Strong hands and shouts of concerned admiration lift me from the abyss of unconsciousness and force me to break the surface with a gasp. People completely encircle me; throngs of them, eyes alternating between a young gentleman kneeled at my side and my tired form. Proudly my white knight beams down at me, groggy with deep, medicated sleep, his damsel in distress. “That was a close one, bud,” he tells me. “Train almost got you, try and stay off the tracks from now on.”
Gee. Thanks a hell of a lot.
The way he eyes me, looking me up and down suspiciously, carefully, eyes pausing momentarily around my waist area, his heroism begins to make sense. The hunchback of a shoulder-holstered gun bulging through his jacket, and the thick, shrubbery mustache scream “Police Officer,” plainclothes or off-duty, I can’t be sure. I speculate plainclothes detective.
Claps of praise and congratulation propel me from the dank subway disappointed, a failure.
Again
Hurrying into the brisk morning air, I push my way through the multitudes disgusted with everyone and everything. The people who are too stupid to realize how poor of an existence they suffer, perpetual smile plastered on their faces, repulse me. Those too selfish, too focused on their trite goals to see the world as it truly is puzzle me.
My philosophy in life is simple: Life sucks, pretty much.
The worst part about my life is that, despite a kind-of concerted effort on my part to end it, I cannot seem to do so.
One stormy night, mostly sick of the tiresome, toiling life, I climbed into the tub with my toaster. Standing knee-deep in the water, the flicker light from the candles reflecting an eerie glow, it felt perfect. Laying supine completely submerged and completely unharmed, I realized that the tempest had shut down my power, thereby giving me a reason for the candles.
Frustrated beyond belief, I held myself underwater, waiting to drown, but damn it all, I couldn’t breathe.
Another time, I picked up a nasty looking air powered BB Gun from the sports store, and after composing a beautifully written suicide note, I gave myself the most painful blood blister ever, and it didn’t pop for weeks. I am no DeNiro, and Russian roulette is not quite what Deer Hunter hypes it up to be.
Just recently, I decided that consumption of alcohol was the solution, but as the whiskey hit my blood stream, I realized that I was just far too drunk. I went to bed smashed, literally beaten again by life.
Starving yourself makes you too hungry, I barely lasted a day.
Fire brings so much smoke and it’s really hard to breathe. Plus, it makes my eyes sting and water real bad.
Ropes puzzle me, knots are an unfathomable mystery. I wear Velcro shoes and clip-on ties, so hanging is out.
Venereal disease or cancer is too long-term.

I need an immediate fix to the inconvenience of life.

I’ve never been a drug user, so overdose is out of the question.
Patricide, committing a crime ending in my premeditated execution by an officer of the law, is impossible. I am no criminal.
With no garage and no car to leave running in it, carbon monoxide poisoning just isn’t an option.
My depression, my self-destruction complex is a debilitating obsession. My inadequacy, the lack of control to even finish myself, deepens this depression and intensifies this obsession. My days are a series of almosts.
good tries
nearly theres
In summation, my life is a failure. I am not a doctor, a lawyer, a successful politician. I am not educated; I am not polite or kind. I do not have religion, money, or potential. I am not creative, unique, or talented. I do not have friends, or a job. I am neither attractive nor personable. I am short and balding. I cannot make people laugh. I have no kids, no golden retriever to lick my face, no white picket fence. I’m not even dating, let alone married. I do not have cancer, I am not homeless or hungry—no charitable cause. I have literally nothing to contribute to a conversation, no opinions whatsoever. I do not have kind eyes, a nice smile, or even a personality. People do not like me, or pity, or even notice me.
I cannot even kill myself.
Each person has their own idea, relative grasp of success and failure. A scale that ranges from your fast food cashier, toothless and bitter, to the president of the United States of America, the king of the political world.
Failures score from Milli Vanilli to Chernobyl.
You won’t find me anywhere on either scale, because I am apart. A separate level of failure. A separate existence, not even part of the human race.
With no spark or motivation, I plot, I diagram, and I experiment. My masochistic passion has given my life meaning. The prospect of new and more efficient methods and means for destruction fuels my existence, my life perpetuated by the search for death.
Each idea breeds the possibility of success, the fruition yet conclusion of my work.
my life

I have reached an impasse.

My mind is Michigan Avenue, downtown Chicago. Cars, thoughts, stopping, going, jamming. Two-way traffic.
My life’s first success will breed my ultimate demise, my existence is fundamentally ironic.
That little episode this morning with the hero-cop and the subway—that was my latest fool-proof plan, my most recent “get dead quick” scheme.
Scientifically, the procedure was simple.
1. Pour 12 fluid ounces of Nyquil into mouth
2. Swallow
3. Climb down emergency ladder, onto the train tracks
4. Lay (fall) down
5. Sleep like the dead
6. Die
Mathematically, even simpler
1 bottle Nyquil plus 1 human being times 1 subway train equals infallible suicide, success, completion.
As mathematicians and scientists do, I forgot to account for a variable: The variability of human compassion and responsibility. As a police officer, this gentleman’s duties are summarily to protect and serve.
Let me explain my rationale in omitting this variable from my suicide equation. We live in an egotistical society. Our motto is, “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” Apathy. Selective conscience limits responsibility to one’s family and friends, and one’s belongings. The average man encounters poverty, violence, hunger, all worthy charity cases, countless times each day, and provided that he or his remains unthreatened and unaffected, he doesn’t bat an eye, or dole out a cent.
To rationalize this curse of apathy, he sits for an hour a week in a man’s church. He sits, kneels, stands, sits, kneels, sings, and writes a check. He sleeps soundly at night, satisfied that his one hour of shallow sacrifice and his tithe are sufficient. Naively he smiles, oblivious to the fact that the check he wrote for Haiti’s children is an account, drawn from again and again, before it places one box of colored pencils in one malnutrition-ed child’s hands.
House payments for the preacher. New carpet for the Church. A marble altar. Schools clothes for Timmy, the preacher’s oldest. Better speakers to address the congregation. Colored pencils to solve the world’s problems.
All apathetic, narcissistic bullshit.
With this realistic thought about a society so concerned with its own mousey problems, would you consider human empathy a variable worth including?
Or a constant to be ignored, human apathy its inverse, the mathematical equivalent of a factor of one.
I have no doubt that, subtracting the audience, Old Johnny Law would have averted his eyes and continued his path, quickening his pace at the traumatized gasps of those who have now witnessed exactly what happens to a human body when struck by a vessel traveling upwards of 60 miles per.
As a cop, his responsibility lies only in identity and not his moral code. He sees me as a crazy person, a loon. Not chewing my food properly in hopes that a large hunk of meat will lodge itself in my throat.
Arms scarred by half-assed attempts to bleed myself out.
Refusing to relieve myself, praying for my bladder or my bowels to explode, poisoning my intestines, spilling warm waste into my body’s cavities.
And today, wandering onto the tracks of a subway and falling asleep, probably coked out of my mind.
Not his problem.
Why do I want die so desperately?
You don’t care; genuinely give a shit about my answer to this question. But I answer you regardless.
If you don’t care, then why should I?

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