WALKING ON THIN ICE

suicide – foto by Smith

Resumé

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

 – Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) from her 1925 poetry book Enough Rope

Dorothy Parker had several suicide attempts; she first tried by slashing her wrists in 1923. She also tried overdosing on the sedative Veronal, consuming a bottle of shoe polish, and taking sleeping powder; she finally quit after her last attempt in 1932.

I know two folk who have killed themselves – my 30 year old younger brother Cat blew his brains out in the back of his pickup in 1987 to teach his wife a lesson for leaving him for a rock musician, and our artist friend Bill Wolf hung himself last year at age 61 down in Oaxaca to escape cancer.

Over the years I’ve thought of suicide myself but could never approach it seriously. I don’t like pain so could never hang myself, shoot myself, drown myself, crash myself, or slit my wrists because what would happen if your last moments linger forever in your soul’s mind so you spend eternity feeling that dying pain.

Same logic holds true for offing oneself with an opium or other drug overdose – if there is an afterlife, I wouldn’t want to start it off with a fogged brain because according to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, there are decisions the spirit has to make immediately after death, and just in case that’s true, I don’t want to befuddle my chances with haze causing drugs. (The only one I remember from TTBotD is do not go toward the orange light, which in my poem below I reference in the line “Dying the silent, sinking orange“).

No, were I to kill myself, I’d starve myself to death because every now and then (mostly then) I fast for 3 to 5 days and I’ve noticed after the second day of not eating I become high, serene, light, focused, alert, and happy – and after about 36 hours of not eating, I am no longer hungry.

This way I could get lighter and higher and happier for 4 to 6 weeks and blog the whole thing the whole time. Plus I’d weigh almost nothing when done so my removers would have less work to do.

But I’m not thinking of actually killing myself. My “suicide” will come from the globally warmed earth ceasing to feed me because it can’t grow crops anymore. Of course in this scenario we’ll have lost electricity and the internet so there goes my final audience.

Besides, I can’t kill myself – my younger brother already stole that performance piece and I hate to be a copy cat.

I did have two performance suicide pieces conceptualized. In the first, I was going to pre-sell my suicide, get the money upfront, enjoy it for awhile, and then jump out of a 2 mile high airplane without a parachute and broadcast my last thoughts live over radio all the way down. In the second, I was thinking of preparing a 12 foot square canvas with paint, sharp objects, corrosion and slow drying glue, place it flat on the sidewalk, then jump off a 7 story building and land on it, carrying a few gallons of acrylic polymer medium with me on the way down to splash over me and seal me after I splat. Perhaps if I were really good, I could combine the two and fall two miles through the sky and then splatter on my canvas target.

But again, both scenarios involve sudden abrupt unpleasant intense trauma, so we’re back to my basic problem of not liking pain.

Years ago I solved the whole dilemma by deciding I simply wouldn’t die – I’d live forever like the Willoughby Librarian prophet prophesized I would at a Chagrin Falls new-ager party back in 1977. But since then I have become too weary of the world and its human inhumanity to each other to want to live forever, so now I’m opting for serenely dying in my sleep. That’s the nice thing about fasting yourself to death – at some point you simply go to sleep and never wake.

Or, they do call an orgasm “the little death,” so maybe I could just keep masturbating endlessly and let all the little deaths accumulate into one big final endless sleep in the sky. This would be my Meat Beat Manifesto scenario.

Anyway, here’s my own suicide poem written 15 years before my brother killed himself – it’s not nearly as much fun as Dorothy Parker’s, but it is quite erudite.

Suicide Note

Poor naked ape, melancholy Dane
Dying the silent, sinking orange
I offer my praise to mad Ophelia’s black mass
Receiving Laertes’ pain poisoned harangue
I’ll soon join that fortunate lass
Morpheusly oblivious of pain
   (Camus’ first question of philosophy re
    weaves Thane Hamlet’s “or not to be”
    brings Kant’s “progressive unification of
    sense manifold” to termination: total
    psychic expiration. Hence our sole
    existential goal becomes fervently wishing
    good death’s black ghoul to sensually become
    as one with our whole)
Where God assumes skull Yorick’s reign
Stay yet awhile Horatio and give lie to my name

 – Steven B. Smith, 1972

aftermath – foto by Smith