So I doused myself in gasoline today, because I was having another of my apoplectic fits. I did this right in front of my girlfriend, after cutting my forearm with a sawzall blade and scratching my throat with the same.
I guess I just kept driving myself to up the ante. I was working – with lead paint? maybe that matters. Fits of apoplexy are nothing new to me… I was scraping lead paint. The guy I’d given $70 bucks to to help me with my yard hadn’t showed up. Just a down on his luck hobo who was going to help me clear weeds, kept texting me to say he’d be a little longer. Kept reminding me how I always try to believe in people, and they always let me down. I’m scraping my garage because I got cited by the city for peeling paint. I’m overwhelmed, running behind, wasting money, still underwater on my mortgage. Worse, the people in the neighborhood who I have turned to for help have at times glimpsed my intensity – I’m comfortable neither being a scourge of the city inspectors nor being a sickening white gentrifier – now they want nothing to do with me. I’m utterly alienated.
Other things that have gotten me down lately. There’s trouble with the independent business I started – on all fronts. I’m 40, and I really didn’t intend to be doing this anymore. I’m a writer, but as I’m depressed, all my writing is shit or seems shit. Does it matter? When you stop believing in yourself, it really is over.
Anyway, I’m here to say don’t douse yourself in gasoline. I guess that’s like an emo lyric or something. In Zoolander it looks like no big deal until the punchline. The truth is very different. My mucus membranes started burning furiously and instantly. I almost would have lit myself on fire just to stop the pain, but I guess it was too much of a taste of the pain of actually burning alive, and I gained a drive – the one I hadn’t had before – and that was to stop the pain. It took about 20 minutes of cold shower to get myself – my eyelids, my ear, my throat, my genitals – out of the “howling in pain” agony. My eyes are still burnt, and my ear is aching, but I’m surprised how just 12 hours later, I’m mostly okay.
Strangely, later in the day, the guy who I had paid to work on my yard showed up. I wondered how fucked up I looked. It seriously felt like I’d melted my face off with lye. Then he told me his baby-mamma’s mother had killed his baby and herself, dousing them with gasoline and a match. I would have liked to see the look on my face. I was thinking – maybe she just doused herself and then realized there was no way out – the burning is seriously so incredible that you might do it just to make it end faster. Maybe it was because I had cut my skin. But the pain was referring so violently that I couldn’t tell what was what.
Now I stink. I smell of gasoline and the things that gasoline does to your skin, your hair follicles, your inner ear. I feel soiled forever by this experience. I hate summer. I hate life. I want out. I have wanted out since I was 9 years old, and I told my parents, overwhelmed one Christmas Eve, that suicide seemed an inevitability. How long would I last? I was miserable.
In my mid to late 30s, I seemed to conquer it for a while. I worked out a lot, and I got fit. I’m tall, and not terrible looking, although I have some weird light colored moles on my face. I’m white, so I’m advantaged in a lot of ways in this society. Of course, it’s not enough for me. I’m a spoiled, petulant child with a serious anger problem. I thought the working out was making me ragey, so I quit that.
Now I can’t even stand to scrape paint for a little while. My stomach is becoming distended and swollen. I guess I hate hard work so much that I’d rather die.
All the voices that I hear in this society are unforgiving. I I try and try to find a state of grace, but it never lasts. Sometimes I think about a life that might be happier, but I don’t know that i have the courage to find it. Having bought a house in 2006, I’m determined to make it work… to fix the upside down situation and make this work for me. Now I’m sitting here, lightly burnt and smelling of gasoline. I guess that’s it.
5 comments
Yeah gasoline is no good. I’ve had a few encounters with it myself, particularly this one time i had to drain fuel from my car to put in my mom’s car, ended up with one arm totally covered, which burned for days afterward. Getting a bit on your hands is one thing; being covered up to your shoulder is another. Motor oil can be “fun” as well. I’ve had a whole arm covered in that too, which immediately sent me to the edge of vomit-ville… though i managed to avoid entry.
I can also identify with the notion of stopping the working out, as a way to decrease your own potential for damage, just in case you end up losing control. It’s basically disarming yourself for the greater good, even if it ends up putting you at a disadvantage (which then cascades into all sorts of other problems).
Thanks, clevername. I appreciate that others have this struggle. I tried Anger Management therapy. On the last day I pounced on my girlfriend, something that had never happened before and hasn’t happened since. I don’t know why she stays with me. She has rage problems as well, but obviously she is at a distinct disadvantage. When she punches me, I enjoy it. When she breaks things, I’m amused. Both of us, owing to our generation, feel that we’re too smart, enlightened, and good to behave in this manner.
But yeah, covering yourself in toxic fluids is no joke. Your body immediately goes into shock. I didn’t stop snotting for half an hour. And like I said, my body smells like it’s burnt in places. Burning hair and the like.
My life is now such a shameful thing. I have lost my sex drive (the whole reason I am NOT on anti-depressants is that losing my sex-drive makes me sad). And I’ve lost all other drives. I don’t even feel hungry until desperately hungry. Clevername, I am going to read more about you now. It helps to get out of my head.
Aside from the actual anger management therapy and the relationship, i identify with most of what you’ve expressed.
Although i gotta say, some of my entries on this site are a bit embarrassing, especially the earlier ones from when i first arrived. I’ve made some personal progress since then, but i still feel trapped by paradoxical circumstances.
Still, you might find some useful insights buried in the comments of any topic i’ve recently participated in. Heh, i forgot the part that i first identified with: a writer who can’t write. Most of my best writing comes out in comments, but i can’t seem to compose anything worth a damn on my own.
Thanks for the heads up about gasoline OP, would never have occurred to me in any case. I was tempted to lol there, but as you say, it’s no joke. You are a smart guy, a writer is what I always dreamed of being. You have your own house, some kind of income, a gf, and you managed to stay off anti depressants. It’s true they kill your sex drive, as do other psych meds, but I’m sorry you’ve lost it anyway. Depression alone will do that. Have no advice for you being incompetent at life myself, just I hope today offers you something good. Scraping paint – ugh. That’s a task I would definitely want to delegate.
I’m glad you got a laugh from the gasoline story. It’s really funny and even ironic: you attempt suicide and then you’re immediately in this frantic and unexpected struggle to save your own life and scrub all the self-inflicted pain off yourself. If I can make people laugh from my mistakes, I guess my life is not entirely useless.