On Suicide

A friend of mine committed suicide last Thursday, August 27, 2009. He did it by jumping off the Vista Avenue Viaduct, or "Suicide Bridge", in Portland, Oregon, which, if you ask me, is a pretty cliched way to go out for somebody who considered himself an iconoclast. I mean, the bridge is called the fucking "Suicide Bridge", for chrissakes. But I guess, at the end, he was less interested in a final stroke of creativity than in sending a message, and when it comes to bridge-jumpers, the message is invariably, "Fuck you, world! Look what you made me do! Now clean this up."

Suicide is normally a private affair, and it takes a special kind of egotist to do it in public and to leave one's broken body for an innocent mass-transit commuter to stumble over. He was a friend, and I've known him for over 20 years, and I was even his room-mate on two separate occasions, but that doesn't excuse this self-indulgent act of emo nihilism. Suicide is a big middle-finger to everybody you've ever known who has struggled with depression and came out the other side better for it. It's the final solution of those too lazy for life.

Life is hard, and it's littered with more disappointment than victory. It's filled with disloyal friends, bad parenting, poor decisions, and uncooperative weather. Welcome to the party, pal. I'm sorry you took 40 years and never figured that out. The secret to contentment is not to dwell on everything dark, but to exult in everything bright. Maybe I sound like a motivational speaker when I say that, but it took me awhile to understand that basic truth.

I've been depressed. I've contemplated suicide. I've been broken-hearted, betrayed and some other alliterative state I can't think of right now, but no matter how much thought I paid the easy way out, I never took it. I never took it because I don't hate my friends and family. Their sorrow and anguish was too high a price to pay, so I struggled through, and things got better. Things got a lot better.

Maybe things would have gotten better for you, but unfortunately, you'll never know that because you decided to be a coward. I'm going to miss you, and I will fondly remember laughing around the D&D table, but that doesn't mean I'm not profoundly fucking furious with you, asshole. Because your final gesture was an act of pure hate for everybody in your life, and I'm afraid I can't find it in myself to repay that much hate with too much sympathy.

You killed yourself; nobody did it for you.

What Do You Do?

"Well, if you want to know where I work, it's at [WORK LOCATION], but what I do is something else entirely. It depends on the day, really. If you want to know what I did yesterday, I drank cola and clicked around Wikipedia. What I've been doing so far today is meeting tragically uninteresting people and making insipid conversation with them. If you ask me what I'm going to do tomorrow, I'll probably say, 'wait until I'm alone in the house and masturbate furiously to fetish porn.' But at this precise moment, what I primarily do is hate your fat fucking face.

"Aren't you glad you sidled up to a stranger at a party and asked them to reduce their entire existence to a single superficial activity?"

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That's the response I give in my head. In reality, I shrug, say, "I work retail," and another part of myself dies inside. And no matter how much they deserve it, I never ask the same thing back, because fuckers who ask "what do you do?" are always more than eager to volunteer that information.

I Don't Trust...

...gray-haired men with black eyebrows. How can I believe anything they have to say when they can't even get all of their hair on the same page?

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...people who laugh too easily. Seriously, ladies, that greeting card is not that hilarious. How do you react when something is genuinely funny? Can you even tell the difference anymore?

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...ghosts. Motherfuckers be stealing all my shit.

Steggar the Mirthless in "The Spire of the Ubermages"

Steggar was born to Urion the Valiant and his wife, Velma the Fastidious, in the Village of the Elders in the third century of the Age of Hytophrexes, beneath a blood moon as the baying of the carrion hounds echoed mournfully across the Betur Plains, which everybody agreed was a mouthful to print on the birth announcement, but Velma, as her nickname would suggest, was insistent that every little detail be just so. Steggar was bathed in yak urine as per the tradition that nobody was certain to the origin of, and Urion and Velma were showered with many gifts of yak meat, yak hide, and wind-chimes made of the bones of yaks. The yak-poor were allowed to forego gift-giving provided they had a daughter of "taking" age who was willing to offer herself hound-style to the village chieftain. Most civic disputes were solved in this way. The relative merits and faults of the system are open to debate, but it was the only system they had, and the chieftain wasn't about to change things any time soon.

Steggar's childhood was a blur of violence, circumcision and ritual yak-blood drinking and is best not dwelled upon. Upon the reaching of adulthood, Steggar decided that he cared not for anything and took the nickame "the Careless", a decision he didn't think through very well. "Watch your feet, Steggar," the other warriors in the village would giggle. "Steady with that pile of boulders now, Steggar," the elders would cackle through their beards. "Are you sure that hut's properly constructed?" the youngsters would wonder. "I don't think you took the proper care in thatching that roof."

"Okay!" Steggar roared after a few short weeks of this ribbing. "I get it!"

"You have no sense of humor, Steggar," the village chieftain said, and he quickly re-dubbed the younger man Steggar the Mirthless. Steggar, happy to be shed of his hastily-chosen nickname, threw himself into the role, and for the next 13 years was never seen to bare his teeth for any reason but hunger or battle.

Then a few years of other events happened of no consequence, leading us to the situation with which this story is concerned.

To Be Continued

Stand-Up Jokes #1

They say that a friendship is irrevocably altered once one friend has allowed him or herself to fantasize about the other while masturbating. But I don't know. My relationship with Jesus has never been stronger.

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One of the things that's hard about getting older is that suddenly everything is "creepy" about you. You know? Everything that used to be sweet or innocent about young love, poetry, yearning, all that stuff, becomes creepy in middle age. Like, the other day, I was changing out the tape in the video camera that records in my toilet? And my friend was all, "CREEPY, KEVIN!" I mean, when I was 17 or so, you would have found my habit of hanging around the Juniors' Department fitting rooms taking discreet upskirt shots AS CUTE AS KITTENS.

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I would never advocate violence, but if you ever see a tall, sorta gimpy red-headed guy with a scar on his nose? That guy's name is Jonas Spitz, and he's a TOTAL ASSHOLE. Ask him, "Hey, are you Jonas Spitz?" and if he says yes, murder him. I mean, whoa, violence never solved anything, right? But seriously, kill Jonas Spitz. You probably won't even get in trouble, because everybody knows what a douchebag this guy is. Just in case, though, just in case there's maybe another guy named Jonas Spitz matching this description walking around, make sure it's the total asshole one first. A good way to find out is to, oh, I don't know--leave him alone with your girlfriend for about an hour. Trust me, you'll know if it's the right guy soon enough.

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Whenever you see one of those shark programs, they always have a guy on there who got attacked by one. He'll show you the scar, and they he'll talk about how he bears the fish no ill will, because sharks are a graceful beautiful and misunderstood species...Well, let me tell you, if I was ever bitten by a shark, I would become the world's most vocal advocate for seeking out and killing thost fuckers wherever they were hiding until they were extinct. I'd be like, "Sharks? Yeah, they're cold-blooded killing machines. A lot of people really have the wrong idea about sharks nowadays, thinking that they're these graceful, misunderstood creatures, but no: they live for human blood, and they will swallow your babies. Hey, did I ever tell you about the time one of them TRIED TO EAT ME? IN THE OCEAN?"

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Some people don't appreciate my attempts to stay current with the new music that the kids are listening to. I was jamming in my ride the other day, and the crossing guard was giving me the dirtiest look. I guess she doesn't like KIDS' BOP. So I put my van in gear and got the hell out of there. There are other schools for me to try out my new "After school shuttle-van pick up and free candy" service, lady!

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I think a great idea for a movie would be one about a persistent Cub Scout who tries to sell a candy bar to Harrison Ford for two hours.

Facebook Is Hitler

There are a lot of people trying to convince you that various things are Hitler nowadays. Obama is Hitler. Health care reform is Hitler. The economic bailout is Hitler. (Interestingly, according to these people, the same things are also "socialism", which, if you know anything at all about Hitler, is the most ignorant thing you've ever heard. Right, Bill O'Reilly?)

None of these things, of course, are actually Hitler. In fact, the only thing I've encountered in my life which can legitimately argued to be similar to Hitler is Facebook.

I know what you're thinking. "Oh, haha, Kevin, Facebook isn't that bad." True, except it really is. The sort of unthinking society of followers that the "Facebook generation" represents is as disturbing to me as the insanity that led a trollish art-school failure to become the most feared and hated figure of 20th Century evil. Now, I don't think that Facebookers are going to be gassing Jews or invading Europe. But I do think that people are giving away their souls to an individuality-sucking corporate cult of branding.

Earlier today, I got a couple invites from some relatives on Facebook to join some app called "We're Related." What the hell, I thought. I'll make my aunt and my stepfather happy and join this little thing. As soon as I hit that "accept" button, the virus started working. "Choose these other friends to be related to," it enthused. "Fill in your relationship to these people," it ordered. "Manage your family updates!" "Wait, you haven't done this other thing!" "Wait, there are still aspects of your life unsullied by this application!" "What are you doing?" "Get back here and finish what you started!" "NOBODY LEAVES BUSINESS UNFINISHED!"

I eventually just shut the whole thing down and erased it from my profile, but I suspect it's still worming its way around in there, goosestepping its way through Facebook and keeping the rest of my information in line.

That's the indisious thing about Facebook. It's not happy enough for you to be a part of the game. No, it asks you to inform on your friends, family and neighbors, too. It's a self-perpetuating sickness. Are you a member of the party? Why not? Don't you love your family?

From the ever-present branding to the simple fact that everybody's profile looks the same, Facebook promotes homogeneity at every turn. It won't rest until the games you're playing are the games that everybody's playing. And if you choose not to participate, people look at you askance and whisper suspiciously among themselves: "He's not playing. What makes him so special? MAYBE HE DOESN'T BELIEVE!"

So, pardon me, Facebook, but I've had enough of your rallies and book-burnings. I'm joining the resistance. I'll keep the profile just so the odd family member can get in touch with me in an emergency, but I'm taking off my Hitler Youth outfit.

Writing for Other People Is Weird

So, I've taken on a little no-money writing gig for a start-up blog out of New Zealand called Men's Domain. The site owner found me through Twitter and asked me if I would like to write a movie column of some sort, so I proposed "The DVD Cave," which would be a spotlight on movies that "real men" should have in their collection. So far I've featured The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Hard Boiled. It's a neat little thing, and even though I make no money at it, it makes me feel like professional writer to publish things on somebody else's website.

Here's the thing, though: it's really hard. Here on my own blog, I can vomit up words by the page and the only standards I have to meet are my own. But when I write for somebody else, I get all self-conscious, and my language gets weirdly formal, and the worlds wind up petering out way too soon. For instance, I should be able to write a few thousand words about The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly in my sleep; after all, it's one of my favorite movies. But for this other blog, I barely managed a page.

I keep telling myself that I'll eventually learn to relax and write as comfortably for other people as I do here in my own comfy corner of the blogosphere, but every time it's time to write a new DVD column, I procrastinate until the last moment, then quickly type up an awkwardly-written series of words that doesn't even communicate one tenth of the opinions I hold about the chosen film. Or, at least, it feels that way. I don't know how it reads.