We got the news today that a music legend and one of the founding fathers of heavy metal, Ozzy Osbourne, died Tuesday at the age of 76. In 2004, Esquire sat down with Osbourne as part of our long-running series, What I've Learned. After hearing the news of his death, I read it over and can confirm: he understood the assignment and shared much of his hard-earned wisdom. You can read it below. – Michael Sebastian, editor-in-chief Plus: |
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"Nobody else in the world fucking sounds like me." |
Ozzy Osbourne was 56 and living in Beverly Hills when he spoke to Esquire for its What I've Learned interview series. This story appeared in the January 2005 edition of Esquire. Osbourne died on July 22 at the age of 76. "I know what's going to be on my tombstone, and there's no getting around it: 'Here lies Ozzy Osbourne, the ex-Black Sabbath singer who bit the head off a bat.'" "People ask me, 'Do you regret anything?' Sure, I have fucking regrets. But if I didn't have my life the way it's been or the way it's gonna be, I'd be fucking with the big guy in the sky." |
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It's gonna be six years in August since I did it. It's becoming a little bit of an abstraction. The only way that I can say it changed my life is that now, if I'm down on myself for being selfish, I can remind myself that I did this thing. It reminds me that maybe I am a good, empathetic person. But it's still something I fight with myself over. I also have to remind myself that I have only one kidney. I can't be blasé about my health anymore. Right now, I'm trying to lose weight, so it's on my mind. I'm perfectly healthy, but I made myself more at risk by taking away that extra kidney. I think I was trying to exercise my morality in a way that you might exercise at the gym. I thought of it like training for a marathon. And when I ask myself why I would do that, I think the answer is instinct. When a person is drowning in a lake, there's a natural instinct to save them. In my case, though, it wasn't instantaneous. There was a huge, yearslong gap between the idea of saving someone and the execution. |
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Death Valley is surprisingly biodiverse, but you couldn't tell by looking at it. Sitting around waiting for the start of the Badwater 135, a 135-mile ultramarathon between here and Mount Whitney in the Eastern Sierras, the self-anointed "toughest footrace on earth," you see only a particular subspecies of human, ultra-runners. For this race, they'll run on scorched asphalt through small towns and by landmarks with names that read like a contemporary translation of Dante: Devil's Golf Course, Furnace Creek, Stovepipe Wells. They'll run in desert conditions, temperatures nearing 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the day and dropping significantly at night, while climbing a total of 14,600 feet over no more than 48 hours. My editor's asked the big question: What gear do these runners use to keep themselves alive? |
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