So Van Gogh didn’t cut off his ear.

So Van Gogh didn’t cut off his ear. Not the whole ear at any rate. He cut off a piece of it, in a fit of rage over the loss of Gauguin’s friendship. When I think about it — I want to cry.

The big surprise of history is that Vincent didn’t give the wrapped ear to a hooker named Rachel, but to a cleaner named Gaby, at his favorite brothel in Arles. I guess he just gave it to the first woman he knew vaguely, that he found there, in the hope that he would get some comfort, but it didn’t help. 

Almost two years later he killed himself on 29 July. Which means the anniversary of his death was last week. And I missed it, until I looked it up today. It wasn’t mentioned on Facebook, or on the big news rollouts. Strange but true, given that it was 135 years since his death, which is a kind of interesting-looking number.

It’s funny how people want stories of the dysmorphia of famous people to be simple and dramatic, so that they don’t have to think of artists or actors as being real and complex. They just want celebrities to be crazy and impulsive, and entertaining.

Here I feel the need to point out that Walt Disney was not frozen in a laboratory after his death in 1966. I swear I spent all the later years of my childhood believing it — that the head was frozen at any rate. The part I didn’t know was that the body was supposed to have been stored in a freezer, under the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. 

It’s funny how that could have been life-changing information to a boy, knowing how sensationalist kids can be. Although it’s highly unlikely that a child could ever understand why a diseased old adult would want to live forever - Fringe