This Is Not an Exit

I’d like to start this off by saying hello to all you fellow less than content members of the human race (or Realists as I like to refer to us). I’m new to both this site and the general concept of sharing my darkest, innermost thoughts. So, you know, bear with me if it takes a little while for me to fully open up (or at least until I’ve gotten a few more beers in me). I’ve always been more of the silent, keep my thoughts to myself type. I suppose I’ve been of the mindset that as long as my issues aren’t vocalized, they aren’t quite real. Much like the man with the large growth on his neck that avoids the doctor because as long as he hasn’t been diagnosed, he’s in perfect health. Ha.

I guess I should give a brief yet vague enough description of myself to give you a general idea of the person I am whilst still remaining anonymous. After all, anonymity is what the internet is for, right? That and porn. Er, yeah, you’ll come to find that I often mask my unhappiness with humor. Moving along. Y’all can call me Jack. I’m a dude in his mid twenties that has dealt with thoughts of offing myself on a nearly daily basis since I was fourteen. I’ve been told repeatedly that I’m an alcoholic. I’m skeptical, but then I’m kindly reminded that the first sign of alcoholism is denial, to which I reply “Yeah, it’s the first sign of being an alcoholic, but it’s also the first sign of not being an alcoholic.”. You get a cookie if you picked up on the Norm reference. But seriously, I’ve used substance abuse as a means to numb myself since my teens. Started off with coke and ecstasy, then the amount of weed smoking that would put any Rasta to shame, and now the demon alcohol. I realize that the order seems completely ass backwards, but hey, I’ve never been known to follow the norms of society. While I do love my booze, I’d have to say my most loved addiction would be television. No matter how shit your own life is, you can just pop in a movie and live someone else’s life for an hour and a half. I’ve used television as a coping mechanism for as long as I can remember. Writing this so far has taken long enough that I’ve had enough beers and gots a good buzz going that I feel comfortable enough to really contemplate how this came about. Growing up, I never had a real relationship with my father. He’s been dead for around five years now, so yeah, that ship has sailed. He just didn’t know how to relate to me. He had cancer of the balls and assumed he’d never be able to get my madre preggers, then BOOM, I make my entrance. He wasn’t prepared for the role of fatherhood. The only way we were ever able to relate was through our interest in TV/movies. Sitting there staring at a screen was the only time we were even remotely connected. I suppose after a time I replaced the loving care of a father with the gentle embrace of television. Mmm. Long live the new flesh.

By this point you’re probably thinking “C’mon get to the tragic part of your life that makes you want to kill yourself.” (That is, if you’re still actually reading. This has turned out to be way longer than I expected and is probably way less interesting than it is in my head.) No, I wasn’t molested as a child. No, I wasn’t physically abused by my parents. The thing is, there is no great tragedy to my life. Sure, I was bullied in high school (who wasn’t?), I’ve had my heart broken (who hasn’t?), I work hard for little pay (AKA 85% of the population). I really have no reason to hate the act of living. There’s a lot of people that would kill to have my life. Like those little African babies you see in the commercials with the flies on their face. Or crack babies. But what the fuck? Is that supposed to make me feel better? Change my world view? This might just be my apathy talking but fuck the Africans and fuck the crack babies. They got dealt a shit hand but that doesn’t change the fact that I have no desire to live in this world. I just can’t see the point in human existence. We were “blessed” with this “gift” of self consciousness, but all that has given me is the knowledge of how meaningless our little lives are. We have these grandiose visions of how our actions change the world, but guess what buddy, the world is fully capable of changing on its own. All we really do is change it for the worse. But we tell ourselves otherwise so that we sleep better at night. Most of the time when we make a change for the better it’s just us fixing something that we fucked up in the first place. And even then, it’s only the lucky few that circumstance presented itself to that are able to accomplish this. Most of us are just going about our daily grind in order to see the next day. But guess what you’re going to be doing that next day? Yup. Going about the daily grind in order to see the next, ad infinitum. They say “life sucks, and then you die” and we take it with a grain of salt just because it’s been so over used. Well fuck you. There’s some serious meaning to that simple little phrase. So that being true, why not manually bring on death as soon as possible? I don’t know why y’all haven’t, but I can sure as shit tell you why I haven’t. It’s because of that little annoying human instinct that’s been ingrained in us called preservation of life. Christ almighty is that shit annoying. No matter how many times my conscious mind tells my body “Fuck yeah, turn that steering wheel a quarter turn left and meet that oncoming traffic in a beautiful blaze of twisted metal and torn flesh”, my subconscious always overrides the command with “Oh no! That’s a terrible idea! You’d no longer exist and that goes against our programming!”. Fuck me.

Now by this point you’re probably thinking “But Jack! There’s so much to live for!”. Then again, you probably aren’t seeing as you lot are just as suicidal as me, but I’m gonna play devil’s advocate for the hell of it and debunk that shit MythBusters style. Here are the common arguments you’ll hear:

• Love: One day you’ll find true love and all will be well!

WRONG. Love is a fucking myth perpetuated by the two H’s, Hallmark and Hollywood, to sell greeting cards on February 14th and to make ***** whipped guys watch chick flicks with their gals. Love is based around the instinctual need to procreate. We are built with the desire to find a mate so that we can have babies to ensure the continual existence of our race. It’s common with all species on earth, except seeing as we have that “gift” of self consciousness we have to give it a cute name and give it more meaning than it really deserves just so that we can bring credence to our desire to fuck. Problem is, we are nowhere near extinction (excluding by means of our own device. Ya know, nuclear holocaust, anal rape of mother nature, etc,) Love turned us into a virus. Fuck The Beatles. Then again, maybe this is just me rationalizing the fact that all of my relationships that I once thought were love turned out to just be lust and dissolved into a bitter mess and I’m trying to make myself feel better. Fuck it. I’m right, you’re wrong.

• Ease of life: But there’s so many people worse off than you!

WRONG. See rant about Africans/crack babies. Fuck you.

• Religion: But if you kill yourself, you’ll burn in the fires of hell!

WRONG. (this one’s gonna offend some, so skip it if you’re insecure in your own beliefs) Look. You believe there’s some magician sitting on a throne up in the clouds that gives two fucks about what you do and if you don’t do what he says he’s gonna send you to a fiery inferno. Good for you. I on the other hand have this little thing called common sense. Life on Earth came about through a series of unfortunate events that provided the basic building blocks to support it. Yes, yes, there must be a deeper meaning because we are all oh so important and are loved by a higher being that oddly enough we can’t all come to an agreement on based on what our upbringing was. Or wait, is that just our narcissism speaking because we all have the desire to feel special? Hmmm….

• Life itself: But life is such a beautiful thing! There’s so much to live for!

WRONG. Do you think I’m completely oblivious to the virtues you speak of? Yes, I feel the grass between my toes just as you do. Yes, I feel the cool breeze on a warm summer’s day. How people honestly think these things outweigh the bullshit required to live day to day is completely beyond me.

Alright, so by this point I’ve been typing for so long that I’ve gotten pretty drunk and am coming in much more hot than when I started this post/rant/whatever this is supposed to be (please note that I’m the type of guy that has rarely put together more than 100 words, so yes, this has taken me a shit load longer than it would take most people). I’m at the point where I can’t even remember how I started and am far too lazy to read back. I highly doubt very many of you made it this far anyways so I’m just gonna take the lazy man’s out and end this shit with a quote to save myself the trouble of coming up with a conclusion. Take THAT high school English writing class.

“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.”

– Rustin Cohle