It’s a simplistic explanation and it might be argued with by a lot of people, but Bam Margera is a person who became addicted to pain. It sounds funky, doesn’t it? Who in their right mind would want the pain instead of wanting to get better in order to lead a more reasonable and sober life? Judging Bam for his addictions would have been easy enough, even if it isn’t deemed as entirely acceptable, but judging him for any alleged death threats levied against two of his friends and former coworkers and costars Johnny Knoxville and Jeff Tremaine from Jackass feels almost justified since Bam has gone off the deep end it feels. All the talks of suicide, self-harm, and of addiction can be thrust against this issue if people want to in order to explain Bam’s behavior, but verbally attacking those that have wanted to help him and include him is behavior that takes the patience of a monk to forgive.
Even then, launching death threats, allegedly, at his friends, people who want to work with him, kind of speaks to how much drugs and alcohol have affected Bam’s mental well-being since according to his mom, he never drank before he came to the Jackass show. Now, however, he drinks until he blacks out it sounds like, and despite the fact that he knows he has a problem, he’s been in and out of a couple of rehabilitation centers after trying to straighten out his life. So far it doesn’t appear that anything has worked since Bam is still hiding in the bottle and popping pills as much as he wants, even when the one stipulation that Jeff and Johnny had for Jackass 4 was that he stay sober long enough to film each segment. He couldn’t even do that, and so the duo told him that it was off, that he wasn’t welcome back.
Obviously Bam didn’t take that too well, since he eventually started calling Jeff in order to harass and threaten him as is being stated. Whether Bam is even aware of what he’s doing and saying is hard to say, since routine alcohol and drug abuse affects a lot of people differently, but the behavior eventually becomes pretty common. It’s been reported that Bam didn’t really start drinking until after the Jackass show started, apparently to stifle the pain that came from some of the stunts that didn’t turn outright. That’s funny, when a lot of people get injured they take pain medication that alleviates the pain for a little while as the body heals, but apparently, some folks believe in the healing power of the bottle. Oh yeah, that’s a commentary on a poor set of decision-making skills since having watched a good deal of Jackass, I’m still wondering which screws were loosened in these guys’ heads to make them think that a lot of this stuff was going to turn out in any other way.
Bam has been a loose cannon on the Jackass crew for quite a while, with moments of lucidity here and there that a lot of people have been thankful for no doubt. No matter how much of a problem he appeared to be at times though, he was always a welcome member of the cast since people expected him to be there, he had his funny moments, and more than anything, he’d been there long enough that the fans had grown used to him or loved him unconditionally. But when things got tough, Bam turned to the bottle and the pills. Plenty of actors have been harmed in the process of filming, and many have used pain medication to get better, not to drown their sorrows. Many people the world over have lost friends or family to tragedy, but they don’t end up using it as an excuse for their continued behavioral problems.
And many upon many friends have been given ultimatums by their friends to stay on the straight and narrow or be excluded, and have avoided sending death threats, even allegedly, so Bam is left with little to no excuse save that he’s become kind of a garbage person over the years, at least when it comes to his publicized self. However many issues he’s dealing with, however many issues he’s making up, it doesn’t matter, he doesn’t appear to be dealing with his issues in a healthy or useful manner, and he now has a restraining order against him from someone that wanted to work with him, but agreed that being loaded on a movie set like Jackass wasn’t a good idea. Someone might have forgotten to tell Bam that once he grew up that things were going to change, and he would have to change with them in a mature and reasonable manner. That might have at least had some effect.
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