I sat in the car in the driveway this morning contemplating death. Not just death, per se, but suicide – to be perfectly clear.

Paul says there must be fifty ways to leave your lover. I guess there must more than that many ways to die. I just had the thought that isnt it a shame no man  can experience more than one?

but what if a man could come close, just close enough to get a taste to a few of them. Wouldn’t that be a great experiment? Wouldnt that be a great contribution to science? To Sociology? To Psychology?

I guess there would have to be a lot of safeguards in place. A stand by man to bail me out if I got too close… a resucitation machine in the event that things went too far. 

That sounds like too much work. Too many hands involved. Exhausting.

But still. Exhaust pipe fumes into the car… bag over the head… near fatal shooting… almost lethal overdose… alcohol poisoning… hit by a car… jumping off a buiding, not quite high enough to be fatal, just high enough to paralyze me for life and make my situation so much worse…

But maybe all that flirtation with death would cure me of my fascination. Maybe if I paralyzed myself

i would suddenly see everything roses… maybe this darkness would lift and I would find jesus (in the hall closet?) and I would become an inspiration to all who know me… they could make a movie about my struggle… I’d be a hero…

No. I’d probably just end up – if i wasnt completely paralyzed – an alcoholic miserable bastard that the neighborhood kids would dare each other to bang on the window and run away… put bags of burning shit on my doorway, or any other myriad tortures children exact upon the old, the ailing, the fat, the weak, the poor.

And if I was completely paralyzed then I would be stuck – stuck inside that body, that horrible mass of useless flesh, slowly rotting, dependent upon some poor soul who once loved me – a mother, an ex lover – for there would seurely be nothing lovable now- to wipe my ass, to feed me mush, to change my colostomy bag. What a miserable piece of stinking flesh i would have become. And this poor soul would care for me, and he the hero, and he the recipient of the stinking bags of dog shit at the door, and he the martyr, all because I was too chicken shit or stupid to do the job properly… no, that’s a terrible idea altogether.