There's a funny story at my High School that I always found ironic. There's a football stadium outside of it; it's nothing fancy, but it's certainly nice and it's something a lot of schools around there didn't necessarily have. It had a track, a football field, big bleachers, lights and everything. Considering the dirty little town it was in, it was pretty snazzy. What always upset me though, was that it was named after somebody who died. Now now, hold your horses. I don't have anything against honoring the dead, so keep your silly conclusions to yourself. If I was against honoring the dead, I wouldn't be here writing; I would be out in the local cemetery knocking over tombstones and shitting on coffins.
Actually, that sounds like a pretty interesting pastime. I should go out and do that later. But right, my point.
He was a football player. Completely appropriate, right? Tragic how he died, though. His parents said he got into a car accident when he hit a coyote in the middle of a mildly suburbanized town in the California Central Valley. ......Read that again. Read it again. READ IT THE FUCK AGAIN. THERE'S NO FUCKING COYOTES IN THE MIDDLE OF A GROWING TOWN IN THE CENTRAL VALLEY, WHO THE FUCK DO THE PARENTS THINK THEY'RE FOOLING WITH THAT CROCK OF SHIT? NOBODY, THAT'S WHO. IT'S A LIE. A LIE. A FUCKING LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIE.
He was known to be a jock and a partygoer according to some people who knew him, like my brother. And he drank a lot. It was apparently a Friday or Saturday night when the accident took place. You do the fucking math. That black woman with the enormous fro he was racing towards in his car to make love with turned out to be a tree that was closer to him than he expected. Of course I'm adlibbing here because like all interesting car accidents I'm going to assume he was killed on impact and we couldn't get that exact quote from him. Although that would be awkward if we did; the paramedics are using the jaws of life to pry his bleeding, dismembered body from the vehicle, but they're going to be too late. The paramedic puts his face close to his, listening to his last trickling breathes... "Damn... I thought that chocolate woman's hips looked to be a little to wide too be human..." Then his eyes close, and the paramedic caresses his face, and tears start rolling down his cheek. It starts to rain, he looks up, and dramatically screams into the air, "DAMN YOU, MARTIN LUTHER KING JR, DAMN YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOU!"
Okay, it was sad that he died and all. Really, it was. But are we honestly going to honor somebody's death when a good lot of people know the real circumstances that led up to it? The man essentially killed himself. You do something that's entirely within your control, you induce these circumstances upon yourself for no reason other than stupidity, and FUCKING DIE. This isn't a choice like "Well I could've avoided going to war, but instead I'm fighting for my country!" or a GOOD reason. The reason is more along the lines of somebody whoring themselves out for money or pleasure or boredom, and yet when they finally have an STD or AIDS that they're eventually going to succumb to, it's now a tragedy. When that festering pit taints the rest of the well, it's not a surprise.
"I can't believe I have AIDS..."
"I can."
"THAT'S INSENSITIVE!"
"I didn't say it wasn't sad, but come on..."
"THAT'S HEARTLESS!"
"YOU'VE TAKEN IN ENOUGH FLUIDS TO RID YOURSELF OF NEUTRAL BOUYANCY. I COULD THROW YOU IN A LAKE AND YOU'D SINK."
"JUST SHUT UP!"
"BITCH THAT'S NOT A RUNNY NOSE, YOUR BODY'S JUST RUN OUT OF PLACES TO STORE IT."
It's essentially suicide. It's just a indirect commitment to the ritual induced by one's own stupidity. Granted it's not immediate, although it's an entirely different beast if you do it on purpose, then shit gets serious. You don't do things in honor of somebody's suicide. Unless it's the backwards realm of Nippon and committing suicide is considered to be honorable because apparently it's a glorious display of self-control to drive a knife into your squishy interiors and disembowel yourself. It just doesn't make sense when people openly go out of their way, looking everybody they ever loved in the eye, and then mutter "This emotional burden is too much for me to bear. SO LONG, SUCKERS! NOW THIS SHIT'S YOUR PROBLEM, HAR HAR HAR! SEE YOU IN HELL!"
And seriously, they're all in Hell. They aren't around long enough to see how badly they really fuck up things when they commit suicide. They have the arrogance and ignorance to actually think "Well, Hell can't be as bad as this. FUCK IT!" and pull the trigger. I guess they're expecting when they get there, they'll be in a line, Interlude With Ludes playing over the intercom, and Satan will be there in a smock at a barbeque, waving people in. "Ooh, what's for lunch?" the recently deceased ask. Then they act surprised when he responds with "Oh, well, you." and shanks them so they become a delicious meal for the rabid monsters of Hell to feast upon, then they're turned to shit and flushed down to Super Hell, and I don't even want to begin to explain what goes on down there. All I can tell you is that it involves reliving a farmer's life somewhere in a infertile dirt patch in Wyoming with The Grateful Dead's greatest hits constantly playing on loop.
I get into arguments over this a lot, and it upsets me that they think it's somehow disrespectful. It's like I'm disrespecting a prison inmate for raping a child, despite it being his own damn fault that he's in there. He's depriving his family of himself while he's in there. He's tainted his family's reputation with a terrible stigma that will stay with them for a good long while. He's committed something AWFUL (unless the child had it coming), yet it's okay to judge him for it because he's still alive. I explained this to people when I was at school, and they got all upset. Then I told them, "If I die tomorrow by putting a gun to my head and blowing my own brains out, I want a shooting range built for JROTC and I demand that it be named in my honor." Ha, how's that for irony?
Unfortunately that never particularly happened. My own attempt at ending the game was far less exciting. It was Christmas time, which makes it alright. Because that's when Jesus died for our sins and was resurrected a week later on Christmas day or some shit I don't know, I don't read the bible. My life was in the shitter, I was considering dropping out of High School due to my tanking GPA and my inability to care, my father left us screwed, my mother was binge-drinking and destroying the house, my birthday ended with me wandering the streets in a fever-induced delirium after buying myself something nice because I was the only one who bothered to remember, and the only person that managed to keep me sane during those Hellish times walked out of my life for good. So being an ignorant little shit, I figured that now was a good time to call it game, set, and match on life at the ripe old age of 16. But not in a manly way, no. I didn't have the balls to do it in a manly way. I also wasn't a pussy who was slitting my wrists, hoping I would slowly bleed out, either. If I was going to cut myself, at least I would cut myself in a way that I know would assure death. Like across the jugular. But choking on my own blood sounded unpleasant, so I opted against it.
Instead I had a nice idea. Where I would lull myself into a nice sleep and never wake up from it. It'll be like how my grandparents died. Or two of them, at least; one of them died of an agonizing heart attack because God hated him and he hated God. Piled upon this horrific depression and total lack of caring was a 103 fever, an empty stomach from not eating for two days, and the strength to barely stand. Nobody was home and I was supposed to be at school, but I didn't go. I was feeling pretty shitty in both the emotional and physical sense of the word, so in my delusions I figured, "Fuck this, I'm done." I went to my medicine cabinet, and got my vicodin prescribed to me by my doctor for pain. Using smart thinking, I figured I would need to take a lot to make all the pain go away. So I took about 12. It was like swallowing a bag of chalk. Not being one to half-ass things, I washed it down with some delicious beer sitting out on the counter. About two or three cans.
Being the underweight, malnourished shlop I was, I figured "This should be more than enough to kill me. Otherwise Google's LYING TO ME." And I would say it certainly was. I never figured out though, because after a few minutes, upon retrospect downing over 6000mg of vicodin with a bunch of liquor on an empty stomach that hasn't digested anything for a few days while I'm sweating bullets and nauseous from a fever wasn't a smart idea. I slumped lifelessly in the bathroom, and realized about 5 minutes in "Actually, maybe this might not have been a good idea," which is an epiphany that seems to contradict the intentions of suicide in the first place. It makes me wonder how many people who killed themselves jumping off a high place realized it was a bad idea about halfway down.
Well despite being in agonizing pain and praying for death, God decided to deny me that privilege, and punched me in the gut and called me a pussy. I'm serious; It might've been the delusional agony, but I almost visibly heard the man say "Oh suck it up, you bitch. Satan said he's not ready for you yet, he's renovating the apartments in Hell right now. Try again later, if you're so eager to get there." I threw up all the liquor and all the half-dissolved pills into the toilet, but still suffered some serious shakes and twitching and other creepy shit I don't want to recall as I laid there on the floor for a couple hours. I didn't sleep, I didn't cry, I didn't do anything. There was just nothing there for a while. Nothing more than complete emptiness.
My brother brought home a pizza that day after he got off of work. It was real food for the first time in three days. And as greasy and bad on my stomach as it was, it was pretty damn tasty. And it helped get the taste of pills and beer out of my mouth. Of course he didn't know a damn thing about what happened; the only sign was my mom wondering where the Hell all the vicodin went. Unfortunately it didn't kill her, either. And she drank more than I ever could. I went to school the following day, considering it was the final day before Christmas break and I felt a vague obligation to be there. And when I did, I looked out at the field near my JROTC class, muttering "I'll get you eventually. Just to prove my point." Of course it never happened. Like they would care enough if an ugly little nerd offed himself in the first place. Ha, what a bloated sense of self-importance. It's completely ironic since most people who off themselves don't give two shits about themselves, BUT MAYBE IN DEATH, SOMEBODY WILL.
Well it certainly won't be you. Because you'll be dead. The worms might care, it just means free food for a while. And the environmentalists might care because apparently it would be bad to have my ashes put into a plane and spread over the city to rain down upon everybody. Or maybe the publicists would care, because somebody doing a reverse crucifixion on the top of Half Dome might make a good story.
But you won't know or care. BECAUSE YOU'RE FUCKING DEAD. SO DON'T THINK YOU'RE IMPORTANT IF YOU BRING YOUR OWN DEATH UPON YOURSELF.
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