Don’t pretend you aren’t interested.

Vince Young has had a rough month. First there was the MCL sprain. Then came the suicide scare. And that’s to say nothing of the subsequent media storm, stoked as always by the sensibilities of those suckers who read the stories.

Misery loves company.

The flip side, of course, is that company also loves misery.

This is by no means a lecture. I’m not accusing anyone of malice here, and I won’t pretend I haven’t followed the saga in Nashville. But to conform is not to condone. If we’re going to wallow in the gutter, we at least ought to be brave enough to take full stock of the risks entailed.

All empathy is obliquely voyeuristic.

Then again, all voyeurism is inherently empathetic.

However hardened you believe yourself to be, you can’t stare too long at pain without suffering a few wounds of your own.

Being a fan means celebrating success. It also means gawking at failure. That’s neither a good thing nor a bad thing—it’s merely a thing, a product of some morbid itch to which none among us is immune. The only catch is that amorality makes a poor substitute for virtue, and scratching morbid itches never did anybody any good.

When bad news happens to you, it’s a hardship.

When bad news happens to someone famous, it’s a headline.

If you let the tabloids tell you where to look, you’re liable to lose sight of the truth beyond the trivia.

There’s something enthralling about human ruin. That’s why we can’t turn away from train wrecks or Entertainment Tonight—and why wayward quarterbacks will always generate search-engine traffic. The ugly truth about Vince Young is that we can’t get enough of the ugly truth about Vince Young. Whether the prognosis is bleaker for him or us is a puzzle for the mystics and MRI techs to pry apart.

VY's song sounds more like a dirge than a ballad, but the rub is still the same for a Thin Man:

You hand in your ticket
And you go watch the geek
Who immediately walks up to you
When he hears you speak
And says, How does it feel
To be such a freak?

And you say, Impossible,
As you change the channel, and turn up the volume.

Because something is happening here and you don't know what it is—or maybe you do, and maybe you'd rather simply shut your mouth than run the risk of only just saying, is all...