I Think a Lot About Death, Part 2: The Earnest Edition

"It’s ironic that sad eyes are usually depicted in drawings as tiny smiles over eyes."

As I walked home from work after a particularly long, physically and mentally strenuous workday, I couldn’t avert my stare from the ground. It was as if the weight of the world, of life, pressed down on my head and would not, could not allow me to raise my head and look forward. It’s happened to me before, very recently and very often. I am also often purposely over dramatic.

And before I start on my privileged-first-world-life rant, I know that I don’t have it as bad as many other people, but I don’t think despair discriminates.

I've written about death before, and that time a friend accused it of being a glorified advertisement for my book about, well, death, but this post will be a tad more earnest. Not that my last post about death wasn’t earnest, but I did try to stay positive for positivity's sake, just in case a potential reader of mine would stumble upon that post and think, “I’m not going to read anything by someone this morbid and disturbed.” Of course, when I thought that I didn’t take into account what the subject matter of my first story was. It would then, in fact, be appropriate for me to be a little morbid and disturbed. But now I doubt how many other people, besides the odd (literally) friend here and there, actually read my blog, so I feel a little freer to keep it more forthcoming this time around.

But I do think about death a lot, mostly about ways to reach it. I’m not in any rush, per say, but I do have feelings of general hopelessness that I feel can only be wiped away by offing myself. But, there are reasons why I haven’t done so yet. Let’s go down the list of a couple of the most common ways to do it, shall we:

Death by Hanging: I live in a box, a metaphorical one as well, but I mean it literally. My room does resemble a box and I don’t have many fixtures where I could comfortably hang a noose. I do have a ceiling fan but I don’t think it would support my weight. Not that I’m especially fat, but it doesn’t look like a structurally strong fixture. I’d just end up with a broken ankle at best. Besides, I’m half black and it just seems disrespectful to my ancestors and a tad bit too ironic to take myself out in that manner.

Death by Wrist Cutting and Pill Popping: I don’t know, that just seems like a too juvenile and teenaged way of courting attention. I think the 35-year-old equivalent of pubescent attention seeking is to write a blog post about suicide…

Death by Jumping from High Structures: I’m deathly (PUN!) afraid of heights, so there goes that idea.

Death by Stepping out into Traffic: It just seems a little messy. And if it goes wrong it could leave me paralyzed, unable to try other ways, which would just prove to be counter productive if that was the case.

Death by Auto-erotic Asphyxiation: Let’s just say my mother is lucky that restricting the flow of air to my brain fails to sexually arouse me. I never thought I’d ever write a sentence like that.

Death by Shooting Oneself: I consider myself a pretty liberal guy, and as such I, for the most part, abhor firearms in cases of uses other than filmed fiction. There also seems to be a lengthy background checking process that just seems tiresome. Arguably it would be the last process I would have to go through, but I’m still too lazy to go through all that trouble.

So, the real reason I don’t remove myself from all this perhaps misperceived misery is just simple, good old-fashioned human fear mixed with general human laziness. That, and there’s a new Star Wars on the horizon and there’s now way I can miss that.

But, I jest.

The real reason I don’t do anything brash, as I alluded to previously, is that I believe that my self-induced passing would cause family members and several friends considerable premature emotional distress. Which, I guess, is both weirdly narcissistic, as it suggests that I think everybody cannot bear to be without me because I’m so awesome, and, strangely self-less, as I don’t want to cause anyone emotional pain because of my selfishness, just in case anyone does hold affinity for me.

People have told me I need professional help to ease me through all the mental anguish, and today as I suppressed an urge to irrationally throw a large amount of boiled eggs on the wall in public, I am now forced to believe them. On the other hand, maybe I just spend too much time by myself.

But, as I said, there’s new Star Wars to be seen so, at the very least, I’m fairly confident I‘ll make it to the end of 2015.

And I apologize if this just seemed like cheap ploy for attention––it may very well be––but it is truly what I’m feeling at the moment.