Suicide Is Totally Not the New Black

Suicide is soooooo 90s.

I read a comment the other day on a blog featuring a picture of a girl in hideous pants who was smoking a cigarette. The comment said, "People still smoke?" Who says that? Yes, people still smoke. There do exist people who you know, are addicted to smoking? People who don't smoke Lucky Strikes just because Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco, and Is Toasted? What's next... "People still drink?" Indeed. Ten years after all you hipster wanna-bes have supplanted six PBRs per night in an overpriced scene bar with one glass of Shiraz per week with dinner, there will still be people in your graduating class who drink to forget. Not everyone is going through a phase, could you be any more naive?

I must admit that when I heard Siobhan* broke down into tears and confessed her suicidal thoughts, I marvelled at the passé-ness of wanting to kill yourself. You couldn't get more cliché if you wanted to--getting shitfaced drunk, dancing and singing, being pushed in a shopping cart to your favorite bar, laughing and playing with complete strangers, having the time of your life, then slumping against the wall in a crowded club toilet on a Saturday night and talking about ending it all. Streaky mascara tears and requests for "one more drink" while you seriously consider what the point of anything is.

Yaaawwwwn.

I'm glad I wasn't there for that. I don't reckon I have a lot of time for suicidals, and certainly not ones with no major complaints. Your husband didn't leave you for his 22-year-old secretary. You're not losing your house. You didn't gamble away the family fortune. Your dog isn't dead. All you've really got to deal with is sorting out why you're here on this spinning rock and how you plan on making sense of it all. In what way you plan on "organizing your personality" (love that term) around the ostensible senselessness of the human existence. I'm glad that I just pushed the shopping cart, then took myself home to eat some pasta and sleep off the vodka.

What happened later was even more miss-worthy. At the second bar, Lucretia* gets a phone call which prompts her to hail a taxi and drag Siobhan and Mary* along with her on her crusade to prevent a FOURTH party from offing herself that night. When they arrive they notice the girl looks a bit sleepy and has cut marks all over her arms. So what do Mary and Siobhan to do give the girl a reason to live? Thrust their tongues down her, and each other's throats--just to give an authentic Foxfire-esque edge to the whole sordid saga. Oh, to be a fly on the wall of that room. The stench of three sweaty drunk bitches with rivers of make-up oozing down their necks coupled with the odor of desperation, blood and aloe vera moisturizing strip. Mary evidently wrapped up the evening by delivering the sound, life-affirming advice that only a 22-year-old who was raised on a horse farm can give a suicidal stranger from an urban hellhole.

Now Mary is my good friend and told me all about this nonsense the next day. When she finished her story, she exclaimed in a self-satisfied tone, "Isn't that crazy? I mean, wow."

I said: "The only crazy thing about that story is that you let your fool self get dragged into a cab at six in the morning to go save the life of some bitch you've never even met. All I know is that if I were trying to kill myself, the last thing in the world that I would want is some girl I've never set eyes on trying to talk me out of it. Why you involved yourself in that hot-ass mess I really don't know. I hope you learned your lesson."

Allison, to whom I later relayed the highlights of the story, mused, "Who knows? Maybe she does have a reason to kill herself. Maybe she's a child-rapist or something. Some people need to die." I could do nothing but concur.

I reckon suicide is corny as well as out of style, but I am by no means insensitive to the realities of it. There are tons of valid reasons why a person might not want to wake up the next day, but if they're not my good friend or relative, and I know nothing about that person, I am not getting in a cab out to the middle of fucking nowhere and making out with them until ten the next morning. I am going home to eat pasta and sleep off the vodka.

Another friend told me about some men she knew who had succeeded in killing themselves. Knowing already the answer, I asked her how they went about it. One shot himself in the face, the other hung himself. Fairly fail-proof methods of dying. Giving yourself minor lacerations with a Lady Bic or swallowing twenty-five aspirin and a thimble-full of cough syrup just ain't going to cut it. Don't cry for help, ask for it. Call me insensitive, but I really can't be dropping everything every time you want to cry wolf.

I think suicide is horrible. I also believe in God. I also believe that most people with some sort of spiritual awareness are less likely to pretend to want to kill themselves than someone who can't stay sober long enough to contemplate the possibility of an existence divorced from the (ab)use of drugs, alcohol, and prime-time politics. There really is more to life than partying and ideology, but understanding that takes a bit of patience and certainly is not to be worked out while hunched over a filthy sewer of a toilet sniffing moist cocaine through a crumpled €10 bill.

The moral of the story is: smoking, drinking and gambling away the family fortune may not be phases, but wanting to kill yourself probably is. Do me a favor and leave me out of it, unless you want one last shopping-cart ride before you go.


*names changed to protect the sloppy-drunk.