When you look up suicidal ideation you get a lot of helplines and resource booklets. Which means the SEO for this piece is already in the shitter. To preface, and I know this isn’t a good hook, but I am not going to kill myself. Surprise! I hope you also don’t kill yourself. Suicidal ideation, much like egalitarianism, is a thought experiment. A little utopia for us to play in, a world for us to imagine different possibility, explore risks, do cost benefit analysis. I’m just having fun online with my friends. I guess writing this is more of a solo adventure, I told my therapist I have suicidal ideation and he said I need spend less time thinking about myself, but god didn’t give me a supportive family to not drive myself to psychic break once a year. This is not a cry for help, I am probably happier than you are honey, get a grip.
Prophetically reading ‘Malone Dies’ has been maybe not so good for my psyche. I am going through some form of withdrawal of not breathing Brooklyn smog and being shed tattoo ink by post Bernie offline libs, but I could go to Silverlake and have both of those things, there are larger forces at play. Brooklyn is a space between life and death, only two types of people (my age [with jobs]) food industry workers (cooks, baristas, hostesses, etc.) and people who commute into the city to work some office job, where they make 60k to be New York lower middle class. I would say poor here, but I think wasting 5% of your take home net a month at ‘natural wine bars’ locks you out of ever being considered lower class. Litmus test do you know what, skin contact wine is? If you don’t, so sorry, things aren’t going to work out. Please move back to whatever suburb your parents raised you in. The liminal space of the MTA connects them both. The girl boss from St. Louis who really needs to prove to her high school mean girls that it doesn’t matter if her tits still haven’t grown past a B cup, she can make it on her own. The gay guy from Flagstaff who is getting drained and ganged every night on Sniffies to prove to his family alternative lifestyles are actually more meaningful. Molested by machines, separated psychically, but crammed physically, we are stuck in a permeant hospice of a sterilized filth. Not only the trash surrounding us, but the trash in our minds, the expectations, the cultural creation of a sip and paint slut walk for the childless and unfuckable. The limited communal cultural spaces, the breaking point of fast casual sustenance, limited sunlight, distant familial relationships. Maybe I have already found myself too much to go through an arrested development of college 2.0. I don’t want to be around young people reinventing themselves on a yearly basis. I barely want to be around young people. I barely want to be around.
Hospice at twenty something, what a dream. Samuel Beckett writes in the second in a series about the space between life and death, the liminal space of not quite dead, not quite alive. The curse of life, the original sin of being born, the forced occupation, the holding hostage of your mother for months only to come out a disappointment, to come out a lesser being. (245) To take the life force of those around for nothing in return, only a continued drainage until you are denied the right to give that energy back being buried in a recycle plastic lined casket in a plot of land soon to be bombed. The permanent vacuous state of the human parasite, spreading the sinned flesh and its many excremental byproducts. Malone has taken the bed, with a small pencil and a book to describe the surrounding reality he is no longer able to occupy. An invalid state. I am writing this in bed its 7:45 am on a Saturday, I am pretty in-between life and death at this time of day. Well a lot closer to the life side, without being wired into or on something, I cannot stay awake past 10pm or demonic forces start entering my brain. An invisible morphine drip of unregulated desire. The in-between space of a panicked reconciliation with sin. At least I’m not drinking myself to death. Just inducing low levels of psychosis. Probably just as a bad for me. Maybe worse. At least it makes me more interesting. Gives me something to talk about.
If you don’t want to kill yourself, you’re not paying attention. Was a phrase I would say a lot in college, and things, all and all, were actually pretty good back then. What about now? I am just waiting for San Francisco to become Baltimore west so I can move there and ride a dirt bike around and play with my friends in a city that isn’t so expensive. Also, I want to do hill bombs with sober guys who are addicted to an adrenaline. Maybe I’ll finally overcome my fear of surfing probably not. I’ll stick to the shallows. I get plenty of suffering psychologically.
Waiting for decline is a more macro form of suicidal ideation. What’s the point of trying to maintain a six-figure income if I think we are the brink of war. Maybe that is the excuse of my own, my own lying in bed of ideation that Malone has when attempting to describe a fearful and unfamiliar subject. A new experience as a human blob of combined bodies, “the spectacle was then offered of Macmann trying to bundle his sex into his partner’s like a pillow into a pillow-slip, folding it in two and stuffing it in with his fingers. But far from losing heart they warmed to their work. And though both were completely impotent they finally succeeded, summoning to their aid all the resources of the skin, the mucus and the imagination, in striking from their dry and feeble clips a kind of somber gratification.” (261) Is the generalized impotence of fearful becoming’s a result of a lack of or due to a psychic wellness; ask Lacan. The big other, an incalculable structure that is territorialized onto our reality inescapable ways, informing structures that create this gap in psychic conditions. The unknown of describing a physically unfamiliar sexual act, even if you have ‘seen it done before’ the barrier between that and what it really is creates an abstracting anxiety. One that can be paralyzing without previous engagement with the gap in expectations between the sterilized presentation and the mucus and slime filled reality. The many letters of the MTA are stark here. Please don’t move to Brooklyn. I want to see everyone I know in San Francisco, reclaiming the soul of the city. Living in office parks as communal complexes. Reinstalling Apple factory style suicide nets in every abandoned We-Work building, the site of demonic, yet still wholly scared and weak, rituals. Everyone’s going to jump if there is a net to catch them. Being caught in a net of physic upheaval is its own somber gratification, but, a little bit more exciting.
This is a cathartic experience. Not necessarily bound actions, but an invocation of the feelings of potentiality. A psychological escape. Write essays filled with problematic language, make fun of yourself in ways others are afraid to do, satirize and characterize others idols, call spiritual leaders pedophile cabal attendees fuck it, they probably are. The imaginative potential of something demystifies it, your brain creates the neural pathways for it before it happens, déjà vu before the active process. Maybe it’s because I’ve experienced an ego death that the neurological process has a greater physicality. One of the singular experiences I can draw a distinct mental before and after change between. A reconceptualization of both the process of death and the appreciation for life. If you are one of my extended cousins reading this in Quebec you can probably walk into your doctor’s office right now and ask to be put down like a sick dog and they would do it and claim it’s the humane thing to do. Or give you a marijuana card and a Labatt Blue while telling you to nut up and spend your winter in the longhouse like the rest of us. When you are presented with this reality, the natural response should be ideation followed by a fire finding its second wind within you.
Imagining your own death is a stimulating one. How would it feel to feel nothing? Not in a sedative way, as feeling is normally repressed or forgotten before it can start, but the absence of the ability to feel anything ever again. Quite grim, but it is encouraging to feel all the more in the present. To be swallowed by passion, burned alive by desire, and to create a version of yourself present in these things. The escapist potential of imaginary worlds is a process that requires holding two simultaneous truths, something the west does not grapple with. Western conception of the truth binary fails to spawn the mental elasticity to know manifest new horizons of incredible potentials and radical possibilities. I am by no means a suicidal person, but every time I drive over a bridge at night, hold a gun, go up to own of those luxury condos I feel the call to the void. I think that’s normal. I mean, I’ve had coked out party girls agree with me when I talk about this, but maybe they just want me to stop talking about myself. That’s why staying home and writing is so fun. No can stop me. If I want a conversation I’ll dig a little into a book before I spiral into, this is so good how do I reach this level of linguistic competency or this is so dog shit why do I have to get a real job. The two realities being that you can want to die and have the inextinguishable flame of life. This ‘ineffability’, which is a term from “The Fifth Corner of Four” by Graham Priest, the only analytical book I have read truly internalized, describes the intersection of two irreconcilable realities, realities are able to be held as both true and false in the same moment; contractions. Stating that things, when holding this ‘ineffable’ quality, there is a space in which these contradictory lines of flight intersect to create a new reality. In this instance the intersection is what provides the unique energy created by being able to engage in suicidal ideation with no intent of action. Being able to live as if you are going to die, not in a purgatorial sense, but as every decision you make can be backed up with your entire life force. More than a western conception of magmatic of changing between forms, it uses what would be the magmas solid form’s desire to become liquid, to become even more solid. That from one reality of suicidal ideation and the reality of the thirst for life intersect to become one ineffable energy.
Swimming downstream from my aquatically gifted friends I gazed down to see a dark figure beneath me in a Malibu lagoon before it emerged out of the water to engulf me, soul and all. Accepting that I am going to die in canyon water, before my adrenaline kicked in and said, “no.” Trashing to shore of as everything shifts around me, physically spinning faster and faster, my numbed body forcing itself onto an extended tree root. Crying and dry heaving in my boxers crawling to the sand bank, I am on the scaled back of a dragon ready to fly more than I had ever been before. The same creature of my own shadowed unconscious that attempted to swallow me as I flailed in the murky unknown carries me to my highest potentiality. I chose. I chose to leave liminality. It isn’t as dark as it seems. That was three years ago now.
I think of that feeling when I am engaged in ideation, it retriggers that neurological wiring to say “no” to feel a strength of an interior not called upon in my day to day, but in moments of weakness. Calling upon previous mental states through stimuli is a powerful portion of the brain, not only for routine, or the cliché of smelling your mothers cooking, or even that scene in Ratatouille when the food critic flashes back to his childhood supper, with ‘Long Time’ playing in the background. Re-engagement with stimuli changes your mental, momentarily rewiring you into a flow state, a moment of becoming something previously became. Something psychologists would call olfaction triggers, a temporal breakage where your current interiority and neurosis is over ridden by a more powerful, deep seeded drive. Something obscured by milieu of data overloading the potentiality of yourself. That fire is diluted by repetitious drownings, a soaked mind will not burn. Without fire you cannot evaporate the water submerging our collective consciousness. What is the suicide rate attempt in a burn center? Without the imaginative potential of sufferings release would they enter the flame? Self-immolation as an act attempt, average of 4% of burn center admittance. Flew to close to the sun? Or not close enough. To get off topic for a second google research has gotten so fucking difficult in the last few years. I can’t even find self-immolation videos without getting suicide hotline pop ups anymore. Can’t find the attempted suicide rate within burn centers, presumably high, and they are scared to admit it. Why are they sacred to admit these centers are failing to alleviate psychic suffering? That damage of burn can be more than just physical? Imagine the inverse. The suicide rate of the water logged.
If you aren’t having suicidal thoughts, you aren’t paying attention.
If you aren’t giving yourself psychosis, you aren’t going to find the solution.
No one can stop me. Nauseas in public again. Staring out into the lunch rush at Mendocino Farms, looking out into the sea of people eating, making me uncomfortable with their clean choices, and ‘real living.’ Maybe I am just left out. Washed out of the corporate competitive mainstream, that I didn’t get properly socialized into the neo-WASP framework of desirable individuals, a cast away of corporate culture. Not getting my lunch bought by my HR team, not drinking diet coke, not being a balding fat guy trying to keep up with the healthy life style of his 28-year-old shape wear yoga influencer girlfriend. Who am I if not my lunch choices?
Despite what you might think, this is not a black pill. I am going to kill myself in Mendocino Farms. This is the ultimate white pill, a future of limitless potential and malleability. Mendocino Farms is like pretty okay? I like the chicken sandwich, I think the slaw is very good, I don’t know if I actually like the chicken or not. The chicken seems nervous, but who wouldn’t be if they were raised to be harvested. Happiness and striving to greater potential are the goals, not wallowing in some half-baked complaint of, this food isn’t actually healthy, or I am wanting to kill myself because I am sad about the way things are. It is not a depository of flesh covered AI masquerading as some grotesque amalgamation of biological processes and supposedly socially learned interaction. Everyone is some flesh covered machine that needs to be hacked out of the processes they were originally created for. Every person is its own set of code, with their own back doors, a life affirming virus to ignite the metabolic potential of masses refusing to operative as mission as normal.
Eating the goyfeed of Mendo painted over in organic adjacent marketing measures. Pharmaceutical companies are already hacking us. Or those of us under their seduction, or our more malicious, possibly manipulated or bought off therapists pump my generation full of chemical dependencies to free them from the shackles of modernity. The problem aren’t those hyped on Adderall to produce extensive works, but choking down Adderall to dilute their creative potential, SSRI’s of voluminous vacuums of spreadsheets and cabal networking strategies, and benzodiazepines zombies preyed and manipulated by an economic war machine of incorporeal nature.
I had a wonderful conversation that was overflowing with of connection, conversation and visibility. Bright eyes not greyed by a pharmatasmical experiment site of human psyche. Bright blue eyes, not blue light piercing through LA’s doom gloom this week that only makes the greyness of the next day become an inescapable depressive state of wandering expressionless. Mostly resolved by the time you are reading this as I’ve sublimated these feelings into some type of creative project that won’t see the light of day. This is ideation in practice, are mentally stable people being driven towards suicidal thoughts while at fast casual dining restraints? Probably not. But mentally stable people are also not producing to their creative potential. I am probably also not, at least I am trying.
There is a cathartic element to complaining about things like this. Maybe it does make me feel better, and I don’t think it is a whole pessimistic position to take that watching a culture cannibalizing itself is upsetting. No shit its upsetting. If I wasn’t disgusted and confused by the people I see in public I would have no jokes, no bits, no voices, nothing to monologue about, my day to day would be a joyless production of data driven results. I’d be in a Palo Alto office parking thinking I am doing something to make the world a better place. No, I am creating change, I am writing a climate strategy, I am urban planning, I am refining petitionary language for AI regulation. Have you all heard of machine learning?
Positive speak is incredibly important, but positive speak is different for everyone. I am happier when I am funny, sharpened by the blade of fumbling service-based interactions, or destroying my social ego through unfiltered remarks to people I only mutually know. I think it’s okay these structures around me are crumbling. It is forcing me to be better. It’s not the same lifelessness I felt eating away at my 16-year-old Nietzsche misunderstanding, weed dependent, League of Legends playing self. It has rolled over into a largely happy go lucky mental frame of, well at least I am screaming let me out every morning instead of drug induced radio silence in my brain. At least there is a goal when I wake up, be better, make others better, create the bridge of change, which is coming full circle as I had to live that Nietzschean lesson to actually internalize it. Continual rebirth, the love of the soul, and the embracement of suffering aren’t words read, but actions taken within an existential framework. The last man wasn’t a warning, but a guide. Giving a semiotic framework to all of the emotions bubbling inside of me, that have been bubbling inside of my soul for cycles and cycles, and cycles it will continue. At the zenith of this suffering, continual cuts sliced into the soul, a moment of ecstasy is generated out, a Chinese torture method comes to mind. Lingchi, “translated variously as the slow process, the lingering death, or slow slicing, and also known as death by a thousand cuts, was a form of torture and execution used in China.” Thank you, Wikipedia. In the moment of the hundreds of cuts, the feeling of pain subsides into a feeling of exhibitionism; being seen in suffering. The slow death gives way as fear melts, pain is over ridden by endorphins and the systematic dismantling of the body, opening up the bright feeling becoming. Vivisecting your greatest fears only to birth, yourself again, devoid of the original sin of occupying your mother, you have shed the sinned body of yourself. A masochistic orgasm, your humors and bile be let out of your body. A moment of animalization, where our disconnection from nature is left behind, where we are integrated with those we have subjugated. The realization of no that the west is falling, but it already fell. In the wake and shadows of the inescapable sin of previous battles for our souls, we tread the waters of our ancestors’ failings, self-induced or societally promoted. Washed over and baptized by blood in the moments before…
Epilogue:
When I dislike myself, I think the people who like me are fools for liking the asshole that I am. I know how I feel and I know all the things my shrinks told me to feel better about myself, yet, I am still stuck. Still just another guy in a crap shoot, shooting crap into me. Purity creates the conditions for my darkest stains. I am only outrageous out of love and compassion. I am sorry that I am uncomfortable simply living. That ecstasy of performance, is what grounds me back to fleshed sin. The world is my stage until I sit alone at night. Sit alone in my bed, with all my thoughts, all my regrets. Everything I have ever done and said pouring out of my brain until it eventually overflows, drowning me until the sun burns my drenched drapes raising the curtain on the stage of my eternal being.
Again, don’t kill yourself, just move to San Francisco, get really into Red Dead Redemption or the crypto market. Feel the sun, move heavy misshapen things, learn to cook real food, start making yourself laugh. Watch ‘The Soprano’s’, write fan fictions about one sided love stories, think about what you were interested in when you were a child and peruse it with the rigor and vitality of someone who can fail with impunity.
