Lost in the Disco

Suicide 101

I can quantitate the alcohol in the bloodstream, I can. I can give the E.R. physician the acetaminophen level to determine if we can expect the liver enzymes to proceed through the roof... Heralding the onset of a nasty, slow death. The other drugs are even easier... Just a few drops of urine and a test kit.

Self-inflicted gunshot wounds (reserved for those who wish to demonstrate that they're really serious about this!) rarely involve me, but I can crossmatch a few units of blood if needed.

But I can't get my mind around how the richest, most pampered and entertained culture in the history of the world can produce otherwise healthy individuals that choose to end their lives... (And some of them are health food nuts). Obviously the will to live is not directly proportional to the ease with which one sustains a comfortable and distracted existence.

And there are always other options... Aren't there?

Maybe it's like in the movie "Arthur"... When Arthur's grandmother, played by Geraldine Fitzgerald, tells her fabulously wealthy grandson that he can't survive being poor... Because he doesn't know how.

And when your life is all about... your life... Then it becomes worthless and disposable when times are poor? And poor is defined here as that moment in which our roll, the illusion in which we couch our self-obsession, becomes a nightmare and blows up in our face? ...An interesting predicament that would no doubt leave Thailand villagers - making a buck-fifty a month - with furrowed brows and mouths agape.

Ah, the Holidays.