The experiment was a success. The boy went to a prestigious college, where he was a star player. He then proceeded to the National Football League, headed for a glorious career.

Then, of course, the entire project collapsed. Drug addiction with its attendant legal and publicity problems arrived, and the NFL career blew up. The kid went through rehab and came back, and relapsed. And relapsed. And relapsed again. And left sports. He tried to be a rock ‘n’ roll singer at one point, and made a stab here and there at being famous for a living.

A couple of weeks ago, at the age of 35, he was once again busted for speed and syringes and is currently doing 90 days in the local county lockup.

I hear through the grapevine that his father is trying again, with another baby, by a new and improved mother. On his sports training company’s website there is no mention of his son.

In exiting this way, though, he condemned himself to a worse fate. Mr. Smith has now entered the Pantheon of Sad Artists, enshrined next to Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain, Nick Drake, Sylvia Plath, Karen Carpenter, and that really talented gal you knew in high school who offed herself. Generations of grimly satisfied depressives will play his music for their friends and say “…and he died young, and so tragically. He was just not made for this world.”

That’s crap.

Suicide is a terrible thing for an artist. All sorts of people off themselves or O.D., every day, and it’s a grim business. Most of them are ordinary people with extraordinary problems, and anyone with a heart feels bad for them. It’s unromantic, inconsiderate, and depressing for everyone concerned. But when you make art and die by your own hand, you turn into a Suicide Artist and your entire body of work becomes raw material for immature angst. Every dysphoric teen in a suburban mall will wear your t-shirt, and every suicide-gesture livejournal will invoke your name in the daily goodbye to a thousand cruel worlds.

Ian Curtis should be remembered for a fine hand with songwriting, a haunting voice, and the skills and heart to make that Vox guitar scream and scream. Sylvia Plath put her nose to the grindstone and produced beautifully polished prose and poetry. Nick Drake, Kurt Cobain, and even poor Karen Carpenter worked long hours at the studio and practiced and made art that people cared about. The fact that they couldn’t make it further, beat their problems back, and produce more art is a crappy footnote to their creative biographies.

Please don’t turn Elliott Smith into the latest sad-kid suicide poster boy; he deserves better.

The holiday has an odd history. Celebrating wildness, devilry, and death has always been a difficult business in this country. We’re very conflicted about it. When my father was a child in the 1930s, Halloween was a dangerous wild mess in which he and his friends destroyed property and committed various other crimes. A favorite trick was tipping over an outhouse. In some parts of the country there are still traditions that recall the original Roman holiday of “Pandemonium”, e.g., Devil’s Night in Detroit.

When I was a child in the 1970s, Halloween was dress-up and candy for kids. We all made or bought clumsy costumes, and just after dark but before it was “dangerous”, we toddled about our neighborhood begging candy. The neighbors had a lit pumpkin or maybe a spooky record playing, and there were some decorations. It was loads of fun for young kids. Once in a while the adults would have a costume party too, but that was pretty rare.

Now it’s a full-fledged Adult Party Holiday. Offices have workers in costumes. People go to multiple parties in one night. There’s a whole lot of drinking. Forty-year-olds ask each other “what are you going to be for Halloween?”. And the money rolls in, probably mostly for beer and party supplies. Even fundamentalist Christians who actually remember what the holiday is about and want to avoid celebrating the occult will have a “harvest party”. I noticed, for example, that big chain retailers are calling the holiday “Friday October 31″ to avoid offending the people who want prayer and pumpkins but no devils.

And the decoration bit has gone straight off the rails now. Ordinarily normal suburban homes are lit red and stacked with skulls, and a repellent “executed criminal” dummy hanging from a tree and a tombstone on the lawn. Orange pumpkin heads and black cats wave from the back of minivans. The nurse at the E.R. may be dressed as a vampire when you stagger in bleeding. This holiday has definitively and finally been stolen back from the kids.

Here’s our problem in America. We don’t want to grow up. We want to drive a Tonka truck to work, eat cookie dough with our hands, continue having “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” well into our seventies, and eat sugary breakfast cereals with milk. Because we’re rich we can do it.

So this October 31, we’ll celebrate the Day of our Dead, our All Hallows Eve, Pandemonium, or any of its many names by saying “boo” to each other at the office and heading off to parties, where we’ll wash candy corn down with beer and play a little grabass with the other kids.

Later at night, when we’re clutching the toilet and heaving up a mess of Tootsie Rolls and Jagermeister, we might even feel the cold breath of the guest we forgot was there the whole time.

Looking through the site, I found the page for their board of directors and there was Dr. Lorraine Day. Oh dear, I thought. What now?

I first encountered Dr. Day in 1988 or 89 when I was working for an orthopedic medical journal. She was one of our regular peer reviewers, and I found her a very impressive person. She’d clawed her way up from nothing through community college classes, a dental hygienist job, medical assistant, through nursing school and the nursing profession, to medical school, and finally had broken into one of the most notorious boy’s clubs in medicine: orthopedic surgery. She was at the time Chief of Surgery at San Francisco General Hospital and at the top of her profession.

Around the time I left that job, Dr. Day had stopped reviewing for us because she was “working full-time on the AIDS problem”, which sounded laudable to me. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Like many healthcare workers, especially in places like San Francisco that got the full first wave of AIDS patients, she was very frightened of exposure to this deadly and poorly understood disease. As a surgeon who worked in one of the most splattery surgical specialties, she had more reason than most to worry about infection. And her early activism was an entirely appropriate criticism of the poor safety mechanisms in place to protect healthcare workers from exposure to HIV.

She then descended into ignorant gaybashing stupidity. She became the go-to person for the “Medical conservative viewpoint” on the talk shows, advocating restrictions of the basic civil rights of homosexuals, blaming gay men for AIDS, and in general feeding the Bigotry Monster. She appeared on TBN and the 700 Club constantly. She was shrill, and mean-spirited, and unscientific, and downright Un-American. I was sad because I’d thought of her before as kind of a career hero to me: someone who had triumphed over adversity to succeed and help others.

According to her web site, she acquired and then beat cancer recently. That’s cool. However, she’s also selling “natural cure” books, barley “dietary supplements” that cure everything, and a load of other prescientific and dangerous quackery all larded up with religious sentiment.

This is, quite literally, tragic. When I think of that long journey from nobody, through dental hygienist, up through the medical ranks to surgeon; of all of that skill, caring, and good hard scientific knowledge; and of all those years of experience that could be passed on; and I see a deranged fundamentalist herb-saleswoman leading on other sufferers to death? It makes me sad.

There’s a spot where paranoia, health-food crankery, know-nothing religion, and distrust of authority meet. That’s where Dr. Day has landed, 15 years after she abandoned her oath, started gaybashing and turned away from science.

Say it ain’t so, Dr. Day. Say you didn’t sell out to hatred and ignorance and fraud and Scientology and quackery. Say it ain’t so.

The general brownness of those years expressed itself in a myriad of ways. Pretty much everything “designed” was some shade of tan, mahogany, or chocolate. Cars, the interiors of homes, clothing, electronics, all of it. Fake wood, for example, was everywhere, and brown plaids and corduroys dominated the back-to-school wardrobe of my childhood. There are still parts of my house that have left over brown plywood veneer on them.

It wasn’t just a matter of designers’ taste, though. Brown was a general cultural preference. In food, for example, white was out and brown was in. Rice, sugar, bread, pasta, eggs: everything was to be a dusky color now. Brownness was goodness: it meant whole grains with more nutrition, less refinement and processing, and the idea of “natural”. Brown things that no one had eaten before, like carob, were suddenly everywhere. The Diet for a Small Planet was in, and so was macrobiotic cooking.

A lot of this was based in good science. Whole grains, for example, are a great idea nutritionally. Brown rice and whole wheat bread are, in fact, better for you without a doubt. But brown sugar? It’s just sugar. Unrefined honey? It’s just a different color. Brown eggs? Come on!

And none of this explains the deep dark wooden tones of damn near everything around us in those years.

The reason for it all was race. After the explosions of the 1960s, everyone realized that White Only wasn’t working, not for anyone. The left and the Civil Rights movement had won, and starting with the universities we all got a good PC reeducation. Brown people, we were told, were at least equal and probably superior to white people. As children we were marinated in “positive images” of brown-ness, at least in my Southern California primary schools. Most of this was for the best. After hundreds of years of racial insanity in my country, a bit of pendulum swing isn’t anything to complain of!

As the négritude of those times finally passed, we got back to disliking each others’ skin color like the dumb humans we are, writing Bell Curves and listening to Farrakhans and generally backsliding like drunks into our racial stupidity. But brown stayed in some places. Visit your local health food store and look around. Brown eggs? Check. Brown grains? Check. Dark, dark unrefined molasses and honey? Yup.

Our souls have been sold back to the devil. Brown people still make less money doing less pleasant jobs. Countries full of them we bomb or ignore. People still say “American” when they mean “white”. But our bellies? We fill them with the comforting mulatto foods of my childhood, because brown is the color of the noble savage, the unrefined “natural goodness” we all need to live.

I hear corduroy is making a comeback.

In short, they were a “bro” and a “ho”.

There are a lot of these people in my part of Orange County, California. The subprime mortgage industry, as it feeds off the desperation of strapped hicks all over the country, has created a lot of high-wage jobs for business school graduates with connections. For some reason a particular kind of person flourishes in this environment. The men are simultaneously degenerate and athletic, and spend money with abandon. The women are simultaneously degenerate and athletic, and are sexually available without much trouble. The result is a seaside Las Vegas dream of wealth, sex, and endless leisure that can be neatly summed up in the use of “party” as a verb.

As long as interest rates are low and the nation’s struggling classes are refinancing their mortgages for extra cash, this predatory class of surfer bankers can pull in very good money, as much as $30,000 to $60,000 a month in some cases. They’re almost all male, and they and their girlfriends share a set of values in which paying for sex is not a problem as long as the fees are high enough to make it look like the high life instead of a prostitution racket. Strip clubs, beach house weekends, Lake Havasu houseboat parties, and hot tub group sex fill their time.

The gods of these modern Beau Brummels are P. Diddy, Dennis Rodman, Kid Rock, and the rest of the MTV “bling bling” crew. Floating on a raft of money, eternally youthful, they ride in their Escalades from party to party, accompanied by a series of anonymous young women with spectacular bodies. Every bro has his ho, everything is for sale, and the cocaine and Dom Perignon can flow all night as long as everyone can show up to work the next day and screw a few more rural homeowners out of a few more points on the re-fi.

There’s another group of people I see at this coffeehouse regularly. On Thursday and Saturday nights, a similar group of sunburnt, slightly aging Hawaiian shirt-wearing men and leathery but curvaceous women shows up. They cluster outside the door of the coffeehouse drinking root beer and smoking. There’s lots of hugging and high-fiving. These are the local 12-step groups for drug and alcohol addicts. At some point, someone lost control of the BMW after a long night of Veuve-Clicquot, or stopped showing up at the mortgage office, or woke up covered in his own blood, and the party ended. Whether the judge told them to go or the doctor did, here they are.

And inevitably, interest rates will rise again, the money will move, and the easy money will leave the subprime mortgage business. A lot of those $30,000 a month jobs for well-connected partiers will vanish, as will the leased supercars and the beach houses. I hope the bro’s and their ho’s have a plan for that day, or we’ll be seeing a lot more of them on Thursdays and Saturdays.