Suicide and Resource Scarcity
Jun. 20th, 2018 12:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraI’ve been feeling inadequate.
Inadequacy manifests as anxiety that I’m not spending enough time entertaining the cats; obsessive worries that the flowers I sent Eleanor ended up on the wrong porch; erotic dreams about B.
Woke up around 2am last night. Didn’t fall back to sleep for two hours until finally I poured myself a shot of – ugh – rum, which was the only EtOH in the liquor cabinet.
They say you’re not supposed to distract yourself by reading or watching electronic diversions when you’re trying to fall back to sleep. (Note to self: Find out who “they” are.) But insomnia is terribly boring. So I looked out my window: OhmyGAWD! Fireflies! Be still my flickering heart.
I’m friends with a lot of dead people on Facebook.
One of them is Jayson Rome who killed himself – what? Two years ago? Three years ago?
This photo was snapped at least 20 years before my penumbra brushed up against his, ever so slightly. But it still made me pause. And consider.
The kid in the photo is just so amazingly beautiful. He also looks embarrassed to be so beautiful, which is a clue that he’s smart. Was smart. He was also pragmatic, kind, and hilarious.
I’ve known a lot of people who committed suicide. Maybe everybody does. But Jayson Rome’s suicide – he leaped from the roof of a motel in Long Island City – hit me hard. Because if someone like Jayson could commit suicide, what hope is there for the rest of us?
###
Calypso is not great, but it’s better than David Sedaris’ last two books. Its centerpiece is an essay Sedaris wrote after his sister Tiffany committed suicide.
“A couple months after Tiffany died, this Dutch film crew came to Sussex,” Sedaris told an interviewer a few months after Tiffany’s death.
They followed me around for several days, and toward the end of it, the interviewer kind of pulled up very close to me and said, “I know your sister recently committed suicide. So if you could say one thing to her, if she was here right now, what question would you ask?” And I said, “Can I have back that $6,000 that I loaned you?”
I thought this was a perfect response: YES! You want to get back every last emotional, material, and spiritual investiture you made in the now departed. In fact, when you think about it, wasn’t it kind of unfair that they extorted all those resources from you? Because they must have known on some level. That they were gonna do what they ended up doing.
###
I’m not really sure why there’s such a huge suicide taboo in this culture.
I don’t think it’s as prevalent in the East or the Third World where people have never paid the extraordinary amount of lip service to the sanctity of human life that they do here.
The sanctity of human life is definitely a First World luxury.
For reasons I’ve enumerated elsewhere at exhaustive and no doubt boring length, I would never dream of killing myself. Just Choose Life! La, la, la!
But I do find the American attitude toward suicide puzzling.
Most people have such small circles of influence; their primary value to society at large is as consumers. I guess in a society that’s formulated around an ever-expanding GNP, every consumer is precious. If someone is depressed, that makes them an even better consumer! Studies have shown that depressed people buy more!
With people like Jayson Rome or Anthony Bourdain or even Kate Spade, the disapprobation is something else, though. I suppose what it amounts to is: But there’s so much more I could have gotten out of you.
Resource scarcity makes the world go round.
Inadequacy manifests as anxiety that I’m not spending enough time entertaining the cats; obsessive worries that the flowers I sent Eleanor ended up on the wrong porch; erotic dreams about B.
Woke up around 2am last night. Didn’t fall back to sleep for two hours until finally I poured myself a shot of – ugh – rum, which was the only EtOH in the liquor cabinet.
They say you’re not supposed to distract yourself by reading or watching electronic diversions when you’re trying to fall back to sleep. (Note to self: Find out who “they” are.) But insomnia is terribly boring. So I looked out my window: OhmyGAWD! Fireflies! Be still my flickering heart.
I’m friends with a lot of dead people on Facebook.
One of them is Jayson Rome who killed himself – what? Two years ago? Three years ago?
This photo was snapped at least 20 years before my penumbra brushed up against his, ever so slightly. But it still made me pause. And consider.
The kid in the photo is just so amazingly beautiful. He also looks embarrassed to be so beautiful, which is a clue that he’s smart. Was smart. He was also pragmatic, kind, and hilarious.
I’ve known a lot of people who committed suicide. Maybe everybody does. But Jayson Rome’s suicide – he leaped from the roof of a motel in Long Island City – hit me hard. Because if someone like Jayson could commit suicide, what hope is there for the rest of us?
###
Calypso is not great, but it’s better than David Sedaris’ last two books. Its centerpiece is an essay Sedaris wrote after his sister Tiffany committed suicide.
“A couple months after Tiffany died, this Dutch film crew came to Sussex,” Sedaris told an interviewer a few months after Tiffany’s death.
They followed me around for several days, and toward the end of it, the interviewer kind of pulled up very close to me and said, “I know your sister recently committed suicide. So if you could say one thing to her, if she was here right now, what question would you ask?” And I said, “Can I have back that $6,000 that I loaned you?”
I thought this was a perfect response: YES! You want to get back every last emotional, material, and spiritual investiture you made in the now departed. In fact, when you think about it, wasn’t it kind of unfair that they extorted all those resources from you? Because they must have known on some level. That they were gonna do what they ended up doing.
###
I’m not really sure why there’s such a huge suicide taboo in this culture.
I don’t think it’s as prevalent in the East or the Third World where people have never paid the extraordinary amount of lip service to the sanctity of human life that they do here.
The sanctity of human life is definitely a First World luxury.
For reasons I’ve enumerated elsewhere at exhaustive and no doubt boring length, I would never dream of killing myself. Just Choose Life! La, la, la!
But I do find the American attitude toward suicide puzzling.
Most people have such small circles of influence; their primary value to society at large is as consumers. I guess in a society that’s formulated around an ever-expanding GNP, every consumer is precious. If someone is depressed, that makes them an even better consumer! Studies have shown that depressed people buy more!
With people like Jayson Rome or Anthony Bourdain or even Kate Spade, the disapprobation is something else, though. I suppose what it amounts to is: But there’s so much more I could have gotten out of you.
Resource scarcity makes the world go round.
