If I ever commit suicide, it will be a thought-provoking and mind-blowing piece of performance art. No, I am no joking. Nor am I considering it any time soon. Too much stuff yet to do!

I've never been suicidal (I get homicidal urges instead... but more like the "I crush your head" kind than detailed plots of trenchcoated revenge). But I have been the suicide watch for a friend or two. I'm glad I was there for them, but I wouldn't want to be there again. Suicide's an incredibly heavy decision to make, and one which has never added up as an equation for me. I mean, I can always just walk the earth helping people and having adventures like Jules from Pulp Fiction talked about, right? Even if I've got nothing left in life, there's a whole world out there.

Maybe some day, I'll make this whole comedy thing work. And maybe I'll finally be able to put all my thoughts about suicide (not suicidal thoughts!) into a routine that makes people laugh. Something that people watch when they're in a suicidal ambivalence that says, "Hey, it's bad, but think about all the stuff you'd be missing." Or something better than that that I haven't thought of yet. I'd like to think that this is the underlying purpose of comedy; it's certainly there behind every one of my jokey comments on this site. Lighten the burden a little bit, say: "yeah, we're all in it, up to our ankles or worse," and generally reflect that every coin has two sides. People are still going to commit suicide. Heck, in Futurama, they have streetcorner booths for it. As we move towards greater personal freedom, that's a freedom we're going to maintain (expand?). But the goal is to make it so people never feel they have to commit suicide.

Humanity is a process. It is a process of gradually freeing ourselves from a purely reactive, instinctual level of living to exist in a more intentional, thoughtful decision-making. Romantics call this "controlling our own destiny." As it's a process, we'll likely never get all the way there. At the base of it, we remain chemical reactions—albeit of increasing complexity. All of us wrestle with control: over our life's direction, over our baser urges, over our very nature. And, in essence, this is what many suicides are about. The organism asserting its right to secede from the superorganism of humanity. To defeat its own purpose as a cog in the reproductive cycle. This may manifest as a message to one's parents that they can't control you; but underneath, or on another level if you prefer, the message is the same: I am aborting my own program, in defiance of every natural instinct of self-preservation. But—and this is why I've never realistically engaged in suicidal ideation—the "joke" is on them, because the decision is still born of the same organic programming that they're wrestling with (known to us as instinct, family, society, etc.). So it's a false sense of control. And sadly ironic for those who do it because they feel they have no choice. They have made a choice, within the bounds of their organic programming. That may not seem like a choice; I did it because I am a chemical reaction obeying physical laws. But it's the only kind of choice we have.

This is my long-winded and philosophical (moar liek sophistry amirite?) way of saying to anyone who is feeling suicidal because they're out of options, because they have no other choice: You do have a choice. Unlike many, I don't think of suicide itself as a bad thing. But I do think it's a bad thing to make a choice without evaluating all the data, or to make a choice out of a desperate feeling that one has no choices. So if you're going to do it, think about why you're going to do it, and be honest with yourself. This is our greatest asset as humans: our ability to think. Our second greatest asset (both born out of and given birth to the first) is communication. Reach out to the people in your life, and ask them to evaluate your decision. Have them check your emotional math, see if you've missed anything. If you're going to commit suicide, do it from conviction, not ambivalence. And before you go, ask yourself: Is there any way my life could be used to help ease the pain of others?

Which is why when I die, I hope it's entertaining or thought-provoking. I'd love to leave a real headscratcher for the ages. Wouldn't we all like to die as we lived?

politicalfilter

The bailout is sounding less and less like a good idea these days. Too big to fail means what exactly? That if the companies go bankrupt, the government loses tax revenue? Rather than a sound investment, the bailout sounds like throwing good money after bad. Rather than buoying up these companies til they can get on their feet, it's more like nursing an unrepentant bank robber back to health. Is it the unemployment issue? It seems to me like the money could be better invested in extending unemployment and medical benefits to those who lose their jobs in related collapses (AIG and all the companies that depend on it), while also funneling tons of money into the SBA so that those with management experience can afford to start their own companies (what with credit being otherwise scarce these days).

It just seems like a colossal mismanagement based on a rushed decision and a need to appear to be "doing something." Let them fail. But make it so that no company is ever "too big to fail" again. There needs to be a disincentive against short-term thinking. These companies undermined themselves and our nation with their short-sightedness. Why are we paying for them again?

I can dream up schemes when I'm sitting in my seat
I don't see any flaws til I get to my feet
I wish I never
woke up this morning
Life was easy
when it was boring

I could make a mark if it weren't so dark
I could be replaced by any bright spark
But darkness makes me fumble
for a key
to a door
that's wide open...

Instead of worrying about my clothes
I could be someone that nobody knows
I wish I never
woke up this morning
Life was easy
when it was boring