Fear and Loathing in Overland Park pt 35

Death…

“All healthy men have thought of their own suicide.”

-Albert Camus

As I’m writing this, music is playing telling me to fill my life with something else. To open my eyes. That suicide is the coward’s way out.

But is it really? With all the death and destruction around, what are we confronted with every day of our lives? Our own mortality is around every corner, and it guides us along our paths. Doesn’t it?

I have to believe that it does. That the idea that someday I will be dead is what keeps me alive. Most times I joke.

Out of spite is why I’m still here.

Spite for the “God” above that most people see as the creator of life and the one who guides our every movements. I’m here out of spite, because if I had committed suicide on any of the number of occasions it has presented itself to me, then I would have had to admit my mistake or his mistake.

My mistake being that if I died and was at the pearly gates and there was a God, I would have to admit that I was wrong all this time. And God would have to admit he was wrong about me. About my fate. About my reality.

And that is another reason I stick around. I don’t believe in fate or destiny. I don’t believe that there is a pre-ordained way your life will go, which is yet another thing that offends people about my talking of suicide.

I’ve spoken to gonzos and friends and family that I felt like suicide was in my cards. That my lot in life was to go out in a blaze of glory and be forgotten. Because that is what happens when you die. People forget you ever existed.

“I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own – a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.”

-Albert Einstein

But is suicide really the way to put punctuation on your life? Is it the same as quitting a job, as Bill Maher put it? Is suicide something glamorous that many people idolize and don’t really understand exactly what it is?

Like Suicide Girls?

A group of women with tattoos and piercings and they glamorize that name for the sake of selling pictures and advertising on a website.

Emo kids who don’t really understand the emotion of the act but just think their life is just the most terribly bad existence to ever face the Earth. Kids with no real problems at all, that live in suburban homes and have loving parents but listen to horrendous music like Good Charlotte and wear black tight clothes all the time, shun the sun, and shop at Hot Topic with their parents’ credit cards and drive their new BMWs.

People have been dressing in black for years and whining about their emotions kids, you’re not original and you never will be.

Those people who glamorize suicide and cut themselves for attention are a different beast altogether. They are the cowards. People like Hunter Thompson who put a gun in their mouths and put the punctuation on their lives are not cowardly.

They are just taking fate into their hands and spreading the good will that “God” offers them.

“To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?”

-Socrates

But as I’m sure you’ll be able to tell, my gonzo nature makes me question just about everything. Question my own mortality and my own thoughts on death and life and living out of spite or hatred or anything else.

I’m not certain what to think.

Is suicide the true man’s way out? Is it a coward’s way out?

Back in 2003, September 11-13 was a very dark period in this writer’s life. John Ritter died of heart trouble on the 11^th. We all knew and loved him from the Problem Child movies, Three’s Company, and various other things. Didn’t really care for 8 Simple Rules, it was just, the dude from Three’s Company was gone. It was strange.

September 12^th, 2003, Johnny Cash died. One of the musical titans. The only country musician I will ever and have ever enjoyed listening to. A man who transcended the world of music and was above it all and was destined to die a dark death but lived an amazing life.

September 13^th, 2003, my friend, Justin Marts, killed himself. He committed suicide the night before and was found on the 13^th. I worked with him at that point for just about a year at Toys R Us and I considered him a friend. I had seen him on the night of the 12^th and we were discussing the newest A Perfect Circle album that was coming out and he wanted me to burn him a copy when I had one and he wanted me to come over and play him in Halo at his place. Then the next day at work, I was confronted with the terrible news that I will never forget.

Red faces in the breakroom. No one could understand it. And that day was one of the worst rainstorms I ever found myself standing in for the rest of that day. I was outside for a good solid 2 hours, waiting for something, anything to brighten the day. And it didn’t.

This year reflects that year in very many strange ways. George Carlin died. One of my personal heroes, similar to Johnny Cash. Tim Russert, a man I respected and enjoyed watching, died, similar to John Ritter. Stan Winston died, a man whose monster work was so much better than anything we had ever seen and was truly before his time.

And a famous comic artist named Michael Turner died of complications from cancer. 37 years old. Way before his time. And his art just kept getting better and better.

A pall rides over these days. Something is hanging over in the sky. And the question of mortality and death has hit me almost as hard, if not harder, than that weekend in September 5 years ago.

“Suicide sometimes proceeds from cowardice, but not always; for cowardice sometimes prevents it; since as many live because they are afraid to die, as die because they are afraid to live.”

-Charles Caleb Colton

Am I afraid to die? Am I afraid to live?

Does living equal failure at all times?

It does. Life is failure.

But isn’t that the beauty of this gonzo lifestyle I hold onto so dearly? It is. I understand, from my past experience with pain, suffering, and suicide, that there are failures to be had. I understand that it can sometimes be the way out.

But is it the way out for all of us?

I have a wife now. I have a life that I’m trying to constantly make better by attempting to figure out what I want to do with my life and I am constantly fighting to give my wife something so much better for her life than she could have ever expected or wanted.

She’s a dreamer, and so am I. But she believes in a higher power, and I don’t. So it’s a struggle.

Every day is a struggle.

But doesn’t that make it worth living? Isn’t it safe to say that if it wasn’t a struggle, if there wasn’t a battle involved, that it might not be worth living?

If I didn’t go through so much personal pain and growth before I met her, would I relish it as much as I do now?

Or would I just blindly throw it away and put a gun in my mouth and take that pain away?

“Seeing death as the end of life is like seeing the horizon as the end of the ocean.”

-David Searls

And that’s the issue. I’m not here to tell you never to think of suicide or death. I’m not here, I’m never here, to tell you that life is worth living and you’re a coward if you seek death instead of life.

I’m here to give you a choice.

Look at all the good you can accomplish, even if that just means staying alive out of spite and writing these blogs and telling people what has happened to you and maybe, just maybe, helping one person deal with their own problems.

Or maybe I’m here to write for myself and work out these problems for myself. Do you really think of me as Gooch and Gooch as me, are we one and the same or are we all one and the same and this is one big love-in?

Maybe I’m just here to say: I have no answers. And that’s the beauty of life. That’s the reason to keep living.

To find the answers.

To figure out a way to be remembered and not completely forgotten once I’m gone.

To figure out a way to spread the gonzo lifestyle of Hunter Thompson and the Or that I so want to be a part of all of your lives.

Or to just be remembered by those who loved me and those I loved and have my life passed down and my fight and my struggle and my choices passed to all of the future generations of my name.

Maybe I just want to be a human and live out this existence, and find a way to gain immortality without actually being a Highlander.

There can be only one, and that is a choice.

Do you choose to live, or choose to die before your time?

Or do you choose to just do whatever feels right when it feels right and make a name for yourself anyway you can?

I choose the or. I choose to live in the or and to do so for the rest of my life here on this plane of existence, even if there isn’t anything above me.

“We can consciously end our life almost anytime we choose. This ability is an endowment, like laughing and blushing, given to no other animal… in any given moment, by not exercising the option of suicide, we are choosing to live.”

-Peter McWilliams