The Black Mood

Well, Robin Williams smoked himself.  And now his family and friends are left to sweep up the wreckage. And people are saying "Oh I feel so bad for him." And every goddamn media outlet and website seems to be having a memorial for him.  And I feel like the only dude in the world looking at all this and saying to myself, "Man, FUCK that motherfucker."

Now, I don't want to come off as a troll, so let me explain my position.  I feel really bad for folks going through mental shit.  You can't escape from your own head, no matter what drink, drug or other pastime you partake in to get away from the ever-flying shrapnel inside your skull.  Eventually, it's just you and the little man who lives behind your eyes and takes care of the filing, going over all the reasons why you should or shouldn't pop the top of your head off with a shotgun.  Those nights, laying in bed and staring at the ceiling, imagining what it would be like to check out, permanently.  That is some awful, fucked-up shit.  I know.

We had found out, months later, that my best friend, Jim, had been planning to kill himself for quite a long time, almost a year.  About two months after he finally did, I was sitting in his room in the basement, sorting his notebooks and filing his poetry, story-fragments and a heap of other shit.  He had always been terrible about keeping his things in order; there were entire crates of papers, napkins with scribblings on them, receipts. Nothing of a specific, all-inclusive journal, save his drug journals that read more like a collection of hallucinatory ramblings and near-psychotic scrawlings that took up over four composition-style notebooks.  There was no note. No final, ultimate declaration of “fuck you!” to the world.  There were none of the warning signs that typically accompany a suicide and are frequently noticed only after the body is cold and in the ground. He was fine one day and then it would appear that he decided to hang himself from the rafters of his room.  His mother and sister found him, his face blue and his feet almost touching the ground.

About six months after the fact, I asked my father (who’s a cop) to see if he could find out what the official cause of death was.  He did (at least, he said he did), and he told me that it was strangulation.  Looking back on it now, I don’t know why I had to know that.  Perhaps it was that I had to know if he intended to die that night.  Strangulation meant (at least to me) that he had, as there were no marks on his fingers or neck that would indicate that he struggled to get out of the noose.  It didn’t matter one way or the other, he was still dead. He let himself die; he didn’t snap his neck while he was fucking around or making some kind of “cry for help.”

He had done that before, the “cry for help”-type thing. Actually, he did it a couple of times and got institutionalized for one such instance.  They put him on meds and he stopped all the bullshit for about a year.  He was loving life, hell, we both were.  Then one night I’m sitting in my room with two of my friends and my parents come down to tell me that the kid I knew for sixteen years, the kid who was closer to me than my own brother, had killed himself.

People always talk about warning signs. They talk about them as if every suicide is a textbook case.  They make it out so one would think that you could tell if someone was going to smoke himself just by noticing a few behavioral earmarks.  Not that I was shocked about the whole thing. Part of me always knew that Jim was gonna go out like that.  Sure, it was unpleasant and very, very sad.  But it was not shocking. I was more, well, pissed off that he would do something like that.  That prick! Now, we would never go to college together. We’d never again smoke a fat blunt on the reservoir overlooking Syracuse while trying to convince girls to go streaking with us.  We’d never get to go on that road-trip to Vegas. Now, it was all worm food.

Owen (the third member of our unholy little trinity) told me at the funeral that any thought, any inclination, that he might have once had of committing suicide was erased the moment he saw Jim’s body in that silver-gray metal box.  I didn’t say anything. I remember wanting to say “yeah, me too,” but that would have been bullshit.  I was constantly thinking about it.  Wanting to die became like wanting to be a rock star or a space ship captain when you’re ten years old; an unattainable wish.  I couldn’t let what happened to all of us following Jim’s death happen again because of me.  I didn’t like being alive, but I couldn’t kill myself.  I was always the leader: of my groups of friends, of my siblings and cousins.  I had a responsibility to keep it together and hold it down for all of them.  But I still wanted out.  If I died in some horrible accident, well, that would be different, right?  If I got shot or stabbed, that would be downright forgivable. That’s why I used to put myself in situations where shit like that might have gone down, and I almost succeeded in my endeavors on several occasions. 

Why don’t I still do that bad-assed shit like I used to? Mostly because I have reasons not to. At least I do now. 

I remember when it was “cool” to be fucked up in the head.  Stylish, like Kurt Cobain.  There was a group of kids at my high school (many of them were my friends) that compared psychological maladies and bragged about what meds they were on much like some kids would compare basketball shoes or clothing labels.  I look back on shit like that and I feel nauseated.  They acted so much like the preps they always claimed to hate.  In the '90’s, nothing was sincere, nothing was real and nothing was ever anybody’s fault.  You’re an asshole? Well it’s because of your upbringing or because of stuff that happened to you as a kid.  It wasn’t because you were just an asshole. I didn’t want to let my self be affected by what happened to me in the past.  I was who I was who I am. And it wasn’t until I wanted to change and actually confront those things that may have affected me, no matter how much I didn’t want them to, that I stopped aspiring, even passively, to becoming a corpse.

I found a reason to live. To not want to self-destruct.  And when you’re natural inclination has long been to fuck yourself up and try to hurt yourself, regardless of how you would do it, well, trying to get up and want to live is like trying to breathe underwater.  About as natural as a Chinese blonde.  That’s the hardest part.  Instead of aspiring to die, I wanted to live, and it felt very unnatural.  I wasn't used to it. It scared the shit out of me. But, I would rather face it and suffer all of those horrible fears and tribulations and pains of self-reinvention than end up like Jim.

For a person who, like me, doesn't get an afterlife, suicide is the ultimate sin.  The ultimate waste.  I see why the Catholics and the like call it the Unforgiveable Sin.  Only it isn't you going to hell for doing it.  It's your friends.  It's your family. It's every person you have ever had, or will ever have, a positive effect on, no matter how fleeting that effect is.  Your final act will be to inflict massive suffering and rob the world of a valuable resource: your potential.  That makes you a piece of fucking dogshit.

"But, Johnny," I hear you say, "Nobody loves me, I have no family, no friends, no one will give a fuck if I take myself out.  Why should I fucking bother."  My answer: Dude, there's nothing after this.  There's no halos, harps or fluffy, white clouds.  You don't get to come back as a hamster or a prince or any of that shit.  You pull the cord and you waste ANY CHANCE YOU HAD OF MAKING IT ANY BETTER.  People can change themselves and love and become loved.  I've seen it happen, many times in the most unexpected people.  Even if you don't feel better, you might do something, anything that might make someone else's life just a little better.  Fuck, just holding the door open for someone or giving someone a smoke or even just smiling at someone might make their lives just a tiny bit better that day.  It's worth living for that.

When I used to hang out on the 4chan boards, one of the Anons said it better and more succinctly than I ever could:

"I never got why people would kill themselves. So, if you want to die, you obviously don't give a shit.  Like, about anyone.  'Cause if there is anyone who loves you, you don't give a FUCK about them, or hurting them and if there's not, there's no one to give a shit about. 

So, instead of killing yourself, why don't you just get the fuck out?  Leave the basement, leave your house, leave the motherfucking country.  Go on an adventure.  Spend your time doing something awesome, like tracking down some terrorists.  Go be James Bond. Go fuck up a shark with a harpoon.  Danger?  Fuck that, you were going up against a 100% death rate before, you're being safe now.  Fuck EVERYTHING, man, the world is your oyster.

Sometimes I wish I was suicidal.  I'd pull the barrel out of my mouth and point it in the air, start a revolution, LIVE.  Move to Barcelona, hit the bars, bang some chicks.  STDs, who fucking gives a shit?

And then when I'm done, maybe I wouldn't want to kill myself, 'cause I've seen how beautiful this world is."

TLDR;  don't be weak.  Don't be a cunt.  Go be awesome. 

Ran a little long in this post.  Hopefully I'll have something more entertaining for the next time.  See you soon, kids.