4:02 p.m. - 2001-11-30
Patchouli Apes and Guillotines
If you are at all sensitive to the subject of suicide you want to skip this one. If you are not, but don't understand it, please don't read into it too much.

Suicide. I once heard the theory that once you have considered it as a viable option, it will always come back as one. I know that a lot of people never even think of it, not in their whole lives. I know that a lot of people consider it, but feel dirty for it, like they can't ever speak it out loud or it will make it somehow more valid.

Well I will. I have thought about taking my own life many, many times since I was a teenager. There were points where I came close, how close I could not gage because it is one of those things that is relative to the act it self. Until you reach the end, you never quite know how much distance is left between you and the edge at any given time. But even in my most desperate states, I can confidently say that I wasn't in real danger of going through with it.

For me it always came out of a sense of laziness, a will to just escape the pressure and responsibility of living. It was never from some insurmountable pain that I needed immediate relief from.

This dynamic can be seen in many places and in many levels in my life story, from faking illness to escape a day of school, to not applying myself to marketing or developing my talents in order to escape the pressure of continuing once I began.

Escape.

I now think of suicidal thoughts as a something that will be regularly with me for my life. The seal has been broken. But I also have become honest enough with myself to know that the stigma attached to them of red flags and emergency are not necessarily true for me. I still respect it, but it would be a disservice to me to disrupt my life every time it crosses my mind. I am a little more familiar with the terrain since I have been negotiating it for nearly half of my existance.

At my worst, my responsibility to my loved ones was enough to keep me from any earnest pursuit of death. I just couldn't bear the thought of the pain it would cause those I left behind. They certainly didn't deserve to pay for what I deemed an early retirement.

As I got more comfortable allowing myself to examine the idea, not so scared of it, I was able to actually consider the details of the thing without it being an exercise in horror. I think it was actually good for me to allow this of myself because many times the ways in which I wrapped my mind around the subject became proof that I wasn't even close to ready to shut the ol' brain off for good.

Here's what I mean, and trust me on this, if you have been even slightly uncomfortable with the beginning of this entry, stop now, I feel compelled to go through with this entry to the end today, but you have to make that choice for yourself.

At the depths of my depression, I contemplated building a guillotine. A beautifully carved, working piece of murderous art. It would be my masterpiece and obviously take months, if not years to craft. In true Heckafresh fashion, I planned to pre-empt any attempts of people who might make light of my death by beating them at their own game. How?

Helium. A helium balloon, tied to my hair expressing my last message to the world like a cartoon strip thought bubble.

"Goodbye cruel world!" seemed like the corniest, and therefor best clich� to scrawl across the balloons surface. No sick minded insensitive jerk could ever top that when compelled to make fun of my cowardice.

But fuck, suicidal people don't go through incredible creative bouts for months to years before they do the deed. And they seldom find it in them to make one final attempt at absurd quirky humor on their check-out day.

Due to this, I think I'm fairly safe from self murder. Because just as it's true that once you've thought of suicide as an option, it will haunt you for life, it is also true that once you have allowed yourself to develop that thought to the point of being ridiculous, you can't go undo that either. So the helium balloon always accompanies, and helps to neutralize the idea of the unspeakable act of cowardice, or laziness in my case, whenever it rears it's butt ugly head. They make a good pair.

Besides, suicide seems too worky.

There's a little taste of the darkness in this ol' thinkpiece of mine. There is plenty more, it's all a balance after all. I'm sure I'll be back to hippie monkeys in no time at all.

Heehee, granola crunchin' monkeys!

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