I watch some blurry youtube videos of him wrestling. So in an attempt to get some perspective (and to soothe my lingering guilt), I sit down and try to learn as much as I can about Louis Vincent Albano. Louis Vincent Albano, the man? I know nothing about him. And as a character, Albano really did belong to the world, even to internet mouth-breathers like me. After all, there is a careful distinction to be made, right? Captain Lou Albano, the character, is the person whose life I feel like I understand, and the one whose death had such a strange effect on me. For me to act like I know anything about his life (let alone how much “sense” his death made), is an insult. For me to act like my coincidence matters is kind of an insult. I can’t even pretend to be a lifelong fan: I’m just a guy who has some oddly specific memories of an old Nintendo-based TV show. What about Lou Albano’s perspective? I won’t pretend to speak for him, or for the people he cared about, but I think we can be pretty sure that, uh, you know, the fact that some internet mouth-breather happened to have a conversation about him a couple of days before his death? Probably not a factor. The “meaning” I had found here, in the tragedy of a man’s death, was based entirely on my own solipsistic perspective. “That’s a horrible way of looking at his death, Stokes!” I thought. That was what I thought today at 5:00, for all of five minutes. And this bizarre coincidence was a fitting end to it. If I came across that career in a Thomas Pynchon novel, I would deride it as contrived and unbelievable. And then a role as a live action Super Mario Brother. The epoch-defining (for wrestling, anyway) collaboration with Cyndi Lauper, of all people. The rebirth as the most charismatic heel manager in wrestling history. The wrestling career based around a one note “hidden knife” gag. Of course it didn’t make any sense! This was Captain Lou Albano, often imitated, never duplicated! NOTHING about his life made any sense. That was how I felt today at about 3:00, when I heard the news. It probably happens to hundreds of people every day, and will probably happen to all of us, if we wait long enough. So in the grand scheme of things, what happened to me today is not all that strange. While the odds of me talking about a specific celebrity and having them die shortly thereafter are low, the odds that someone, somewhere in the world will be talking about ANY given celebrity shortly before his death are probably pretty close to one. Oh, I know all about the law of large numbers. And I hadn’t so much as thought of him in years. Little did I know when we were recording the most recent podcast that it would become so sadly topical: today the world mourns the loss of Louis Vincent “Captain Lou Albano” Albano, who passed this morning at the age of 76.
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