A sign of the time is bad timing indeed; Robin Williams used to sell cheap beer at Trader Joe’s

Are you over the Robin Williams saga yet? I was.

Not from any place of cruelty, callousness or even media oversaturation, but from the desire to let this man rest in peace and to see his family spared an unending number of inauthentic tributes from people who had no idea what he was going through, or tales of his damned soul from religious nuts talking the sins of suicide.

I was over it, and then I went to Trader Joe’s last week.

I nearly spit out my Starbucks when I laid eyes on a hand-drawn advertisement from a San Diego-area beer company with Robin Williams holding a mug of suds, smiling from behind his iconic ‘70s shag and rainbow suspenders.

It incensed me so much that I snapped a photo and uploaded it to Facebook, a classic 21st century passive-aggressive protest, that is, I let social media judge the worth of what Trader Joe’s did but did nothing myself to voice my anger with management.

Thankfully, a more understanding and proactive friend of mine took the rock and carried it all the way to corporate. In the short-term she received a mea culpa from store management and the removal of the sign and in the longer-term, an apology from the regional headquarters and a promise for better-developed practices for future displays.

By now most people realize Williams was a 20-year recovering alcoholic and cocaine addict who had recently relapsed with alcohol, fell deeper into his depression and ultimately killed himself.

Here was this advertisement insensitively hawking alcohol with a dead alcoholic. It was likely an innocent mistake, a misguided attempt at a tribute in the name of local commerce. But damn, think it through a bit, TJ’s.

Yes, this does something very specific to me. I am in recovery myself. I’ve written about it before, never shied away from it, although it hasn’t been a topic of any of my columns in a very long time.

I don’t pretend to have some sort of kinship or psychic connection with Robin Williams because of that fact, but I do understand the how of alcoholism, its progression that either leads to death or to the discovery of recovery. Unfortunately, as in Robin Williams’ case, those ideas aren’t mutually exclusive, as the nature of the disease is a never-ending fight for your sanity and your life.

It’s also a cyclical disease as it many times masks a deeper psychic rot in a person’s foundation, where the salve of drug and drink eases the pain until it doesn’t. And then, well, the house comes tumbling down, and we’re often worse than when we started, broken, unstable, wobbly even through sobriety and always subject to a disease of body and mind waiting to attack when we’re at our most vulnerable.

I can only imagine that guy’s pain. And anyone who has ever felt the sting of substance abuse in their own lives, of depression and the despair that comes with it, they can empathize with Robin Williams, too.

But even those who can’t, who don’t understand, haven’t lived through it or been affected by it in some way, acknowledge the man was a tortured genius clearly exorcising some sort of demon through his manic comedy.

At the risk of reading like a broken record, though, there is a healthy unease with addressing mental illness and addiction separately, and even more confusion and resistance in how they are intertwined and push and pull at each other.

It sounds good on paper, but it gets lost in translation when one human being tries or refuses to understand the patterns of behavior and neural misfiring of another human being.

Tough stuff, for sure. It can be considered contempt prior to investigation, a concept that dismisses what we will never fully grasp or educate ourselves on.

Like alcoholism, like depression, like suicide, that sign at Trader Joe’s wasn’t just a sign, but a symptom of a larger break between a sizeable segment of the population and their constant struggle and the others who cannot comprehend it.

This column first appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, Aug. 22, 2014.