01:22 - 26.05.05
beating the odds (and a few dead horses)
Well first let me say that I lied. Again if you have read any of this diary you know it�s what I do. That and probably (most definitely) some exaggeration. As soon as I wrote the last entry I went about trying to find and restore or save the missing entries and back-up the entries that weren�t missing. I later found out that this process was much simpler than how I accomplished it, but the positive aspect of the tedious copying and pasting effort that I did was that 1) I can see the multitudinous spelling errors in the older entries and in theory correct them, and 2) I wholly agree with the deity of diaryland, and the hand of fate, that some of the old stuff is just utter crap and should be deleted never to be seen again.
Craptudinous. Truly crapinacious.

But being the rebel that I am, I defied the deity and spit in the hand of fate. And then I spit in my own hand and shook the hand of fate and the hand of fate agreed to stop fucking with my diary entries and I agreed to curtail my spitting. Speaking of which, why is it considered a sign of trustworthiness to spit and shake? If anything would prove untrustworthy it would seem to be someone who would spit in his or her hand and then try to shake yours. So the entries are back and backed up.

Flashtastic. Fantabulous. Minterrific. Really neat. Fucking nifty.

Now If I could just get the archive page to work.

So in neglecting my diaryland duties I seem to have missed the whole z0tl crisis of which I was alerted to by my man mobius, who by the way is also fucking nifty. If you too have missed it, apparently z0tl, whom I was never quite sure about, has become seriously interested in his own demise.
At first I felt bad, sad even. Partly because z0tl had told me he needed a minty woobie and I did not respond to him (I don�t think I did. I don�t remember responding). I was busy, but then I am always busy. Busy should be my middle name.
Then I stopped rather quickly being snively about the z0t-man and started to feel somewhat mad. Mainly I think because I felt the whole thing was rather manipulative. The whole write-me-a-note, recommend-me-a-book, give-me-a-good-reason-not-to-kill-myself and if you all fail I�m dead at the 2000th entry which could come tomorrow or twenty years from now, better hurry, tick-tock tick-tock�just seemed manipulative. Implying I think, that if he dies it is because we haven�t found the right and magic words to keep him safe. I thought about writing to him but I can�t seem to bring myself to do it and the whole thing has been going round in my head ever since. The best way I know to get rid of this is to write about it, and so I am going to share my thoughts and feelings with you and if z0tl happens to read it before he offs himself then I will consider this on par with the hand of fate wiggling its middle finger on the inside of my palm while we shake hands and I will be totally creeped out and somewhat excited all at the same time.

This is what I am thinking and I will try to be articulate about it. I should say that this is only my opinion and you are free to disagree but when you do try also to be articulate. I hate the �I know you are but what am I� quality of most arguments of those who disagree with charged subjects. Also my opinion may change. In fact in writing this all out I may become so apathetic with my opinion that I offer to supply z0tl with the gun he is so longing for. You just never can tell.
Z0tl is a good writer, enjoyed by many, and should not die, however we are all going to die someday and in some way. Life is a terminal sexually transmitted disease. I do not object to z0tl dying. I object to his proclaiming suicide as somehow noble and good and asserting that those who would say that life is worth living are delusional and out of touch, or worse yet merely uninformed. It smacks of the �herman hessian/ hemingway� suicide-is-my-destiny crap.
I have tried to see it from other points of view to see if there is a moment when suicide is the right and brave choice. I have considered the idea of choosing death in a larger scope, not in suicide but with the same results, such as when the army lieutenant throws himself on the grenade to save the rest of the platoon. Or better yet the idea of Jesus� sacrifice, dying so that others might live a better life. But in these instances I cannot help but believe that the person in question chose life as most important even as they threw theirs away and I cannot see the same theme in suicide. Even if I fantasize the most fantastic of situations: maybe the father who has committed a crime that is about to be revealed and will ruin his family, and so he takes his own life in an attempt to bury the with him and thusly save them; but even here I cannot believe it is a good thing because the family left behind will have to deal with the guilt, the why and the grief and it seems to me even if this was done on the surface to save others pain, it will likely save no one any grief except possibly the person who in committing suicide avoided the responsibility of his actions. It seems to me that suicide is always about the running away, the easy out, the quick fix.
I deal with death and life and pain everyday. I see people fall apart. I make people fall apart. Ostensibly for their own good I hope. I help them talk about death and dying probably more than most psychologists because of my work with the elderly and the chronically physically sick. I have seen people who are ready to die. I have talked to people who want to die but I have never talked to anyone who was happy with their life, held life as precious and good that wanted to take their own life. I have talked to people who are not scared of death and are looking forward to it but they would not consider ending earlier because that is the act of someone who has nothing to live for and being ready for death is not being through with life. They are two distinctly different things from what I have seen. I have seen that the majority of people who state they are suicidal do not want to die per se, they want to escape their present circumstances and dying appears to be the only way. They do not like their life and are not looking forward to tomorrow. That is one of the classic things depression does to you. Depressed people look at life and to them it sucks now, it sucked in the past and they see no reason to believe it will be different in the future. I have not run into anyone who has said to me �I have no regrets about the past, I have led a good life. I am looking forward to tomorrow. I expect the day after that to be even better and the following day to exceed all my expectation. And then the day after that I�m going to kill myself because I think that will be the biggest adventure of all!� Maybe there are people who think that. Maybe they don�t have any problems ever and they never ever see a psychologist. But as I�ve been in the mental health field since 1989 I would think that there might have been one person with that point of view to cross my path.
Now personally from what I�ve read I don�t think z0tl can claim that he has no problems and that he loves life and that death will be an even greater adventure although that is his hypothesis. That he is done with this world and that moving on to the next plane is the only sane thing to do is what I get from his statements. What I also get is that his life hasn�t exactly gone the way he planned and he is none too happy about it. I can relate. There was a time in my life when life had not gone the way I had carefully planned it should and I was none too happy about it. There was even a moment when I came home to find another woman in my husband�s car and my husband walking down our sidewalk with a packed bag to spend the night with her that I contemplated hurting her, and then later when I went in the house and saw evidence that she had been in my house contemplated killing him and myself. But I didn�t do either of those things because they were cowardly. And now I will say what I would never say out loud to anyone, especially not someone who is contemplating suicide but it is at the crux of what is bothering me and I need to get it out. Suicide is a stupidly selfish and cowardly act.
I could have acted on my rage. I could have even just held onto to the feelings doing nothing but feeling self-righteous in my anger, but I didn�t. That would have been just as cowardly. Instead I tried even harder to save my marriage and when it became apparent that that wasn�t possible no matter what I did, I saved myself. I saved myself by taking responsibility and changing things about me that needed to be changed. Most people would have understood if I just stayed mad and blamed him. My husband had blatant affairs. He refused to work on our problems. When I tried to get him to look at saving our marriage he told me �you�re the counselor. You fix it.� My crime was that I worked full time while going to school full time. I think most people would have been fully behind my �he�s the bad guy� parade. But I didn�t lead one because he wasn�t the bad guy and my life wasn�t his fault.
It�s the easy way out to look for someone to blame when your life doesn�t go the way you planned. It�s also the easy way out to think that somebody else or something else is going to save you. There is no relationship that will fix you, no life-changing book that will sway you, and no experience that will turn the tide if you don�t want it to. You want life-changing books? Then read everything and find the things that touch you. Some things will, some things won�t, that�s just the way it is. You have to fix yourself. You have to find the books. You have to find and make the meaning in your life. If it�s missing, I am sorry to say, the fault lies with you.
You see I think that most people think that life, and love and being happy is supposed to be easy and it�s not. It�s hard work. People have this illusion that they will meet the perfect person and everything will be easy with them because that person will really know them and really love them and it will all be easy and it�s not. People think that happy people are just happy and other people just aren�t and it�s just not true. From what I�ve seen people have to work hard no matter which end of the spectrum they chose so you might as well chose the one that makes you feel good.
Now you might say that its easier to not eat right, to not make time to go to the gym, to keep dating the same type of person that makes you miserable eventually and maybe it is in the short run, but it doesn�t seem to me that it makes anything easy in the long run. And maybe you are just in it for the short run and if so I say to you get it over with and stop using the resources of those of us who want to be around. And if that offends you then good, then you still have some fight left in you. You�ll need it.
Life is hard. Life is hard work. The lessons of life are hard work. There are things that I do that make me unhappy and I am as a rule a rather happy and well-adjusted person. I can name three things right now that I should change or at least modify that would make my life easier in the long run. I procrastinate too much. There are things I should do, but I put them off. I feel better when I do them, I feel even better when they are done and yet I still procrastinate. I ruminate about things and process them to death. While it makes for occasionally good writing, it does not make me happy. Rarely does my rumination and worry end with me running through the alpine meadows ala Maria VonTrapp (whose grandson or was it great-grandson, I met on a trip through Vermont or New Hampshire or which ever New England state it was that the VonTrapp clan came to live when they escaped). Despite this I still allows myself to get stuck in this rumination. Lastly I am terrible at transitions and making decisions. If I were the proverbial chicken on the road, the question would not be why, but when.
There are things about myself that used to make me unhappy that I have changed. There will be things in the future that I will have to look at and deal with if I want to live to my potential. I have no guarantee what that potential is but I�m sure as hell not going to give up. Because there is no point in life when the lessons stop. For all we know they continue after death. Look, the search for the quick fix is universal but the quick fix doesn�t exist. Most people, if there was a pill that they could take and be slim and trim and fit and healthy, they would. We all want the rewards without the effort. We all, sometimes secretly, sometimes not so, want the easy life. We want to live a nice easy life and die peacefully after a long full life. I suppose there are those who want a faster life. The live fast-die young, leave a beautiful corpse crowd, but in neither of those scenarios does suffering endlessly come into play. But what if living well and dying well, no matter what life hands us, is the final lesson and our completion garners us the reward we seek, whether that be heaven, or joy or nothingness. Nothing comes easy. Even those diet pills, all of them, slim-trim, ultraslim, slim-now, whatever; they all say: the use of this pill with regular exercise and a balanced diet has been shown to reduce weight. Well regular exercise and a balanced diet is the hard part. It�s the part that everybody tries to ignore, the work. It would be like a pill that said �taking this pill with regular intake of oxygen from the atmosphere has been shown to produce respiration in the lungs.� Thank God for that new breathing pill! I was getting so tired of doing it all on my own.
My point is, to quote the song, life�s what you make it. Not a very popular sentiment especially if your life isn�t exactly living up to your expectations. My other point is there is not really a moment of smooth sailing, no worries, no work. Life can be good and happy. There can be moments where everything seems to be going your way, falling into place, but if you think it will stay that way without some effort on your part you are in for a rude awakening. There is a song by Lou Reed, he of walking on the wild side, that was written after Andy Warhol�s death and the death of Lou�s father where Lou was rather sad for obvious reasons, in which Lou keeps questioning the goodness of certain things like mayonnaise soda and rain that falls up, of cancer in April and diseases that won�t kill you and he decides that these things are really not so good after all. This leaves Mr. Reed wonder what is good? This man who has just lost father and best friend is having a hard time finding the reasons that life can be considered good and ends the song asking, �what�s good?� To which his back-up singers tell him life�s good. Mr. Reed takes some convincing but in the end he agrees with them but adds �but not fair at all.� Or take the lesson of the princess bride where in the movie (by Wesley) and in the book (by Fezzik�s parents) we are told �life�s not fair, anybody who tells you otherwise is just selling something.�
I want to say things about God and nature and about my own fear of change, to impart further the idea that it is hard, that it is unfair but that it is also good, but I can�t seem to make that part come out in an articulate manner. It is my personal opinion that there are certain lessons that we have to learn, that the consciousness of the universe, which for lack of a better understanding I call God, tries to impart. I feel strongly that the universe continues to present the same lesson to us over and over again until we get it but each time the lesson is a little stronger, the consequences are a little tougher. I believe that eventually if we continue to ignore the lessons and stick our fingers in our ears singing la-la-la-la, God will bitch slap us up and down the street if necessary. Maybe I�m full of it, but ask yourself, the current mistake you are making that is making you miserable, how many time have you made it in the past? Trying a new direction is not all peaches and cream (or peaches and herb for that matter). The mechanism of homeostasis kicks in, the brain starts with the �devil you know speech� except that with the devil you know you know how the story ends. And I think that�s the loop that leads to the idea of suicide being the only way out.
Yes, life is a rigged carnival game with the bottom of the bottles weighted and the hole a tad bit too small to easily throw the ball through. Life is a casino where the house holds the best odds, but that doesn�t mean you should stop playing,
you should never stop playing,
ever,
because sometimes, just sometimes,
you win.

mg

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