It still bums me out because he is the type of comic you either "got" or did not understand at all. It is an alternate way of 'thinking' and not in terms of drugs, as to why a lot of his jokes were funny, combined with the delivery. I've been watching a lot of the show 'Intervention' lately and it pains me that the producers of this show couldn't get to him before March 31st of this year.
I mean, the writing was on the wall, as evidenced by this review:
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/09/24/131428.php
Some people make bad choices, and sometimes it only takes "one time", kind of like pregnancy, to get hooked on something. Sure, people are all wired differently, so some people can smoke a cigarette and not pick another one up for years. Thankfully, I never went down that road, I just saw all of that stuff as a waste of time and money. If you need that sort of short term escapism, you might want to work on the underlying issues instead of going for the 'quick fix'.
I just recently found out that it wasn't a heart condition that killed Mitch but a speedball, aka cocaine and heroin. I'm hoping he had been clean for a long time, like he said he was, and just had a bad night, grabbed some 'junk' and did his normal amount. The crummy thing with human tolerance levels is that they lower over time, and that might have done him in.
Of course, I am sitting here drinking a Diet Mt Dew which is filled with caffeine which is like my own version of a speedball, so in a certain sense I have no room to judge, but I know that drinking a 2 liter tonite isn't going to kill me, and it is legal. That is probably a bad analogy, but I can see very easily how these sort of things can happen. That's why I avoid addictive things as much as possible because "I know me". It is the same reason I've avoided World of Warcraft.
Mainly I'm just bummed there will be no more "new funnies" from Mitch. Mr Pibb didn't even have a degree.