I told my family I
think about killing myself sometimes eight months ago. It is always in there
like looking at my own nose. There was a perfunctory we would rather you not,
but a summarily understood exhalation that there is little any of us can or
will do. So it is, as before, and for these decades, I am on my own. Fart. To
be or not to be. I think about work, unemployment, America, personal
relationships, art…I figure write a few books and when the gas sputters out of
the bank tank say goodbyes. I don't want to say goodbyes. I never have.
I manufacture a story that the kid wants something to do with me, but that’s mostly bullshit. Occasionally I get to text. We have a call. Laugh. it's god damn beautiful, but compartmentalized.
I manufacture a story that the kid wants something to do with me, but that’s mostly bullshit. Occasionally I get to text. We have a call. Laugh. it's god damn beautiful, but compartmentalized.
There is this radiant
numb sort of perpetual weight. I cannot afford
to get a diagnosis or drugs or a person to talk to about it because why bother.
I tried the shrink. It didn’t shrink. The irony in America is if you seek professional help and get diagnosed the check boxes on forms change, employers or reports or people who want to extricate you from the subways or court proceedings get notified and the gyro of the world starts the pariah stigma of labeling the crazy one.
This is my fight with the voice that is gleeful that this could all end. In all the meditation and trying there is a voice in the subtext of everything that just says it is all illusion. None of this is real and every waking day requires theatrical performance to conjure the self-deceit about why anyone would want to be alive. I have my reasons. I choose to stay.
This is my fight with the voice that is gleeful that this could all end. In all the meditation and trying there is a voice in the subtext of everything that just says it is all illusion. None of this is real and every waking day requires theatrical performance to conjure the self-deceit about why anyone would want to be alive. I have my reasons. I choose to stay.
I stare into the ledger
of joy. I look out across the world. I feel the awfulness people do to each
other. The ooze baby of our self-hatred elected to the throne in D.C. I taste
the steel in my mouth of the dehumanized corporate mechanics. The lack of
kindness feels lethal like a big fucking snuff film with an orgy scene before
the grand finale for the march of the pigs.
I do not want to be
here for this. Imagining faking it for another person feels Sisyphean. Then I
think about the child in me, the one who cannot imagine anyone wanting to stay around.
I confront the paradox doom loop of depression repellent, the contagion,
the way the kid talked to me, the way her mother did, the way my family looked
at me so bored when I told them I think about killing myself. Hard
to convince me inside they do not feel the same. All faking it,
struggling, stirring the roux that this world is worth staying in if we can
just lie to each other well enough.
Maybe we each find
different drugs. I wonder if I ever had the capability to love, like really be
in love, if I could get there. I feel like my ankle is roped to a hole and it’s
just a matter of time. So meeting new people or talking about it is just a
disservice to others. Whatever illusion other people can muster, I hope other
people can keep it, because the rawness of all of this is just too much. Then I think that's all bullshit of course I could, I just need the right season.
I have not felt safe in
years. I think about if there were suicide stores where we could just go get an
injection or a breathe helium and off ourselves, millions would do it. It would
be the only thing to get the Orange Slut off the news. All the world would need
is a tipping point and the bodies would just be leaping into pits to end this
farce. Fuck it humanity, if you don’t want to be here…if you are this cruel, I
am exhausted and an asshole. I am no hero, no voice, a shitty writer whose best
talent of saying no to his demons is quavering.
I miss the sunlight. But I know it exists. I stay for the sunlight behind the clouds, knowing as Eric Draven taught high school me, it can't rain all the time.