There’s a horror/dark comedy show called Happy! that I finally got to purchase on Amazon that really shaped a lot of my philosophy about death, or at least the way I’ve been thinking about intentional death lately. In the second season they have an episode called “Friend of Death”, because they are setting up a little girl to assassinate a kids show host, but you can’t kill someone straight out the gate as an innocent person, you have to make a friend of death. So they have one of the darker characters take the little girl out and help her kill someone.
It’s just something that’s been rattling around my head, about why some people fail at killing themselves and some succeed, maybe that’s the factor. I don’t mean they’ve actually killed someone, but there’s a familiarity with death, a closeness with death that some people achieve prior to making their attempt that assures them success. You either get it, or you don’t.
You have to be ruthless, cruel and calculated enough to follow through. Something like that maybe? I don’t know, because I have a heart and mind full of darkness and awful things, but also full of memories of trying to help people. The description friend of death could just as well apply to me. I haven’t been afraid of death, my own anyway in so long it’s hard to remember when someone threatened to kill me that I thought that was something other than funny. Like they’d actually succeed, they’re more likely to die themselves than to kill me, damn self preservation I’m more likely to kill them. It’s been too long since someone was willing to offer to kill me.
Something happens when you look into someone’s eyes and have no fear of death, they kind of lose the juice of their will to kill you, because I will tell you the truth there are very few people who are friends of death in this world.
So that’s what I’m thinking about tonight, how many of you think you are friends with death. I’m friend enough to kill myself, no doubt about that, but no one I know is friend enough to kill me.
For now I’m nursing a Mr. Pibb and rum and consider the sad state of the world, and that no matter what happens I’m still gonna die. There’s a song about that, here’s that song.