And then there’s suicide... first draft, unfinished

And then there’s suicide...

When I opened my eyes this morning my first conscious thought was to kill myself. AS I remember, when I went to sleep last night I was romantically ruminating about the end of a shotgun in my mouth and blasting myself in the face. I thought of the landlords reaction when they heard the gun go off and their floor, my ceiling, get hit by buckshot and blood.
This morning I asked myself why do I want to commit suicide and my response to myself was time, it just keeps going by. Well time always goes by, it never stops, days turn into years but I don’t always think of suicide. If I stop time by going to Walmart and getting a tool, that frankly scares the shit out of me and place it in my mouth one evening while consumed with fear and depression what time will I have left?
But the root, what is the root? What is the fear and what do I think suicide will control? And moreover, why does my coffee suck and why do I keep going to Starbucks to get a bigger, better coffee? That sounds tangential but it’s not. It’s all closely related. Starbucks costs at least two dollars a day, which is then at least sixty dollars a month. Yesterday I spent twenty-three dollars on gas, four dollars on coffee and another three-fifty on smokes and a soda. The total means I consumed or spent more then I made. So here comes suicide. I went to work. I worked four hours on the clock and another two off the clock training, writing my first vosot, which is a script for the anchors that includes video and audio, it got killed in the show but that’s neither here nor there. Oh yeah, I spent another six dollars on dinner because I was training. While on the clock I earned a very meager wage. This is all bringing us to the equation; these are all parts of the equation that are currently adding up to my desire to die.
Today I have a dentist appointment, but I am going to skip it because I cannot afford it. Other than suicide, in the back of my mind is a print I need to work on that will half my rent. I’ve been putting it off; maybe I’ll get to it today, maybe I won’t. I’m thinking of having a yard sale tomorrow in preparation to move to Baltimore. I have no place to go there, no job lined up; I just have friends there and in New York, which beats here. I have three friends and no life except sitting at home and either making art, wallowing in depression or plotting to move and wishing I had more money, all while smoking endlessly, a task my doctor told me never to do again a year ago, yet I still am.
So I am going to die a painful death of emphysema anyway.
I won’t exercise but I’ll worry about my weight, hoping that I’ll magically lose this stomach. I won’t talk to anyone new or flirt or get laid. I simply do the prior and go to work and get underpaid and fret endlessly about money, disease, death and my front tooth falling out because the gum is receding.
While at work, while working for free to learn how to produce the news, I’ll wonder why I’m investing the time and possibly six dollars for dinner since I’m just going to move. But how am I going to move since I can’t fit everything in my car and a lot of what I can’t fit is my art, which has cost me a large amount of money to produce and I hope it will make me famous or at least turn into income generation. Meanwhile, I’ll make lists of what needs to get done, since I have no life and I have plenty of time to do the lists, but time passes as I wallow in depression and smoke cigarettes, which I shouldn’t be doing because I’ll die a painful death that I purchased myself.
Are we getting to the root yet? Or are we just reiterating the saga in my brain, the questions I can’t answer and the mathematical equation that voids faith? And once the root is found will that assist me or will it be another unanswerable equation? My answer is to say things like fuck it and buy the damned coffee. A Short term, fix until I feel like taking my life because I can’t afford the fucking coffee. Or get another job to afford the coffee but where and why if I’m moving, but then why waste the six bucks, why train if I’m moving? But then stay? Train and hope I get a producer job? But then where does my savings go and how the hell do I have a life?
As I step forward each day, because I do. Amongst the daily tapes playing over and over again in my head, completely unaided by my wife, who is to soon be my ex, who says I should stay to make sure the divorce she is filling from Oklahoma goes through. As I step forward making art, going to work, selling my crap, plotting and planning, I can see a glimmer of an unattainable answer. It’s as if I could snap out of this and make some sort of hour-by-hour schedule and be this productive monster of happiness and success. I made one yesterday, I did the first thing on it, smoked some cigarettes and then wrote for two hours about my marriage. I wrote until it became rambling, chronological bullshit. But, I like to write. I really like to write. I really like to make art. I really like to write, I sit around work waiting to get to rewrite twenty minutes of crap with lead sentences such as “Aliens are attacking the earth” followed by “and Microsoft plans to make millions” or “Here come the lefties!” and “Move over Hollywood... Here comes Albuquerque”. And my grammar sucks. But while at work I avoid leading my sentences with and, although I really like to do it at home as I feel it sets a rhetorical tone that best exemplifies my head.
On a side note, everywhere I go to avoid the sun puts my laptop in peril as left over rain drops fall from the trees and I have just smoke four cigarettes, I’m on my fourth right now.
Then there is faith, the corruptible belief set engrained in so many Americans heads, or at least mine. Faith is a mother fucker. It tells me everything is going to be ok. It tells me screwing my list and writing for hours is healthy, beneficial and what I “should” be doing. Of course my head tells me it “should” be the list, it then tells me I’m failing and I should die. My head tells me I should get another job instead of smoking myself to death and writing about my brain. Then faith tells me I am a boheme, and fuck a job, “everything will be ok”. (until I starve, because I don’t know the rules of grammar as well as I should).
But if I got the producer job, a producer job, and I worked from two in the afternoon until ten at night I could write and make art guiltlessly. See there is always a catch. I have guilt, I have poverty and If I stay here I have no life. But faith, rearing it’s ugly head, which looks just like a mother fucker, tells me that not only should I learn how to use this thing -, I have no idea where a – is appropriate, but that I should also just split town and hope for the best. As if I’ll just show up on the east coast and earn a livable wage, get laid, have a life, make art, and write and actually rewrite, come back to my writing like three times, four even, make it smooth and successful. Maybe I’d even learn where these – things go.
There is no end to this essay. It just rambles on. It can’t stop. It can only stop if I figure out if faith is real and if “everything is or will be ok”. I have a feeling if I knew that I’d be Jesus.