Looking at What We've Become

If this is not the beginning of the end, it's a pretty reasonable facsimile.

At the ass end of history, everything will look like a target (Photo by Kasia Meow)

The first person I ever knew who killed themselves was Annabelle. She was tall, it seemed to me, and possessed of a febrile vigor that as an adult, and a man, I recognize in all of the crazy women I have since found myself attracted to.

At this point now I have not seen her, or a photo of her, in years and have no real sense of, regardless of me being attracted, whether or not she was attractive in any conventional sense. She seemed “hip” to me. And to a certain degree cool, in a late ‘60s kind of way. But I was seven and she was in her 20s, and the sister of my stepfather.

She’d come by and take me and my stepbrother out places. To eat. Or to play. I never noticed much that was wrong with her or any of this until suddenly I did.

I had to use the toilet one day and going to use it I found it full of newspaper. I couldn’t figure this out. Her father was a newsman, her mother had been a journalist of some note. As was her brother, my stepfather. They were related to the famed sports columnist Red Smith, and we always had a photo of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, poolside, with their son Scottie, somewhere in our house. Family friends.

But the toilet bowl was full of piss, and newspaper. We had toilet paper, very near the toilet, in fact. So it made no sense to me. And how do you explain to a seven-year-old “not right”?

One day though a call came in. Annabelle had killed herself. I think it was an overdose of pills. At least I was told it was. Nothing more violent than that. Not a gun, nor a hanging. When I asked about why, all I remember being told was there was never any one reason why someone kills themself.

It’s living all over us, this death. In our cars, heads, houses, songs, films, news, feeds. We can’t get enough of it…

As I came to understand it, there were many, and any separately, wouldn’t be enough, but collectively? Almost always too much.

Something I finally came to consider when it was my turn to consider what “too much” could mean. A friend, helpfully, mocked me out of my morbid self-attentions via a brief one-act starring him as me.

“KILL myself??! YOU kill YOURSELF! I’m TOO HANDSOME TO KILL MYSELF!”

Exeunt. Curtain call. Take a bow. Thanks Gabriel.

That didn’t change the fact though that for even a small piece of time I found it attractive and suitable as an option for what ailed me — love, or lack thereof —but instead what I was left with was this great Thanatos moment where I realized that really what I wanted, more than anything, was the party to end when I left the party.

Some version of FOMO, fear of missing out, fueled an unspoken desire for not just a solo casualty event but a massive mass casualty event. Like Hitler’s Nero Decree where Germany, post-defeat would be destroyed by Germans, leaving nothing for the “invaders.”

When Hitler directed Nazi architect Albert Speer to carry out the decree, Speer inquired after the Germany people, marked by concern and a desire for their continuation. Hitler’s response, and I paraphrase, was something along the lines of “FUCK the German people. They’ve failed me.”

And there, in a nutshell, is what I figured I was hungering after. René Girard calls it a “sacrificial crisis” and here in 2022 we’re in the midst of a casualty event so normalized and ubiquitous that it’s impossible to tell that, like someone stuck in an avalanche, we’re really digging down, and further away from survival, and not up.

It’s living all over us, this death. In our cars, heads, houses, songs, films, news, feeds. We can’t get enough of it, and it, and echoes of it, thrums so routinely that our hunger for homicide is really just a finally tuned desire for the death of self. Also known as suicide.

At first you don’t notice it. Then you can’t stop noticing it.

But who takes a loaded pistol to a comedy club these days? Outside of ALL of us?

Back window obit appliqués announcing the “untimely” death of someone or another. Fox News’ steady offering of killing chaos supporting a narrative of the decadent and decaying city (usually New York. Or San Francisco). Music that’s figured this out sooner than the rest of us and regularly features gunshots as percussion.

Or how about film and television where this week alone I’ve watched over 60 people murdered; and I’ve only watched two hours of film and television this week. Podcasts and books with either murder in the title or that are about murder, abound. And rounding it out, real world events that beggar analysis and deeper explanation.

We stink of it and we don’t even realize we stink of it.

Like my new car asked me to give a name to my driver profile and in a blur that I barely remember, but that shocked me when I first started the car the next day: MURDER. I named my car MURDER. Danny from The Shining had to read it backward and in red in his bathroom mirror — REDRUM — to get it. We don’t have to look that far.

Now there’s a difference between exercising our limbic system, the animal part of our brain involved in our behavioral and emotional responses, and indulging it without restriction. A BIG difference. A man recently took a loaded firearm to a comedy club where he challenged, as a joke, Mike Tyson to a fight. Tyson defused the situation by hugging the man, proving himself to be a far better person than I am.

But who takes a loaded pistol to a comedy club these days? Outside of ALL of us.

Now once upon a time Ronny Zamora said that he killed his neighbor because he was suffering from television intoxication; and people laughed. A few years ago he was released from prison after 27 in prison, and while we’re not using this failed defense to beat any rap, no one is laughing at this as a defense any more.

But what drove us here? Everything. And who can drive us out? No one.

Because we want it too badly, and badly is how we want it. From the stylized and generic Internet mewling about every bit of modern living that we have to endure that will draw an audience (witness: THIS sub stack and everything else owned and operated by super yacht dwelling billionaires) to a sense of hopelessness over our addiction to the same, we’re struggling and striving for…relief. While at the same time stoking the fires that make the likelihood of relief even more remote.

Twin engines of misery. Of our own making. I’d like to say we’ll be fine but I don’t know that we are. But, at least, you know, no one ever kills themselves for any ONE reason.

And as I type that last sentence my phone rings. It’s a friend. He tells me he’s got cancer of the spine, is having chemo. He says it’s stage 3. The five-year survival rate for stage 3A NSCLC is around 36 percent. For stage 3B cancers the survival rate is about 26 percent. For stage 3C cancers the survival rate is about 1 percent.

Was he A, B, or C? I ask.

“It’s too early to talk about that shit,” he laughed, then coughed. “But could you write me something. Something about not having too much time left?”

Yeah…you know I will.