"My heart is broken. You can give your kids everything they could ever want in their entire lives and they can still turn against you."

Wrote Tommy Lee, formerly the drummer for Mötley Crüe and formerly the husband of Pamela Anderson, the mother of the son who punched him in the mouth that looked brutally swollen in the photograph Lee captioned with that quote.

My reactions, in order:

1. After reading the quote out loud, I said, out loud, "Maybe you shouldn't have given him so much."

2. Maybe you should have given him something other that what you think is "everything [he] could ever want."

3. Lee is such an asshole to take his swollen lip out of context and whine about his relationship with his son to the world even as he is further damaging the relationship by disparaging the son and defaming him as violent. Tommy Lee himself has had violence problems. He spent 6 months in jail after pleading guilty to beating up Pamela Anderson. And the son — Brandon Lee, 21 — says that he hit his father in self-defense. So it's at least complicated. Don't take it public and hurt your own son in a self-serving effort to enlist fans on your side!

4. Was Lee influenced by the #MeToo movement, in which some women have successfully used photographs of injured faces to bolster their credibility? Most notably: "Rob Porter's ex-wife Colbie Holderness is pictured in a photo from 2005, when she says Porter gave her a black eye on a trip to Italy."

5. The incident happened right after Pamela Anderson did a TV interview and talked about the old abuse. It's possible that the dispute with the son was related to that. Perhaps the son intended to aggravate the father into doing something stupid that would elevate Anderson's story. But Brandon also defended himself with a punch (it seems) and that left a mark that enabled Tommy to make a social media move that's more commonly associated with women.

Checking in with Tommy.

I read the the NYT "Fashion & Style" article about Tommy Lee. Here's a list of things I learned:

Why the spousal abuse that made Pamela Anderson call the police and led him to plead guilty wasn't, per Tommy, really as bad as you might think: he was wearing Ugg slippers when he kicked her.

What jail was like for Tommy: as a celebrity, he was put in "a K-10, a keep-away ... so you're ... in solitary, basically, for months."

What Tommy said to himself while in solitary confinement: "I'm going to take advantage of the silence in prison and just chill and check in with Tommy."

Name of the memoir that emerged from his period of reflection, which is also the name of his house: "Tommyland."

Additional product of his voyage of personal transformation, because a memoir is no longer enough for a celebrity of a certain dimension: a six-part network reality show, in which he goes to college at the University of Nebraska.

How the NYT indicates that the word Tommy Lee just used was not "dating": "the term he used was a bit more brusque."

Crude expression the Times doesn't mind using: "the career is in the toilet."

Person Tommy is considering working with who has toilet problems of his own: Lenny Kravitz.

Quote from a professor: "You lose whatever identity you have and become an appendage of Pam Anderson, or an appendage of all the infinite references to your name. You become the empty center of all those references."

Quote from Tommy: "I was like, dude, I've done it all. There's really nothing else to do. I mean, unless they come out with something new I haven't tried. Which I doubt."