We’re not starting with the People’s Choice Awards today. Today we begin with Marilyn Manson and Johnny Depp, because I’ve just finished reading the Rolling Stone article Meg sent over earlier this week and it’s probably the best celebrity profile of the year, even though the year just started. Practically every paragraph is quotable. And provocative, intended to be provocative. Immediately. Because he starts talking about sex and how he never has sex without his underwear around his ankles since you never know if your house will be set on fire. Sex, by the way, or the “sexual congress”, as he puts it, must happen a minimum of five times a day. With his live-in girlfriend, Lindsay. By the end of the article, she confirms that they did indeed have sex more than five times that day and she’s so sore down there she might need an ice pack.

But Manson, as you know if you read this blog regularly, is not a regular character here. The reason he’s appearing today is because his friend, Johnny Depp, makes an appearance. Twice. And the way Manson describes their relationship is…

Everything.

Everything is confirmed.

In the present day, he's also spent a good bit of time hanging out with Johnny Depp, even going so far as to take up part-time residence in Depp's guesthouse in Hollywood. They apparently understand each other as few others can. Most literally, they're both low-talking mumblers who have found that they don't need words to communicate with each other. "We mumble like we're a mumbling chorus, and we finish sentences with hand gestures," says Manson. On a deeper level, they share certain fascinations and predilections. At one point, they tried to buy the gun that Hitler killed himself with. And neither can go to sleep unless a TV is on, with Manson's preference being "really loud and violent things."

They have matching tattoos, as well: on their wrists, the phrase no reason, and on their backs, "Charles Baudelaire, the flowers of evil, this giant skeleton thing," Manson once said. "It's kind of a secret. People say to us, 'Why did you get that?' And we say, 'No reason.' " And today he says, "Johnny's one of the only people I can talk to. I can't explain it other than we don't ever have to say anything, but we can't really say it to anyone else, either." Which means whatever it means, as is so often the case with Manson, but you get the drift. And maybe he will have more to say about that later.

He does. Later, when Depp comes up in the conversation, Manson takes it all back to high school. That’s their bond. They’re the cool kids, the older kids, the kings of the cafeteria:

"We like to consider ourselves 12th-graders, the guys with more experience than the ninth-graders, the ones that the girls want to f-ck. I mean, time and age are really irrelevant to me. Johnny is the same way. Sometimes, I think I'm trapped in the age that I started this. I'm trapped at 23." Or 14, of course, depending on the company. All of which would help to explain so much, including his occasional urge to shoplift, his most recent haul being a pair of sunglasses from the John Varvatos store, which he later told them about, "so technically it's not shoplifting," and a pack of spearmint gum from a CVS, which he says he "threw away and didn't even eat."

Aaaaand…that pretty much describes how we see Johnny Depp now. And what Vanessa Paradis had to live with. Can you feel Vanessa now? Can you understand the permanent eye roll that must have been her life for the last few years they were together? He and Manson, with their matching tattoos and secret language, and telepathic virtual laser brain notes, are more Taylor Swift than Taylor Swift herself. So OF COURSE he’s going to fall in love with a 25 year old. Because, Christ Jesus, who else could tolerate this? Not even Taylor Swift.

But seriously. You HAVE to read this. Click here and take your time.