final message: “Your genes don’t decide who you are – you do. If the Prince of Darkness managed to get clean and sober after 40 years, anything is possible. God bless Ozzy Osbourne.
