Why I Committed Suicide (25 page)

My twenty-first birthday was uneventful except for continuing to live with Jenifer in sin, which is the only present I wanted since I could already indulge in my drinking delights. My relationship with my parents is improving, mostly because I don’t ask them for anything anymore. My mom still sets aside the occasional bag of groceries for me though. I sympathize with my sister for still having to live there with them but I’ve tried to let her know she can stay with me if things ever get too rough. She’s never had any problems with ignoring their authority so she’ll be all right. My sis has the potential to be really cool if she would only quit listening to that infernal pop country music crap.

After a few bad interactions with her family, Jenifer got put on anti-depressants again in order to satiate her father’s insistence that she has a chemical imbalance and
I
got put on anti-depressants again to satisfy my mother’s neurosis. Jen and I both get run down but we’ve decided it’s due to our unbiased views about the state of the world rather than fictional cynicism partially due to a chemical imbalance. What is it with adults pushing drugs down our throats to make everything
appear
better? When did everyone give up on trying to actually make things better? Am I living in some delusional late 60’s radical mindset, didn’t our parents try to change the world for the better once upon a time? Maybe I should try to do both, fix my mind with their serotonin stimulators or inhibitors and try to follow my heart to do the right things. The damn anti-depressants have caused a slight diminishment in my creativity that is very bad. I need that inspired part of me for film school dammit or I’ll wind up directing crappy videos for crappy bands on MTV. Lately, I’ve been making these cool collages that I paste together over a period of weeks and then shrink down on the photocopier to mass-produce intricate pieces of mini-art. I’m really proud of them and I like to give them away to people or use them to write letters to my brother Adam, but when I’m on the Zoloft I just lose the drive to do any of it.

So when we can remember, Jen and I take their medicine and just try to keep each other sane like we always have. I get more nervous when she forgets to take the old birth control pills, but apparently this woman who looks like she’s as fertile as the Tennessee Valley isn’t. It’s good right now while we’re in college but I’ll be sad if it turns out down the line that we can never have a child together.

Oh well. If we had some cheese, we could make a ham and cheese sandwich, if we had some ham.

Jen and I went to Mexico via San Antonio on a Rohypnol run. We visited Jim and Simone while we were there which was pretty cool. I felt like we were two yuppie couples, with the world at our financially stable feet. We stayed at Jim’s house and I got to hang out with his little brother. Jim says his brother has looked up to me ever since the day we went to a Texas Ranger’s game with him while we still lived in the dorms and I showed him how to heckle. That was the same day that Jim got so drunk and stoned before we went to pick up his brother that he puked out the window of his Mustang while he was driving and poor Kirk, who was riding in the back seat, caught the backsplash. Jim was so sick that we just stopped at a random house by the side of the road and used their hose without asking in order to clean out his car before his brother got in. I guess his little brother just really liked the way I constantly badgered the umpire and batters from our cheap seats. Even though the players couldn’t really hear me I kept making his brother crack up by being so blatantly belligerent. What a positive memory to have about someone, right?

Jenifer had never been to S.A. before, so we went down to the River Walk and took a tour boat through the canals they have there. It was fun and probably seemed pretty plastic to Jenifer since she’s experienced the dirt and charm of Venice, but we had a good time. Afterwards we went to Taco Cabana and drank a couple pitchers of their bogus wine margaritas, mostly because Jenifer isn’t 21 yet and we couldn’t get into some club Jim and Simone really wanted to take us to. Truthfully, I didn’t really want to go to a club in San Antonio anyway so we dropped off Simone and then Jim took us cruising through the Mexican barrio for kicks. I’ve ridden the subway through Harlem in NY but I’ve always wanted to see the Mexican ghettos and I kind of felt like a snobby shit for going slumming. Still, curiosity prevailed. Class distinction is so fickle and so much bullshit anyway, more people need to get out and see how people live and survive outside of the white suburbs.

Jim still had the acid I mailed down to him a few months ago and the following day we tripped our balls off at Natural Bridge Caverns. It’s the place whose burnt orange yet cracked and aged dinosaur signs had inspired me to visit Carlsbad Caverns a while back. You know, the ones that looked like a retard person painted them? It was a different experience than I expected and it was almost creepy down in the cave but I really enjoyed holding Jenifer’s hand and watching the walls melt and then reform. I think I must be getting old because lately when I trip I get slightly scared when the raw intensity of the hallucinations overpower me. I
feel
the acid more, which should be good but it just isn’t that fun to me anymore and almost by unspoken agreement, Jenifer and I hardly even mess with it now. I guess acid is just something people grow out of. This was just a special rare occasion, and besides I’m a sucker for exploring caves.

The cave was pretty freaky but the tour of the caverns only lasted about an hour and a half, so by the time we got back outside we were all still peaking really hard and we were too fucked up to think of anything else to do that might be cool. On acid it’s hard to quickly adjust to changing situations and going from being in the total darkness of a cool cave to back out into the hot sun was disconcerting. Still, it was a clear sunny day and we made the best of it. We were all still slightly tripping when we eventually went to meet Simone over at her parent’s house and hang out. Her little brother is a schizoid with a motor mouth, but in all probability he’s a genius that will do great things if he can learn to focus. Still, he was kind of annoying given the state I was in at the time.

We went and ate breakfast at Simone’s house the next morning, which tasted wonderful despite my hung over belly. A traditional Mexican breakfast with chorizo is a great cure for what ails ye, especially after the weird night we had. Jenifer, who is allergic to everything on four legs, had a severe asthma attack in the middle of the night that was triggered by Jim’s foo-foo dog. She didn’t have the “machine” with her and I tried suggesting all sorts of remedies in my overreaction to something I couldn’t control. We even tried going out and sleeping in the car to get away from the pet dander but eventually we had to wake up Jim and get him to drive us to the nearest hospital for her special steroid mist treatment. After arguing with the bone head doctor, who seemingly felt threatened by Jenifer telling exactly him what she needed in an amazingly ridiculous battle of wills, she was all better.

I hate seeing Jenifer in pain, her attacks hurt me with worry and her tough attitude sometimes makes me forget she is as fragile as a desert flower and could spontaneously keel over. She often tells me she almost died when she was born from this asthma and I’ve personally witnessed what could have been her second death (twice!). Bad luck happens though, so if we can get through her ‘little death’ number three with no repercussions, her life should be kissed with blessings forever.

Cramming our San Antonio adventure into just a few days was a whirling dervish of an experience but loads of fun. Seeing the power of Simone’s family cohe-siveness made Jenifer and I pine for one of our own, but I doubt it will happen anytime soon. I psychically sense distraction ahead of us. Visiting Jim was like visiting a favorite uncle and he treated us really well. Respecting his sleep patterns we pulled out early in the morning without waking him up to say goodbye, but it was necessary to make our timetable. I hollered at his little brother who was awake, and told him to say goodbye to Jim for us and to keep his fingers nimble so he could retain his title as Super Nintendo champion. We drove the rest of the way down to Laredo and crossed the border into Mexico on foot to buy some roofies. Many nights of Dominos pizza and relaxed loving are in our future now. Jenifer smuggled the Ro’s across in her pants with no trouble and we’re on our way home with yet another mini-vacation under our belts. We’re so cool we went to San Antonio and didn’t even see the fucking Alamo. Even Ozzy had to stop and pee on it when he went there, but I guess that he’s even cooler.

I feel so incredibly mammalian today, what with the heat and all. Having body hair is like having parasites all over my body, sapping my crucial minerals and the calories that I need to grow. I think maybe evolution is weeding hair out of our human genetic pool because it is past serving its purpose as a survival mechanism. All the thinning patches do now is give lawyers and businessmen sunroofs of insecurity for their heads. If I ever start going bald I’m going to shave my shit off like Michael Jordan instead of trying to cultivate a flap. A flap is when a person grows out the hair on the side of their head and tries to comb it over the balding area. It’s what the military might refer to as a strategic deployment of available forces.
A mullet is a fish?
My body hair is sucking me dry to extend its roach-like antennas up through my skin. I’m metamorphosizing
[1]
into a giant Kafka bug! I worry that this incessant hair growth will eventually turn Jenifer off. It certainly turns me off when I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror after a shower.

My life is at the point where if I found a picture of the Virgin Mary weeping on some strange surface I wouldn’t even call the Catholic church to try to cash in on it. Say she appeared on a tortilla; I would probably eat it thinking “damn that tortilla tasted heavenly!” savoring the pleasure all for myself. Maybe I’m fearful of exploitation due in part to my anger at the discovery my education wasn’t always based in truth, which makes me fearful of exploiting things myself. Focusing on the small pettiness of life is making me increasingly atheistic, yet when I let my mind expand enough to take in the vast infinity of the universe I know there is a God. I know it, even when I don’t want to know it. The only problem I have with Him is that the world I live in reflects a laissez-faire policy on His part and that’s even scarier to me than not believing at all.

I’ve come to the personal decision that I believe in a higher power, and I know God wants me to question everything, including Him. There are enough people with blind faith based in ignorance; wouldn’t it seem logical to love the people that find out God exists on their own?

“Expedit esse deos, et, ut expedit esse potemus—It is expedient that gods should exist, and, as it is expedient, let us deem that gods exist.” I take comfort in knowing at least
my
God isn’t a tool invented by the man to control society, and so despite his anonymity I have to be content with the knowledge that He’s doing the right things. The fucking Baptists around here would censor the entire world if we let them. It’s almost as if they think God favors sterility.

If I ever decide to write a book, that Great American Novel we all have inside us, I sure hope I don’t prostitute it out by hiring somebody to write “compelling” or “spellbinding” or “a real page turner” or “Mr. Paul is a master storyteller” just so I can slap quotes on the cover and induce some soccer mom into buying it. Maybe blurbs are needed to sell books to the average American but it sure gets repetitive and hokey when I go into a bookstore and I’m barraged by all the quotes taking up space on the covers. They yell out at me like a circus ringmaster hucking fifty cent peeks at a five-legged elephant. I think saying that a book is “a real page turner” bothers me the most because what’s that really telling me? That I want to turn the pages quickly? That could be good or bad I guess, but it all seems fucking hokey to me. When I write a book, I want to hire somebody to say, “This book is a nasty evil piece of shit and you should not buy this rot under any circumstances.” That would be much better. I found this great quote about Abe Lincoln the other day that I absolutely loved.

“Filthy story-teller, despot, liar, thief, braggart, buffoon, usurper, monster, ignoramus Abe, old scoundrel, perjurer, robber, swindler, tyrant, field-butcher, land-pirate.”

—Harper’s Weekly magazine, 1852, on Abraham Lincoln

I think maybe those words helped inspire me today. Sometimes it’s my day to sit and vent about all the stupid things that are out of my control in my life, so please forgive my tangents. Thank you and goodnight. Elvis has left the building.

“I have always loved marijuana. It has been a source of joy and comfort to me for many years. And I still think of it as a basic staple of life, along with beer and ice and grapefruits—and millions of Americans agree with me.”

—Hunter S. Thompson ‘71

Greetings sports fans. Welcome to the wide and wacky world of occasional journal writing. Apologies to me for not writing for the past few months but various important things are occupying my life right now. Things that are SO damn important that if I wrote them down I would have to shoot myself after forcibly ingesting this paper. Okay, okay, I’m really just slacking, I admit it, but my life
has
been stuck in the doldrums of ennui due to familiar routine. Interest lies in the everyday details but I just can’t justify taking the time to write down what I’ve done each week when the majority of my journal entries would just read: “Smogged out on pot, went to class, went to work.” (Repeat and combine in any order)

No, really though, school is school es una escuela. It IS getting more interesting now that my basic bullshit classes are out of the way and I am strictly focusing on my major. I chose the RTVF major after seeing the type of assholes I would be working with for the rest of my life if I’d kept going after my Business degree—the frat jocks with jobs already lined up at their daddy’s companies, whose butts I would be kissing for the rest of my fucking life just to reach middle management. RTVF is also the major I chose after suggesting to my parents I was likely going to take a semester off (while secretly
already
in the middle of taking a semester off) and suddenly seeing their over-the-top willingness to financially support me with school rather than see me descend into gradual blue collar hell. If I had known the threat of dropping out would make them help me pay for school I would have tried that tactic much earlier. Who says the caste system is dead? The long and short of it is that in the midst of figuring out why I was happy, I personally concluded money is not as paramount to my happiness as I thought it was and with the renewed financial support of my family I’m taking classes that I not only excel in, but also enjoy. Except for the technical terminology textbook aspects of my classes, most of what I’m doing seems too elementary to me to be viable for a practical career application, but who knows?