Last Updated on: 11th February 2015, 03:20 pm
It’s hard to get all sappy about this one since scumbag just radiates off the guy, but the apparent suicide of Don Lapre is worth a mention as far as I’m concerned.
If you’ve been reading a while or if you know me reasonably well, the fact that I tend to have trouble sleeping probably won’t come as much of a revelation to you. It goes back years, pretty much as long as I can remember.
One of the things I’ve often used to pass time while not sleeping or to get me back there is TV. I was lucky enough as a kid to have one in my bedroom. It didn’t have cable, but we lived in a pretty sweet part of nowhere and got a good number of stations. That said, there still came an hour when most of them were off the air (yes I really am that old) or showing crap you would never, ever watch if it were any other time of day.
If memory serves, it was late one night/early one morning either right after or right before a JoJo’s Psychic Alliance infomercial hosted by Geoff Edwards when I saw him. This odd fellow was excitedly talking about how you could make thousands of dollars a week simply by “placing tiny classified ads in newspapers!!!!” For whatever reason, it was fascinating to me. Hey, cut me some slack! I was like 14! As it turned out, the fellow was Don Lapre, and I was strangely drawn to him.
Did I think he was on to something? Not sure. Maybe a little. Did I think he reminded me of a waaaaaay more pumped up version of an old neighbour we had who was into all that network marketing crap? Yeah, for sure. There was also the whole thing about just being able to place ads or start phone lines that could have any or no purpose whatsoever and somehow rake in gazillions of dollars. People seemed to fall for it and I wanted to know why. Whatever it was, I watched those damn ads forever. Sometimes it was the exact same one for weeks, but it didn’t matter.
Watching him now makes everything I just wrote sound ridiculous. Seriously, how did a con artist like this ever convince anybody to do anything? But there was a time when that con artist was my con artist, keeping me company when I should have been sleeping.
I guess when I look at it that way, it might not be quite so hard to get just a wee bit sappy about him being gone. It’s funny how things that are so insignificant can stick with you like that.
