Imperfectly Perfect

I became an Ozzy Osbourne fan at 54 years old.

I know. My timing sucks.

For most of my life, Ozzy existed somewhere in the cultural background: Black Sabbath, bats, Crazy Train, the Prince of Darkness, that unmistakable voice. I knew who he was the way everybody knew who he was.

But I didn't know him.

Not really.

And when I finally started looking, I discovered that the least interesting thing about Ozzy Osbourne might have been the mythology surrounding Ozzy Osbourne.

I became fascinated with John.

John Michael Osbourne from Birmingham. The funny man. The frightened man. The husband and father. The addict. The survivor. The man capable of spectacular mistakes who somehow retained this extraordinary softness underneath all the wreckage.

The imperfect man.

Maybe that's why he got to me.

Because I don't believe human beings have to be perfect to be worthy of love. In fact, I'm suspicious of anybody pretending to be.

Ozzy didn't pretend very well.

Thank God.

He talked about things most of us would bury in a locked box and throw into the ocean. Addiction. Infidelity. Shame. Fear. Failure. Things he'd done that hurt people. Things that had hurt him.

He didn't always make himself the hero of his own story.

There was something liberating about that.

I have a philosophy: Own your own bullshit and nobody can hurt you with it.

If someone comes charging at you with something you've already admitted about yourself, what exactly are they going to do with it?

Yeah.

I did that.

Yeah.

I screwed that up.

Yeah.

I wish I'd done things differently.

And?

There is tremendous power in that little word.

And?

You can't blackmail somebody with a secret they've already dragged into the daylight.

Ozzy helped me understand that.

That's what I would have wanted to tell him.

Not how many albums he'd sold. Not how legendary Black Sabbath was. Not about the bat.

God, that fucking bat.

People have laughed about that story for decades, but I've always found the reality rather sad. He said he thought the bat thrown onto the stage was fake. Then he discovered in perhaps the worst possible way that it wasn't, and he had to undergo rabies treatment.

Eventually, yes, the sheer absurdity became part of Ozzy folklore.

But underneath the folklore was a human being.

That's where my mind always goes.

Underneath.

I wonder sometimes whether he felt lonely in crowded rooms.

I don't know that he did. I never met him, and I won't manufacture feelings for a man I didn't know just because I wish I had.

But I wonder.

Because when you're Ozzy Osbourne, how often does somebody walk into a room wanting absolutely nothing from you?

No photograph.

No autograph.

No backstage access.

No introduction.

No story to tell their friends.

No performance.

Just you.

That's what I wish I could have given him.

Nothing.

I would have loved to sit beside that man and say, You don't have to entertain me. You don't have to be funny. You don't have to tell me a crazy story. You don't have to be the Prince of Darkness. You don't even have to talk.

You can just be John.

I would have thanked him for being honest.

I'd have thanked him for having the courage—or perhaps sometimes simply the inability—to hide every ugly, embarrassing, complicated part of himself.

I'd have told him that his honesty taught me something.

You can survive being imperfect.

More importantly, you can still be loved while being imperfect.

That's different from excusing everything someone has ever done. Love shouldn't require rewriting a person's history or pretending their mistakes didn't hurt anybody.

I don't need Ozzy to have been a saint.

I wouldn't want to turn him into one.

Saints are terribly difficult to relate to anyway.

Give me the complicated human being.

Give me the man who could make me laugh and break my heart within five minutes.

Give me the contradictions.

Give me the fear underneath the bravado.

Give me the softness underneath all that black.

Give me the bloke from Birmingham who somehow became one of the most recognizable human beings on Earth and still occasionally seemed bewildered that anybody gave a shit.

He was imperfectly perfect.

And there were so many layers to him.

So much substance.

So many oceans in his heart that I would have loved to swim in—if he had trusted me enough to let me.

That's the part that hurts.

I'll never know.

I'll never know whether we would have liked each other. Maybe I would have shocked the living hell out of him with how blunt I am. Maybe we'd have laughed until neither of us could breathe. Maybe I'd have annoyed him senseless.

Maybe he would have annoyed me.

God, I hope so.

Because I'm not interested in an imaginary perfect relationship with an imaginary perfect man.

That's precisely what I've learned from him.

Perfect isn't real.

Human is.

I didn't want Ozzy Osbourne to give me a piece of the legend.

I wanted to give John Osbourne somewhere he didn't have to be one.

And although I never got the chance to give him that, somehow he gave me something anyway.

He left pieces of himself behind.

In the music.

In the interviews.

In the ridiculous stories.

In the confessions.

In the things he probably wished he'd done differently and the things he wouldn't have changed for anything.

I found him late.

But I found him.

And somewhere in all those oceans, I found a little more courage to be exactly who I am, too.

So thank you, John.

You never had to make waves for me.

I would have been perfectly happy just sitting beside the water. 🖤