suicide weather

inside the locked room

There was a meme or puff of viral detritus floating the ether last month about men and the Roman Empire. Or specifically how often does the average male brain contemplate the Romans. I heard the question and shrugged yeah. All the time. At least once a day my thoughts land on the phrase bread and circuses. Nero and his fiddle. The aqueducts. The eerily straight narrow roads. The crucifixion. Pontius Pilate. The long dull slog that was the collapse of that empire. But what else do you think about on the regular. Spin the wheel and I think about the dead sea scrolls. The book of Enoch. I think about Pluto and its loss of planetary status. I think about the simple elegant rules of chess. I think about the girl with gold eyes I fell in love with in the eleventh grade and how we spent the next two years taking turns breaking the other’s heart. I think about dark matter and the odd occult rituals performed at the site of the big collider in Switzerland. I think of Sisyphus shrugging and pushing his rock up that hill. I think of Kate Bush. I think about Ted Kaczynski shivering muttering alone in that shack. I think of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods. I think about the last time my ex kissed me dizzy on the stairs. I think about how and why I lost her. I think about the dial tone on a dead phone line and wonder how and why they chose that particular sound. I think of W. B. Yeats and the ever widening gyre. The chaos that comes when the falcon can’t hear the falconer. I think of yellow wallpaper. I think about finding my dog Josie dead in the grass on a damp cool morning before school. I think of the fist of shame in my belly when I realized she died alone. I think about the infield fly rule and I hear Vin Scully’s voice. I think of the day my little brother and I got lost on the streets of Milan and somehow found our way home. I was so worried I might lose him in the fury and crush of traffic and foreign voices that I was physically sick. I think about turtles and matchbox cars and a long marble hallway. I think of walking on rooftops. I think of attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I think of my first blackout in New Orleans and how I came out of it sitting on a bench on the wrong side of the river. How I watched an actual chicken peck around in the dust for a minute before I realized I wasn’t dreaming. How I lurched upright and realized my feet were bloody. My feet were full of glass and I’d lost my girlfriend somewhere sometime in the long empty dark before losing myself. I have no idea what I got up to in those hours and I shudder to think of it to this day but I wonder sometimes if that was the first time I slipped into another timeline. 

I think about the Spanish Inquisition. I think about those nazi rabbits in Watership Down. I think about Guantanamo Bay. I think about Pink Floyd and the grim telephone operator in The Wall. I think of the impossibly blue water off the coast of Cyprus. I think of poached eggs on toast. I think about Plato’s cave. I think about Holden’s kid sister Phoebe. I think about Mr Orange rehearsing his borrowed anecdote on the roof. I think about the last time I was knocked unconscious and wonder if the same version of self took the wheel when I came out of the black. I think of Atticus Finch and the talented Tom Ripley. I think about soccer and suicide and the civil war. I think of Robin Williams and Hunter Thompson. I think of Brandon Lee telling Darla morphine is bad for you. I think of Mary Shelley. I think about monsters. I try not to think of the phrase infinite jest. I think about cranial trauma and subjective continuity and the strange slow creeping fear that I will blink and slip out of this reality into one I don’t recognize. I think of a haunted hotel room in Nashville. I think about the collective hallucination that is free will. I think the voices that torment me when I’m manic. The bleak buzzing silence that haunts me when I’m not. I think about writer’s block and how sometimes my brain feels like a piano that’s been left on the back porch and is now impossible to tune. I think about entropy. I think about the slow drifting slide into dementia and wonder if I will recognize it when it comes for me. I think about the double slit experiment and what it says about reality. I think about the assisted euthanasia laws in Canada and the Netherlands. I think about Albert Camus and the only philosophical question that truly matters. 

I think about suicide dozens maybe hundreds of times per day. I rarely mention this to anyone because people tend to look at you sideways. I really don’t know how normal or not normal it is to think about suicide on the daily but I know that suicide numbers in this country are well past reckoning, beyond fathom. And they are on the rise. Roughly fifty thousand people kill themselves in America every year. If you factor in overdoses that number likely quadruples. The stat that breaks my heart is the veterans. Two of them every twenty-four hours. Day in day out. Two vets kill themselves every fucking day. And we almost never talk about it. Because depression is a down and suicide talk is a buzzkill. I don’t mean to make anyone uncomfortable. I don’t need anyone to pick up the phone and send the wellness cops to my door. I’ve been writing about depression and self-destruction for decades. How it feels and tastes and what it looks like from the inside. Depression is like falling down a well. Or rather depression is like waking up at the bottom of a well so lost and lonely you’d kill to have the chick from the Ring to keep you company. Depression is a massive weight crushing your chest. Depression is the buzz of murder hornets in your head. Depression feels like drowning, like disappearing. Depression feels like being buried alive.

The question of suicide is not how or why but why not. I religiously avoid balconies and bridges because the closer I come to the edge I feel the twitchy pull of gravity. The urge to fling myself into empty space is like metal on my teeth. I can taste that impulse and it seems to rise out of a subconscious place that I can’t control. My position is that dispatching oneself is the most honorable way to die because you get to choose the time and place. Hemingway shot himself in a boat, for instance. I have two guns in my house. One is an antique .22 squirrel rifle, dangerous only to the raccoons who troll my dog. The other is a little .380 Ruger. I keep it in a box at the back of my closet. The firing pin is removed. I keep it around because it might be handy when the undead rise to walk among us. Otherwise I rarely think about that gun because I know that I won’t shoot myself when the day comes. Because I believe that if there is a soul it’s tangled up in consciousness. There might well be traces of consciousness in bone marrow and mitochondria and microbial fauna and the nerve endings of our fingertips but the bulk of the operating system or the consciousness proper is housed in the gray matter and it feels absurd to think of violently blowing that apart. I would prefer to exit the coil from the blue depths of REM sleep but failing that would likely choose to slowly peacefully bleed out in a warm bath. I think of my mother reading that line and I feel a seasick sort of sorrow and shame but something tells me she already knows how my mind works. 

I realize too this is an unsettling and no doubt triggering subject and I apologize for not including a warning above but I don’t believe in them. Because the world outside your door is a trigger. The other humans are a trigger. The cloud above is a trigger. Because one of those fifty thousand walking suicide notes might be someone you know, someone you love. They might be your son or daughter, your brother. They might be your father. They might be anyone among us and I believe we should try to know how and what they’re thinking. And because while it may be fascinating to realize the man in your life thinks about the Roman Empire twice a day it’s equally horrifying and surely more useful to wonder what else he thinks about. And finally because if you’re familiar with my work you already know what sort of ride you’re in for. If you’re new here, welcome. I apologize too for my prolonged absence. I’ve been lost in my own head and sometimes it takes a minute to find my way out. And thank you to every one of you for sticking around. 

peace.