Enter Willie Aames, former child star and current VH1 whipping boy, who lost everything after a series of business deals went bad. "I ended up borrowing against everything I have. Right now, there's no job, no bank account, no wife, no child," Aames tells the camera. "I never dreamt it could've gotten this bad, ever."

But in the age of the comeback, total ruin sometimes equals payola -- depending on your willingness to expose your secrets as the cameras roll. In exchange for $25,000, Aames agreed to be subjected to a verbal and emotional beatdown by financial coach Sarano Kelley for VH1's "Broke and Famous: Willie Aames" (premieres 10 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 5), a one-off special that was apparently originally intended as a weekly series. "Every week I'll do my best to help a celebrity back on his or her feet by putting them through a seven-day intensive financial plan," Kelley tells the camera at the start, but apparently no further installments are planned.

That's not surprising, really, in light of the humiliation Aames is forced to endure at Kelley's hands. We get some foreshadowing of what's to come as soon as Kelley pulls into Aames' McMansion-filled neighborhood in Olathe, Kan. "It's always interesting how people who are broke don't seem to live in places where people are very broke," he says.

Aames, who is also remembered for having thrown a rather spectacular hissy fit during his tenure on another VH1 demean-a-thon, "Celebrity Fit Club," decides to start this personal journey with the most aggressive tone possible. "I'll tell you right upfront, I hate attorneys, I hate managers, I hate coaches," he growls at Kelley seconds after meeting him.

"I always know that the people who act the toughest always feel the most inferior," Kelley explains to the camera.

Aames certainly seems defensive when he and Kelley sit down to look at his numbers. The electricity is turned off in Aames' house because he owes $900 in electricity bills. His house is in foreclosure. He has no health insurance. His wife and 16-year-old daughter moved out six months earlier when they started having to sell their favorite books to buy groceries. Suddenly it's clear that this isn't merely a publicity stunt by Aames: The man is desperate.

"When all the work stopped and it all just kind of shut down, he just came undone. He just couldn't get out of bed," says his estranged wife, Maylo McCaslin. "The way that Willie handled money drove me insane, and I can't live my life like that and I'm not teaching my daughter anything by living like that in front of her."

But Aames appears annoyed by this exercise. "Did I make some bad business decisions? Absolutely. Do you think I want to see this?" He looks ready to walk out the door.

"All of these bad deals, what do they have in common?" Kelley asks, starting to shout. "What do they have in common, Willie? YOU!"

"Yeah, I know ... Don't fucking raise your voice at me!" Aames yells back.

"If somebody had raised their voice at you before, we wouldn't be here right now!" Kelley bellows back at him. Typically I hate this tough-love routine. But financial planners yelling at self-pitying former child stars? That's entertainment.

After the dust has settled, Aames holds a yard sale. Strangely, when he sees all of his neighbors gathered outside to buy all of his furniture and his DVDs and his gigantic flat-screen TV, he seems to find it touching rather than flatly depressing. As they clamor around him to buy his stuffed deer and buffalo heads, as women ask him to sign T-shirts with his young, beaming face on them (nice one, VH1), Aames starts to enjoy himself in earnest. Some of the women actually giggle when he's signing their shirts, even though he has tousled gray hair and enormous dark eye bags and a beer gut and arms full of tattoos and looks as close to a TV star as your average truck driver. People still care about famous people, even when those famous people are old and broke.

Watching Aames at his yard sale, surrounded by smiling middle-aged people who grew up watching "Eight Is Enough," it makes perfect sense that fame would eventually become democratized by reality TV and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter. Like enormous houses and luxury cars, people wanted a taste of fame badly enough that fame had to be spread a little thinner. Demand created supply.

But then, part of the reason Aames is broke is that his chunk of fame isn't worth what it was 20 years ago. Now that the supply of fame is plentiful and everyone is a little bit famous, fame is worth a lot less. Aames can't simply launch a speaking tour or appear on a string of lighthearted reality shows about former stars -- that ship has sailed. No one cares anymore unless you're willing to give up every last secret, either in rehab or at the hands of a slightly sadistic financial guru. Hell, we hardly care about legitimate, current stars anymore, unless they have something to do with Brangelina's crumbling marriage or Jennifer Aniston's biological clock.

So Aames is forced to face the music, just like a regular broke person would: He has to move out of his house (which the bank now owns), he has to find an apartment he can afford, and he has to get a real job. After looking into taxidermy school (too expensive, with too little annual income to warrant the expense) and becoming an outdoor guide (Aames isn't quite fit or agile enough to manage it), Kelley helps Aames find a job doing custom woodworking for a construction company.

At first, watching Aames run a table saw over a big piece of plywood is unnerving, like seeing Vito of "The Sopranos" escape to New Hampshire to try to take a construction job, only to find that honest work is so foreign to him that he'd rather return to New Jersey and risk death than face the daily grind.

But Aames looks satisfied at the end of his first day on the job. And even though he generally comes across as angry and entitled and narcissistic and not all that charming, it's nice to see the man taking some satisfaction in his remaining marketable skill. It's also satisfying to see Aames make amends with his wife and daughter, even if it is partially for the benefit of the show's narrative arc. However staged it might be, once Aames moves into a small apartment, thoroughly divested of the big house and all the stuff he can't really afford, he looks genuinely relieved.

"I've never had anybody confront me on that level," Aames says, echoing what is probably a common experience for child stars after a lifetime of encountering unconditional positive regard from autograph seekers and greedy opportunists alike.

But now Aames has a whole new life, earning an honest living using his own two hands! Could this really be that rare bit of pop culture that ultimately points to the immense satisfaction that comes from a hard day's work? Not a chance. Later, a VH1 publicist mentions in passing that Aames has become – wait for it -- a financial planner.

The real moral to this story? If you're going to fail, fail spectacularly enough and with enough media coverage that you can build an entire business around it. Because in the age of the comeback, every humiliation is just a branding opportunity in disguise. 

Just taking it by the numbers, Vanity Fair writer Nancy Jo Sales points out that, from March to October, Jon and Kate have starred on the covers of 50 tabloids, dwarfing even Brad and Angelina. Given that the only thing that qualified the couple to be broadcast into American living rooms on a weekly basis was once having the good -- or abysmally poor -- fortune to give birth to two sets of multiples, it’s astonishing they’ve made it this far. How, Sales asks, did “two average parents from rural Pennsylvania” become “the biggest celebrity story of the year”?

The answer, as Sales writes it, is fascinating, perhaps even to those who feel an uncontrollable burst of nausea when the remote accidentally coasts across yet another “E! True Hollywood Special.” It’s hard to think of any family who could more perfectly embody our current obsessions: There’s the general obsession with mommy culture, and the specific rise in fertility treatments and multiple births. Like Obama, their children are biracial (Sales points out that the show is especially popular with Asians, and one can’t help but think that Heene, whose wife is Japanese, may have thought of this as a bonus to his hypothetical show as well). There’s the divorce, with the -- alleged -- soap-opera twists (she’s screwing the bodyguard! He’s screwing the baby sitter and the plastic surgeon’s daughter!) And there’s also a shrewd business story: How does one turn one’s everyday life into a multimillion-dollar career?

Kate Gosselin, in particular, seems to be a walking advertisement for the ways a sprinkling of magical celebrity pixie dust can bring about a literal physical transformation. When the show began, Sales writes, she was a “dowdy, sweatpants-wearing mama hen” -- one, we might point out, who had recently carried sextuplets. Now, thanks to a little surgical intervention and an army of stylists, she looks “very much like a celebrity -- from her tanned, trim body to her curiously asymmetrical blond hairdo, now so iconic as to be the model for a popular Halloween wig.” (Jon, for his part, got hair plugs). This past year, tabloids seem to have taken sadistic glee in printing the unflattering earlier photos side-by-side with ones depicting her in an orange bikini or bug-eyed glasses, as if to create a “Before” and “After” montage: See, the message seems to be, she wasn’t even pretty! But with a tummy tuck and a couple of million, anyone can look like Posh Spice! Ladies and gentleman, let’s hear it for the awesome democratic power of celebrity.

It was Kate, not Jon, who, from the beginning, was unapologetic about shilling her family on TV for the money. Yes, it takes a lot of cash to raise eight children, and before she signed with TLC she had already become “controversial” in Pennsylvania after she sued Medicaid to demand more compensation for a baby nurse. But even before the divorce, viewers seemed to freak out over Kate’s bossiness and belittling of her husband. “In an era of confusion about gender roles in marriage,” writes Sales, “Kate was unapologetically wearing the pants.” Gail Collins even went so far as to diagnose Jon as the spouse who was suffering from the “feminine problem that has no name that Betty Friedan wrote about in 1963.” Kate was the star while Jon, the laid-off I.T. guy, described himself as “Mr. Mom,” staying home with the kids while his wife went back out on book tour. He was the depressed housewife. Or as Kate put it, “I’m the cook, he’s the waitress.” “Waiter,” corrected Jon, glumly.

Although I obviously applaud, in theory, the idea of being a good businesswoman, the nature of the business -- broadcasting the lives of one’s small children, with an extra dollop of frisson coming from having a relationship that showed “friction from the start” in the words of Figure 8 producer Bill Hayes -- has given me pause from the beginning of the show. And I hope it’s not a blow to solidarity with womankind for me to say that, on the rare occasions I did watch the show in the earlier seasons -- my mom became addicted -- I was turned off by Kate’s general nastiness and control freakishness toward her husband and children, a quality I find resolutely unappealing in people of either gender. (I also find it disturbing that some people have seen these qualities as just another part of being a “busy mom.”) But when the couple’s story evolved from filming trips to the dog breeder to stage-managing a divorce, a curious thing happened: While the “business” expanded into an empire beyond even the most ambitious reality TV producer’s wildest dreams, the businesswoman seemed, for a time, to lose the P.R. war.

Weirdly enough, though Jon was the one who first admitted to having an affair (he later accused Kate of striking the first blow of infidelity by sleeping with her bodyguard, which she denies), according to tabloid editors, most readers sympathized with him. Meanwhile, the Gosselin “brand” -- a term that Kate is more comfortable with than Jon, who allegedly told a friend that his wife would only agree to go to marriage counseling with Dr. Phil, who, not surprisingly, was more concerned with keeping “the brand intact” than solving their marital woes -- went through the roof. When they were just a family with a bunch of kids, the TLC show was enough. But once the divorce hit, the scandal itself became the family business. Suddenly, as Ginia Bellafante, the New York Times TV critic told Sales, it was a story “completely suited to a multi-platform world”: “You can’t just watch ‘Jon and Kate’ on television and understand it anymore. You have to participate in it on all these different levels -- tabloids, news shows, talk shows, the blogosphere. ‘Jon and Kate’ became unintentionally brilliant because it demanded so much other consumption to find out what was ‘real.’”

In some ways, Jon and Kate were the perfect celebrity couple for our depressing, broke-ass recession year: Unlike, say, Brad and Angelina, or other celebrities who have plenty of other ways to earn their livelihood, their brand grew in direct proportion to how thoroughly they trashed their own lives. (“Brad and Angelina try to be discreet,” says an editor at In Touch magazine, “while Jon and Kate serve it to you on a platter.”) “I’m running a business -- hello?” Kate says to Sales, in her hotel room, right after taking a call from Kelly Ripa, and right before the reporter convinces her that a shopping trip for toys at FAO Schwartz might be a better plan than going for sushi at Nobu. But the most depressing part of their story is not the cavorting on yachts and beer pong contests, or the endlessly scripted crying fests on talk shows. It’s that the business wouldn’t exist in the first place if someone hadn’t decided to pay them a lot of money for the rest of us to watch while they parent their children. That part of the business, sadly, seems to be the one thing they don’t have a lot of time left to do. 

But let's not judge these sound-bite-spewing tattletales too harshly. Because we all hold grudges, don’t we? Sure, we pretend not to, with our therapy-speak about "That's all in the past," and "I wish him the best" and "I would send the motherfucker a congratulatory wedding present if I knew where the shameless gutter rat had crawled off to."

Let's face it: It's tough to let go of the past completely, or we wouldn't collect a colorful assortment of Facebook frenemies or Google the ex-girlfriends of long-lost ex-boyfriends to see how their boob jobs have weathered the storm of the childbearing years.

If Michael Jordan, the best basketball player in the history of the game and also one of the hottest men on the planet, can still relive the rage of being left off the Sports Illustrated cover more than two decades ago, how can mere mortals like you and me be expected to forgive and forget?

Revenge may be pathetic, but that doesn't mean it's not sweet. And these days, it comes with a big, fat paycheck attached.

The Russell Index
The vengeful avengers of the world found their natural leader last week when "Survivor: Samoa" premiered and one of the players, Russell, announced his intention to make everyone in the game, including his teammates, miserable.

Naturally, longtime fans of "Survivor" (8 p.m. Thursdays on CBS) assumed that Russell was making the usual big claims to utter ruthlessness, just like the countless other players over the years who sounded just like Ming the Merciless until it came time to making kissy-face with some cuddly fellow player. Even Johnny Fairplay, who lied and said his grandmother died to win sympathy from his fellow contestants, wasn't openly unkind to anyone else in the game. Hell, even card-carrying sociopath Richard Hatch, who lamented repeatedly that he despised his opponents, walked around naked despite groans of protest, and eventually did hard time for tax fraud, never really rocked the "Survivor" boat all that vigorously.

Surely, Russell was just another poser to the sociopathic crown.

Next thing you know, though, Russell is secretly emptying the water out of all his teammates' canteens while they're sleeping, even stealing one teammate's sock and setting it on fire. Then he runs around forming "exclusive" alliances with three women on his team at once. "My strategy is to be able to have a secret alliance with each one of these dumb girls," he explains. "I got an alliance with the dumb short-haired blonde, the even-dumber long-haired blonde, and the dark-haired girl. I like to call it my Dumbass Girl Alliance."

Next, Russell tells his teammates that he lived in New Orleans when Katrina hit. "I grabbed my axe, because as a fireman, one thing you learn is, when you go in something, you have to be able to get out." Then he gets to the sad part: He lost his German shepherd, Rocky, to the flood. His teammates gasp! How terrible.

"I never lived in New Orleans, I'm not a fireman, I've never even had a German shepherd," Russell tells the camera afterward. "I'm really a multimillionaire. I own an oil company in Houston. I'm not here for the money. I'm only here to show people how easy it is to win this game."

Yes, "Survivor" fans, this is the bona fide vengeful dickhead that we've been waiting for all these years. Because we all want to know: Can you be a complete asshole and still win at the game of "Survivor"? Russell seems to think so. "I plan on making it as miserable as possible for everybody. I figure that if I can control how they feel, I can control how they think."

But the question remains: Who is Russell trying to avenge with these random acts of assholitude? Is he angry at the entire universe? And why is he telling everyone about everything he does?

Although Russell is mean and claims to be rich, it remains to be seen how smart he is. Not surprisingly, within the first few days of the game, he's already made an enemy in Betsey, a cop who quickly surmises that he isn't trustworthy. He also raises a lot of hackles by pulling too many different players aside to talk to them in private. In this game, such a notable lack of discretion might end up being a big problem.

On the other hand, in the second week of the game, Russell finds the immunity idol without any clues – he just looks inside a hollow tree near camp. He pretends to cooperate with teammate Ben, whose nasty, blatantly racist remarks about a fellow player make him a natural rival to Russell's sociopathic crown. But Russell chuckles behind the scenes about how Ben is losing favor with the team.

Russell will probably go reasonably far, but he doesn't seem likely to bring home the million-dollar prize to add to his huge stack of cash. But in the game of life? Russell is guaranteed to win big, because never before at any time in history has it been more lucrative to be a vengeful.

Wake up, little Suze!
Just look at Suze Orman, who takes revenge on money itself every single Saturday morning on CNBC by making us all her captive slaves, doomed to spend the balance of our days socking money into a retirement account, never, ever spending so much as a few dollars on something frivolous or pointless without quickly calculating the hundreds of retirement dollars we're losing when we do.

Now personally, I love Suze Orman. I don't know what money ever did to her to make her so mad, and I don't even care. Sure, she slept in her car for a while and probably pawned her mother's one pair of dentures and dolled out sexual favors for spare change. Who didn't? All I know is that Suze Orman is disgusted with the rampant wasting of money and crappy financial planning that goes on out there, and when you watch her, you'll be disgusted, too --- with yourself!

Mmm, sweet self-loathing, nectar of the gods!

Now, I don't expect all of you to savor the warm, chewy goodness of self-hatred quite as much as I do. All I know is that, even during these troubled times, in this economy, when we can all become instantly depressed after a simple trip to the grocery store, there's nothing better at the end of the day than opening up an icy cold Peroni (that's imported Italian beer I can't afford), taking a sweet sip, firing up "The Suze Orman Show" on my TiVo and listening to Suze berate ordinary human beings with even less financial sense than you and me. It boggles the mind, but they're out there, ready to purge us of our guilt over our own crappy decisions and nonexistent eight-month emergency funds.

My recent favorite was the guy who wanted to blow his life savings just to upgrade his fiancée's engagement ring to a tacky three-carat monster. Suze tells him he's an idiot, flat-out, all the while calling him "boyfriend."

But speaking of boyfriend, Suze's favorite type of caller is Monica, the hapless woman who cosigned her ex-boyfriend's car loan and now pays $950 a month to finance his BMW, which is now in her possession.

"Nine hundred and fifty dollars a month. What kind of a BMW did he buy, an $80,000 or $90,000 car?!" Suze asks, incredulously. "All right, before I tell you how to solve this or whatever, what were you thinkin'?! You wanted to have a boyfriend and possibly a husband who wanted to drive a fancy shmancy car, and he needed his girlfriend to cosign for him?"

I love it when even Suze's mind is blown at how one casual, careless decision can lead to total financial ruin. Thanks to the fact that, if the car is repossessed, Monica will end up owing $40k with no car to show for it, Suze advises her to file for bankruptcy.

Suze's right, money can be a ruthless bastard. But she's not about to let money off the hook for what it did to her. She's going to spend every second of her free time grinding money's face into the rug until it cries "Uncle!" Isn't it unfair how some people's secret demons make them rich, instead of just making them fat and twitchy like the rest of us?

"Oh, I get it," said my 13-year-old stepson during a recent broadcast, when Suze got to the part about not funding your kids' college funds and not even paying for their guitar lessons unless you're already maxing out your retirement contributions. "Suze Orman thinks it's stupid to give your kids money, at all! Don't teach your kid to play guitar. Save it all for yourself!"

"No, honey, she's saying that unless you want your decrepit, smelly, incontinent daddy to move into your den and hog your PlayStation for the rest of your life, unless you want to wipe his chin and empty his bedpan every few hours, he'd better get smart and start socking away retirement money immediately."

Ahh! It feels so good to talk tough about money, even when it makes everyone hate your guts.

Going back to Cali
Speaking of everyone hating your guts, finally we come to David Duchovny's Hank Moody, the loathsome Lothario at the center of Showtime's mediocre, unfunny half-hour dramedy "Californication" (premieres 9 p.m. Sunday). Hank Moody isn't vengeful so much as just horny and pathetic. So why does his patheticness feel like such an act of vengeance on humanity?

Maybe because it's supposed to be sort of amusing and clever the way Hank wanders around getting drunk, flatly insulting people and sleeping with their girlfriends. But why would he do that if he weren't seeking revenge? It's unclear.

And why, if he's really a writer, does everything out of his mouth sound so unoriginal and clichéd? Why is he so repetitive in his aggressive streaks? Why is he so boring, for a sociopath?

He flicks his cigarette at a bicyclist who's hogging the road, only to find out he's the professor father of his daughter's friend. Get it? He's a rebel, an outlaw, the kind of devil-may-care stud who hates tree-hugging professorial types!

"Hey ladies, no Mary Jane." He tells his daughter and her friend in front of the friend's parents, "I'm like a drug-sniffing dog with a hard-on for justice." John Phillips aside, what father uses the word "hard-on" when addressing his daughter? Villains can be so entertaining – Al Swearengen of "Deadwood" is the first and best example that springs to mind. But thanks to the tone-deaf writing here, Hank Moody is not only far less interesting than your average drunken, over-the-hill frat boy, but he's also far more repugnant.

"I just flexed my cock muscle," Hank tells one lover. "That's pretty cool, huh?"

Maybe this is Showtime's way of avenging its loyal audience, the fans who tune in for "Weeds" and "United States of Tara" and "Nurse Jackie" despite the fact that their flaws seem to multiply, week by week, like drug-resistant bacteria.

Or maybe the shallow, wilted, lowest-common-denominator lameness of "Californication" is meant to make those other shows appear witty and clever by comparison (and it most certainly does).

Who can tell? Because revenge, like a fine wine, is complicated. It's also sweet – even a little too fruity for most palates – with a strong finish of regret and self-loathing. So while the vengeful avengers of the world gain fame and fortune from their vengeance, let us all savor the honor and dignity and extreme poverty that come from keeping our fat mouths shut.

Ellen?

Wait a minute.

Ellen DeGeneres is funny. She’s likable. She loves music. She’s personable and passionate. She’s a show business veteran with her own beloved daytime talk show. To quote Max Bialystock -- where did we go right?

Not everyone is thrilled with the choice, however. Let’s ask the blogosphere!

Responding to yesterday's news, "Idol" fan site mjsbigblog promptly fumed “So, is she going to be a real judge or some kind of joke? She’s a comedian, not a singer or a musician,” adding “She was terrible as guest judge on ‘So You Think You Can Dance.’ Her shtick wasn’t even funny.” And on EW.com, Michael Slezak admitted he “greeted the news … with the sudden urge to drive a fork into my thigh and wake up from a strange and horrible nightmare,” noting that he too found her SYTYCD stint ominously shticky.

It’s possible that all the things that make DeGeneres an adept comic and host are the same ones that would thwart her as a critic. Simon Cowell, after all, thrives as a judge on every  competition program in existence precisely because he’s such a brutal prick. And sure, given the relative uselessness of the other two judges, it might have been interesting to have a flashy loose cannon around to throw barbs in the direction of the show business delusional. 

Instead, DeGeneres seeks to fill the role of American Everywoman. Taping her show yesterday, she said, “I'm looking at it as a person who is going to buy the music and is going to relate to that person. So I'm hopefully going to be that voice of what we're all doing at home.”

She’s more than that though – she’s the woman who outed herself on the cover of Time magazine when it was still potential career suicide to do so. The one who hosted the Emmy awards with humor and humanity mere weeks after the tragedies of September 11 and Katrina. Who both charmed and inspired when she gave the Tulane commencement speech this year. 

She may not have Paula’s penchant for slurred non-sequiturs or Simon’s acid tongue, but what she lacks in loopy unpredictability and mental cruelty she compensates for with a steely competence that only appears breezy. Anyone who can hold her own against John McCain will probably figure out how to share the spotlight with the other judges and – more crucially – keep it shining most brightly on the contestants. She’s already got her own show. She knows that “Idol” is ours. She’ll be great. And that’s reason enough to dance.

He surrounded himself with music and women, but his most notorious companion was drugs. The Philadelphia native learned early by example -- his father was a verbally abusive addict who eventually died of AIDS. By the time he was 20, Goldstein had already weathered a stint at a rehab center (where he said he was beaten and starved) and been in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous. It was then that he first began the music career that would both distinguish him and keep him dangerously close to the vices he fought so hard to resist.

He first gained attention as a turntablist for the Los Angeles group Crazy Town, whose 2001 hit "Butterfly" went to number one in 15 countries. It was your basic angry white boy rap-rock, but the band's dark, seductive rhythms hold up satisfyingly well nearly a decade later. (His bandmate Seth "Shifty" Binzer has spent the past few years on and off recovery-themed reality shows with varying success.)

Goldstein's main fame, however, came as a solo act. He quickly distinguished himself, scratching on albums by Madonna and Will Smith and performing last year as a member of the house band at the MTV VMAs. He claimed to have been clean for the past 11 years, saying that the turning point in his life was when someone told him after an AA meeting, "I promise you, if you stay sober, your career will go further than you ever imagined possible."

Whether or not he stayed sober from that moment until Friday afternoon (if a drug overdose is, indeed, what caused his death), we may never know. But he did attain more than he'd likely ever imagined. He also remained consistently, generously determined to help others. His friend Justin Hoffman told the New York Post on Saturday that he "saved my life. I was dying, I was suicidal, and was down to maybe 130 pounds. He reached out to me, talked to me for hours. He'd be there every single time I would call … He just wanted to help people out."

He had cheated death several times already before it caught up with him. There was a failed suicide attempt at age 24, when the gun he had shoved into his mouth refused to fire. There were numerous bouts with drugs. There was an obesity problem so severe he eventually topped over 300 pounds (he later got gastric bypass surgery). Then, on September 19, 2008, a jet he was traveling in crashed on takeoff, killing four passengers and critically injuring him and ex- Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker, leaving both with third-degree burns. His physical and emotional recovery took their toll, and he confessed recently, "There was no reason why I should have lived … and they didn't. It is something I struggle with every day." He was also, by some accounts, reeling from his recent breakup with his girlfriend, American Apparel model Hayley Wood.

And he admitted that he was still fighting the temptations of his addictions. Discussing "Gone Too Far," the series set to debut on MTV in October (the fate of the series is now in limbo), he sat in a car holding a crack pipe and told the Associated Press, "Honestly, it's terrifying. I am a recovering drug addict, and … when I see it and I'm in their room and the paraphernalia and the whole lifestyle and everything, I still 11 years later have that little thing in my head that starts thinking, 'Oh, where's that? I wonder what that is?'" (See video, below.)

His final message, on his Twitter feed, was a quote from a Grandmaster Flash track: "New york, new york. Big city of dreams, but everything in new york aint always what it seems." (sic) It's a sad, self-written epitaph for a man who had picked himself up more than most of us do with twice the amount of time on this earth, a man who recently told MTV, "This is my one chance. I owe it as a human who's sober to say something to them. So that's my job. That's what I'm there for." He spent his final weeks trying to spare others from the demons of drug addiction, but in the end, it seems the one person Adam Goldstein couldn't save was himself.