I never expected to survive past 23. Of course, at the time, I was working against it. I smoked unfiltered Lucky Strikes, an average of a pack a day, and downed coffee like it was a substitute for forfeited oxygen. There was some boozing, but nothing olympian; most untrained idiots have their first blackout before 23, whereas I reserved mine for the following year. No, the main things I did to endanger my life were taxing my heart & lungs with nicotine & caffeine, skateboarding without a helmet, picking fights with fratboys in a town where fratboys had a fetish for putting each other through windows, and overdosing on pills.
Suicide wasn't exactly the plan. It was just a thing I did, once, in a snit. A typical teenager's bad day: had a breakup, got into some shit with my roomies, and raided their medicine cabinet in revenge. The sleeping pills could have killed me. Instead some backup program in my brain kicked in, and my roomies nervously studied me hallucinating & gibbering idiocy about ferret teeth littering the floor while I exercised with the focus of one possessed.
Of course they kicked me out afterward. Sleeping in icy alleys did more to dissuade me from wanting to die than the spooky brain-zap. So I resolved to live, without quite knowing how to go about it.
Fast forward a quarter century.
The suicide attempt isn't something I talk about much. But it's something I have to own, like surviving a murder attempt by my own father, or having my skull cracked & my brain sauced with blood. You don't nearly die three times and come out the other side a normie human with normie perceptions. You either learn what love is or you go buggo, but you don't walk around numb & neutered & perfectly accepting of all the stupid shit humanity rolls with.
I did not expect to be here, with intact memories of the late, late 70s, watching this country thrash itself into the walls like the man-scab version of Eddie Jessup in 'Altered States'. I did not expect to be reading Transmetropolitan (again?!) & shaking my head at how naive Warren Ellis was about America's essential self-destructive depravity. I did not expect to be living on the shore of a vast natural marvel like Lake Michigan, watching the black of night crossfade to yellow & pink, waiting for snow and wondering if I can finish 'Health & Safety: A Breakdown' by Emily Witt before Saturday.
It's a good book. It captures the nineties with as much horrific clarity as the noughties. There was a presentiment, among my varied circles of friends, that most of us had a sell-by date. An age by which we would, in all likelihood, cease to be. For reasons of mental illness & questionable taste in heroes, I had picked 23. What can I say? It was the 90s, and Cronenberg's 'Naked Lunch' had proven popular enough that Grove Press issued all-new covers for Bill Burroughs' books. I was into Robert Anton Wilson as much as anything, and the "23 enigma" had attached itself to my weak psyche like the meme equivalent of a wood tick.
The suicide attempt had been when I was still 18, y'see. Afterward, I became convinced that my fortune wouldn't, couldn't, extend beyond the millenium. But you can convince yourself of anything. Same as you can convince yourself that a bad breakup is worth self-extermination, you can also convince yourself to get out of bed, shave & go to a deadend job everyday. You can convince yourself to hone skills, or re-develop skillsets you already possessed. In my case I convinced myself I was bound to be Discovered, one day, as a talented & desirable comic book artist.
Yeah, that didn't happen. But I convinced myself to live, to learn to love living. I have yet to give that up. I have plans. So what if I'm past my sell-by date? I'm not a bag of fucking groceries.
Hey: who-ever you are, reading this? Neither are you. So don't let the fucktards in power get you down. We can ride this out, however uncomfortably, and when we emerge on the other side, maybe a little dazed & stunned & disbelieving, we can take the future by the balls...
And twist.
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