Ebola Doldrums in the Age of Mercury

Breathing mouse shit dust in an Alcoholic's Subaru
I fear I caught the Hantavirus
Nurses on planes wearing Ebola hats
Eat cocktail peanuts
Somewhere on the horizon
A great film has yet to be made
The Sober Gonzo is tired
The leaves have changed color
Are falling
Sprinkling the browning grass with yellow feathers

A Different Perspective on Suicide

There is nothing wrong with suicide.  You read that correctly.  Keep breathing. 

We live in a society where saying that suicide is acceptable is like saying that the moon is made of cheese. 

Robin Williams killed himself.  

He has been called a coward, his death has been blamed on depression, or addiction, and all his potential (and personal) reasons for ending his life are constructed in negative terms, like he broke the rules, like we, the living, lost control of his life.  

We assume that we have the right to pronounce a judgment: that he made the wrong choice, that it was a mistake, a momentary loss of reason that could have been prevented.

When a family and intimate friends lose a loved one, there is hardship and there is pain, there is a long period of mourning, a personal, living, struggle to understand, to find peace with the loss. 

When a society loses someone who makes them laugh, who entertains them, who they did not know personally, we might do well to look at our own problem, celebrity worship, and a mentally deranged idea that we somehow have a special and intimate connection with, and ownership over, people who do not even know who we are. 

Robin Williams had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.  Most people who commit suicide have a serious physical or mental illness, some reason to no longer want to wake up and see the sunrise or feel a lovers embrace.  The things that make life worth living, no longer do.  What kind of society are we living in when someone is not allowed to make a decision not to go on living when they will be subjecting themselves, and their friends and family, to a long, drawn-out, degenerative illness, as their own life becomes more and more difficult to live?  

I know something about suicide.  My mother died by her own hand, by drinking a glass of water with a deadly dose of powdered phenobarbital dissolved in it.  She did this while I was holding her hand, while my little brother and I sat next to her, keeping her company and telling her how much we loved her. 

To watch my mother drink that cup of water, that would not nourish life, but would end it, was to witness the most courageous act that has ever been performed in my company. 

Have you ever been standing at a bus-stop or subway platform, and felt the air move as this large machine approaches, and think, I could just step in front of it?  Along with that thought, when I’ve had it, was always this immediate sense of dread or revulsion, an absolute feeling of “no-way, I want to live.” I would immediately move backwards, even if I was already a yard from the danger zone, I would make sure I was safe. 

The will to live is not something easy to surmount.  Killing yourself is not an easy task.  For a person with the will to live, pointing a gun at your own head is going to feel very unnatural.  If you’ve ever gone out shooting and someone next to you holding a gun starts to turn toward you, you get very uncomfortable, and probably tell them they should take a gun safety class, tell them to turn their ass around, and get that gun pointed in the opposite direction. 

In our society there is a prohibition against suicide, they lock you up if you try it, you are punished, stigmatized, people think you are sick.  My life, someone else tells me, belongs to them.  I don’t own my own life.  

I imagine the prohibition against suicide leads to more suicides than it prevents.  Do I know this to be a fact?  No.  But the suicide rate in the United States is certainly higher than it is in, say, Switzerland, where assisted suicide is legal, where my mother, brother, and I were able to go so that mom could be freed from her suffering and sickness.  

In a society where suicide is made available, in a compassionate way, maybe it becomes less appealing.  If my life was mine, maybe I would care more about it.  That feeling on the subway platform would return, having death right there, would make me pull back, remind me that I do want to live another day, to witness the great mystery of living.

Who am I to say that Robin Williams shouldn’t have killed himself?  I can’t even say that my own mother shouldn’t have killed herself.  It was her decision.  It was her life.  It was her suffering.  I could only witness, be there, be present, be a grown-up.  For any of us to judge someone for taking their own life demands an enormous amount of immaturity on our part, and is a symptom of what a society of emotional wimps we are.  

To kill oneself is to go against the fundamental instinct of life, it is to overcome the will to live.  If someone takes this step we should feel compassion for them, understand that their suffering may be beyond our comprehension, and understand that they may have made the best decision for them, and maybe even for their family and society. 

Of course we should offer mental health care to all our citizens, it should be a part of any reasonable universal health-care plan, and we should try and prevent and treat depression and other mental illness (suffering might be a better word for illness) and many of the other drivers of suicide, addiction, and violence. 

We also need to look at the stigma against suicide in our society, and ask ourselves whether what we are really trying to avoid looking at is what a miserable society it is that has to command its members to go on living, and to prohibit something that should be naturally unappealing, except in cases that those of us who still have the will to live might not be able to understand.      

There was no blood on the moon tonight.

There was no blood on the moon tonight. The moon was a sun. The total lunar eclipse, April 15^th, 2014, was a magical thing. A long performance, that made me aware of just how big this earth is.  We have a very long shadow.  How glorious, what a universe to behold.  Yet we forget how small the universe really is, with all its’ possible multiple dimensions, or its’ so called worm-holes, or mysteries, and imaginings.  

We’ve zoomed so far back in time trying to find out how it all began, made our projection of the totality of things so huge, so immensely beyond our mortal comprehension, that we’ve forgotten where we are, the only place there is in fact, for a human being to be. Right here.  Right now.  Where else is there?  Sure we’ve launched ourselves into space, but we were earthlings in space.  It wasn’t exactly outer space, nowhere even close to the edge of the sun’s orbit.  We haven’t left the neighborhood.  We are in orbit down here, and we are in orbit out there.  A few dozen earthlings went to space.  How nice.  Nothing like a little field trip to fuel the imagination and take us a little further out, into our science fiction adventure in forgetting our nature. 

What does it mean for earthlings to launch themselves off their life support system, their source of life, their home?  Can there be any rational explanation for it, or does it lead a clear thinking person to believe that these astronauts and their admirers, these imaginatively deluded, self-identified space colonizers, have forgotten that they are the earth? 

We are not separate from this planet, well, at least not according to evolutionary theory.  Here we are, billions of years in the making, uniquely suited to life on this planet, in this solar system, breathing this air, in this peculiar and unique atmosphere.  Really, where do we think we’re going? 

We can watch a performance like the moon, in the shadow of our home, getting comfortable in the darkness, turning off all the lights.  Even when our earth shadow turns off the lights on the moon, which turns our big night-light in the sky way down, one could still have a snack, in the faint glow of the golden orb in the night sky.  Tonight it was like the sun, about to set on the horizon, all soft orange and glowing, and it’s the moon, doing it’s same old thing, but longer, endlessly held there in a faint glow of perfect roundness, in our shadow.  On and on, held in our view, moving slowly nowhere.  Where did we lose track of our place in the solar system, passengers on this orbiting planet, full of blood, wet with the tides of the moon?

They call it a blood moon, but we are the bloody ones.  We are the one’s naming things, giving meaning to things, making up explanations for the universe, creating alternative universes with our imaginations, in concert with our inventions.  Telescopes: to take us further away from here and now, showing us images of a past we’ve convinced ourselves is comprehensible to us.  But we are always here, now, whether we are seeing backwards or projecting forwards, we can only ever do it from here, inside our minds.  We think we are the inventors, but we are inventions of the earth, conscious creators, in a little holding pattern of mental projection.  Someday if we return to sanity, we might even call it what it is, a type of collective psychosis.  But it’s an interesting adventure anyhow, in the light of the moon, halfway out of the shadow of our mother planet, reflecting brightly the light of our energetic seed, sunlight, as we orbit just so.  We think we are going somewhere, but we’ll always be now here, which means we are going nowhere. 

Where else is there? 

Here, now, then, there.

Two weeks ago I was laying on my belly in a little guest-room in Hawaii, turning right to look out at the broad pacific ocean.  I'm addicted to distraction.  The sound of notification chimes from my phone. I ignore it, but am tempted.  I'm constantly drawn back into Facebook, as though pulled, from a physical aloneness, into the digital public square.  There must be peers there, yes, but is it an illusion of togetherness? We seem to move ever so imperceptibly toward this falsity of companionship.  Where are these people? The implicit suggestion of the photographs and posts is that we are busy living, thriving, in a real world.  Yet, here we are, day after day, in the same digital sphere, called back, like salmon returning to our birthplace, to spawn.  If it's so real, so deep, so satisfying, so present, why are we sitting with our faces attached to a screen, updating this moment into a public journal; as if to say to each other "Hello!?" "Greetings!"  Here I am.  Living.  Here I am, I exist. The public square, the village, evaporated into ethereal digitation.