The thing that makes death such a fascinating subject is that, by definition, it's a once-in-a-lifetime event. So is birth, too, but there's no "you" sitting around beforehand to ponder your forthcoming birth, so that's in a different category. To state it precisely, death is the only once-in-a-lifetime event that is ponderable beforehand. That's why you do it.

Pondering death in general is one thing. "Yeah, yeah, one of these days I'm gonna go." Sometime way in the future, presumably, and under circumstances only vaguely imagined. "Maybe I'll have a heart attack in bed," you hope to yourself, considering this to be preferable when measured against such things as the slow suffocation of emphysema or watching your body rot away from cancer.

Foreseeing death as something you wait for but don't bring on yourself makes it fascinating, but since it doesn't involve making any decisions, there's no immediacy to it.

Suicide, on the other hand, means that you have to plan. And when you're planning for a once-in-a-lifetime event, there's a lot of pressure to get it right. If you miss your golf shot there's always another game, but with suicide you only get one chance. If it doesn't work out the way you figured, well, too bad, you missed your chance to get it right because now you're gone!

And maybe the worst thing is you never even get to be sure it DID work out the way you planned!

It's like you planned a big, elaborate wedding for somebody else, but then you left just as it was starting. Maybe you flew off and lived the rest of your life on a desert island. Did the bride walk down the aisle without tripping? Was everyone seated properly at the reception? Did the caterers do their job without spilling anything on anyone? You'll never know!

The only way you get to find out what happened after your suicide is if it fails. You didn't take enough pills. Or the bullet missed your brain. You find yourself in a hospital bed going, "Oh man, this sucks!"

So that's the thing: You really, really don't want to fail, but if you succeed you'll never know!

That's where religions come in. I blame religions for suicide, and here's why:

Religions promote the idea of an afterlife. After you die, you sort of float off somewhere, peering back whenever you wish at earthly mortals in some sort of cosmic vouyeurism. By pushing the idea that you CAN check out the results of your suicide, religions remove that big "what happened next?" barrier.

"I'll blow my brains out, then Suzie will be sorry she turned me down!" As though you'll be able to sit up in a cloud somewhere and chuckle with sadistic pleasure while you watch Suzie beating her breast in guilt and grief.

You can't, you won't, you'll never know. Suzie might turn out not to give a shit. She might not even show up at your funeral. You'll be gone forever, so if you want to be sure Suzie feels like shit, you better stay alive and work on a different plan.

And don't even get me started on Islam and the 72 virgins. "Go blow yourself up in a crowded marketplace or fly an airliner into a skyscraper. Afterwards, you'll spend eternity getting attended to by 72 virgins." Yeah, right.

You'd think at the very least these poor, gullible slobs would ask some pertinent questions before strapping on the explosive belt: "Are all these virgins good looking? How much do they weigh? Who's going to keep them from coming to me whining about annoying, inconsequential bullshit? Do they keep being virgins even after I fuck them? If so, how does that work? Do their hymens grow back right away? Why is that something I would want, anyway? Could I opt instead for 72 deflowered maidens so I wouldn't have to go through all the extra effort of busting their hymens?

Since people apparently fall for something this lame, it's only a matter of time before some enterprising con man will put together some competition. "Don't blow yourself up for Islam, folks, where you only get 72 virgins. Join my new religion, "Malsi", and get twice the virgins! You heard right, 144 prime virgins for each and every time you blow yourself up as your Imam directs! And that's not all! Our virgins are certified to be not over 14 years of age, none are over 100 pounds, and all are 100% acne-free! And if you act in the next half hour, we'll throw in a matron attendant who will supervise your virgins, making sure their petty grievances are all taken care of outside your bed chamber. All you do is fuck, fuck, fuck, for all eternity!"

As the late George Carlin said about religion in his final HBO special,

"It's all bullshit, folks, and it's bad for 'ya!"

What did you decide?

When you've thought about Doing It, what did you decide would be your preferred method?

The fact that people even care about this suggests to me that they might not be serious. After all, once you're dead, you're dead, and it doesn't make the slightest difference how you got there.
I thought about this the other day when I was carrying a kitchen knife. I thought, "I could just plunge this into my solar plexus right now and I would die." But I quickly realized there was no way I could get myself to do this, so I'd say I'm not really serious about it.

Then I thought about the Japanese author Yukio Mishima who actually did something like this, and I confess I felt quite a bit of admiration for him. He was recapitulating the ancient practice of "seppuku", which is how honorable people are supposed to kill themselves when faced with dishonor. It escapes me now why Mishima felt that he was dishonored and so resorted to disemboweling himself, but the fact that he used this method to kill himself certainly tells me he had a lot more courage than I do!

The old gun-to-the-head method has the same no-turning-back finality to it, but squeezing a trigger is not in itself a violent act, so it seems to me a tad less deserving of respect than the guy who sticks a knife in his own heart -- or especially belly. I mean, Wow!

A method that occurred to me once would be simply to disappear off the face of the earth by burying myself. Oh, well, maybe they'd dig me up and blow my cover, but, hey, it would give them something interesting to do, right? Here's how it would work:

1. I'd dig a big hole -- you know, a grave. Six feet under, etc.
2. I'd get a tractor with a pusher blade. Buy it, rent it, whatever, wouldn't matter because I'd be dead, remember?
3. I'd experiment with the tractor, running it out of fuel, then putting small amounts of fuel in the tank to see how far it would go on a given amount.
4. Once I'd determined the exact distance the tractor would go on a given amount of fuel, I'd load that amount into the tank and start it up, putting it in gear, slowly headed toward the dirt berm next to my hole. The amount of fuel would be such that it would just push the dirt into the hole, then stop.
5. I'd jump into my hole, then I'd kill myself. Gun-to-the-head, cut my jugular vein, whatever. I'd collapse in the hole, the tractor would bury me and stop. End of caper. Literally!

Anyway, farfetched, I know, but it's an idea I found oddly amusing. Maybe it's because of how I imagine everyone would be debating the thing afterward. Was it suicide? How could it be suicide when the body was buried?

Of course, that's the annoying thing about killing yourself -- you never get to find out what happens afterward!

Different strokes

It always struck me as odd -- ever since I was a little kid -- when I learned that suicide was illegal. Maybe that was when I started questioning the whole legal thing, but that's another subject, so let's not digress off to a tangent.

Nowadays, it's legal in Oregon. Under certain circumstances, of course. There again, I'm going, "Why"? If it's legal to kill yourself when you're terminally ill, why stop there? Sure, the idea behind the "terminally ill" thing is that you're going to die soon anyway, so why prolong the agony. But everyone's "terminally ill" in the sense that we're going to die sometime, so why doesn't the same logic apply to a person who, let's say, decides that his or her life isn't worth living anymore because of loneliness or being broke or -- well, whatever!

Maybe your thing is nooky. You heard me, poontang, sex, the f-word. Tons of people ain't gettin' any, you knew that, right? Especially old people. Take your average old person who isn't getting any more nooky, wouldn't it be reasonable for this person to say, "Hey, if I'm never gonna get any more, why not just quit right here!"

Sort of reminds me of the Gershwin song, "It ain't necessarily so". One of the verses goes like this:

Methus lah lived nine hundred years,
Methus lah lived nine hundred years.
But who calls dat livin' when no gal will give in
to no man what's nine hundred years?

Same principle applies, whether it's 900 years or 50 years, seems to me. How can you blame somebody who decides to pull the plug at any age once the nooky dries up?

So somebody answers, "There's more to life than sex, you know." Yeah? Speak for yourself, bucko!

Getting Started

Don't tell me you've never thought about it. It's like masturbation: There are only two kinds of people -- those who admit to doing it and those who don't.

This is a blog. Nobody's watching you, so you can relax and admit that you sometimes think about the unthinkable -- offing yourself.

No rules here. No judgements. Nobody trying to talk you out of it -- or into it, for that matter. Just comments and thoughts about the subject as they come along.

If you stop reading, well, maybe you did it. Or maybe you just got bored with the subject. Whatever. Same goes for your humble poster. If I stop posting, maybe I'm dead. Or maybe I just moved on to something more interesting. Whatever. It's not important.