no shame november

I’m happy for a few weeks in March and again for a little over a week most Octobers but for the rest of the year I’m silently contemplating suicide with varying degrees of seriousness and sincerity.

Look, do you think in my rock and roll youth I ever imagined I’d spend my thirties worrying about picking out the right can of sweet corn at the suburban grocery megaplex?

Does that appeal to you? Does that shit turn you on?

I’m tired of being silently judged. I’m tired of being a nuisance. I guess I always thought my life would automatically have some sort of larger meaning other than playing roles in other peoples’ lives like an actor plays roles in other peoples’ plays. All the world is a stage and I’m fucking suffocating trying to act. I can’t remember the last time someone asked me “hey, do you need anything?” and honestly wanted to hear the answer.

Yes, I have needs. But I’ll damned if I can express them. Anywhere.

Because of my massive debts and a piddly $100 life insurance policy from my credit union, I am literally worth more dead than alive.

So why not? Hey, I’m worth nothing alive and $100 dead! Are you attracted to me now?

I imagine driving up north to that great green bridge and jumping off. Would I feel the cold water before it shoved my femurs into my brain? I imagine more locally, off that other bridge into that other cold river. Would the Coast Guard bill my family for recovery? I imagine driving my car like Christopher Walken in Annie Hall, no seat belt at 100 miles an hour into a bridge abutment, the broken glass and crushed skull. Ugly way to wind up. I imagine pills or razor blades. Wouldn’t want to be found like that. The mess they’d have to clean up. I don’t want to be a nuisance.

I imagine the looks on the faces of my children and I get horrified. I can’t do that to them. I imagine my wife having to tell them. I can’t do that to her.

I don’t want to be a nuisance.

So I come around and eventually reject the idea.

Until it comes up again.

Look, I don’t want to be dramatic. I’m sure I’ll never do it. But I’m not sure I won’t go through life almost constantly considering it with varying degrees of seriousness and sincerity.

Is that healthy? Is that a life worth living?

(joe)