Review of: Ways to Kill Yourself

Jumping from a building/bridge:[1] I feel like jumping from a building-slash-bridge kind of works for me. If you’re going to kill yourself, you may as well get to do something you wouldn’t otherwise get to do. I mean, I’ve always wanted to go parachuting, but clearly, I’m never going to drive the 50 miles to the regional airport, sign up for classes, pay 300 bucks, get a “jump buddy,” etc., etc. So screw that. Plus, I really want to be flying through the air, not wearing some piece of parachute cloth on my back like I’m some little wussy baby wearing little wussy baby water-wings. So for me, this one works. As an added plus, as you jumped, you could pretend to be either Wile E. Coyote or Superman on a spectacularly bad day, possibly a day on which he ate some bad oysters that were also laced with Kryptonite.

And once you’ve jumped, you’ve pretty much committed yourself, you know? After that, you can just chill out. Relax. Enjoy the view. Of course there are those stories of people who have fallen 30,000 feet from airplanes and survived with only some cracked ribs so I’d probably be worrying about that on the way down — Oh geez, are cracked ribs really painful? Will I just be able to walk away from the crowd of people on the ground while clutching my cracked ribs? — and thus would miss the full beauty of the experience. Grade: A-minus

Shooting yourself: See, this is where real life and the movies start to diverge. In the movies, I’ve seen approximately 10,000 guns, without even getting into all the samurai swords, lightsabers, bazookas, chainsaws, air-to-air missiles… In my real life, I’ve seen exactly one gun. It was at a party at some dude’s house, and drugs were being consumed, and the head dude, with the requisite backwards baseball cap, arm tattoos, neck chain, and blond goatee was like, “You guys wanna see my gun?” while waving some sort of aluminum-y, very gun looking-thing wildly around. And my friend and I, in perfect harmony, yelled “No!” because so clearly some sort of Boyz-in- the-Hood accidental shooting death was in the works, which meant that my dad would have had to drive all the way down from Pennsylvania and drip malt liquor on my grave or whatever. And so, pretty quickly, my friend and I got the hell out of there.

And since I’m never going to find that party or that guy again, I wouldn’t know where to find a gun. Would I, like, have to go to Wal-Mart to buy one? Assuming that I want to kill myself, I must therefore, ipso facto, be already pretty depressed. Do I want to then have to drive out to Wal-Mart, which is even more depressing? Do I want to then have to stand in line and fill out forms? And you just know I’m going to forget my driver’s license or my passport or whatever… And then I’ll have to drive back home… And then, I’ll have to wait two weeks, and, uh, ugh, forget it. Sounds like work, dude. Sounds like having a job. All that effort, it’s like I’m doing the man’s suicide work for him. Maybe I’ll just learn to deal with my latest failed relationship/dashed literary hopes/sucky childhood/insert problem here, instead. Grade: D

Slitting your wrists while lying in a bathtub filled with warm water: Apparently this is how the ancient Romans committed suicide. I should have known about this one, because I was a Classics major, but I didn’t. What tickles me about this is that apparently people had bathtubs 2,500 years ago. Huh. Were the bathtubs made of, like, stone? Did they have Doric and Ionian columns on them? Was the water heated by some sort of elaborate Flintstones-esque sarcastic talking bird attached to a wheel attached to a turtle attached to a bellows over a fire sort of contraption? Questions, questions… Also, another fun fact that I turned up in my research is that apparently the ancient Romans had fast food restaurants. I’ll bet they were gross. Grade: B-minus

Committing Hari-Kari: I’m not getting anywhere near a big knife, dude. Grade: D-minus

Sticking your head in an oven: The preferred method of Sylvia Plath, and therefore, of Comparative Lit majors worldwide. Not to dump on poor Sylvia or anything, but man, kind of a wussy way to go, don’t you think? You don’t even light the oven, what you do is turn on the gas and inhale it. Seems kinda girly. Not a real guy-ish way to go. I just have a hard time imagining walking into Clint Eastwood’s or Hulk Hogan’s or Shaft’s or Darth Vader’s apartment and finding one of them with their legs sticking out of a Kenmore stove and I’m there shrieking, “Shaft, no!”

Anyway, the only time I stick my head inside a oven is to fix the little bitty inner light bulb when it’s gone out, and then I always notice how disgusting it is inside, coated with Tombstone frozen pizza stains and such, and I just wouldn’t want to die like that. Except maybe if I was thinking how I had to clean my oven and how dirty my apartment is and how I really really need to buy a “Swifer” and then maybe, maybe, I just might turn the dial…

…As an added side-note, I’d like to say that I think Shaft’s funeral after his suicide would be a real buzz-kill, especially if orated by, say, Jesse Jackson… “Who WAS the black undercover dick who WAS a sex machine with all the chicks? SHAFT! AND HE’S DEAD! Who was the cat who only ONCE copped out when there was danger all about? SHAFT! REST IN PEACE! You know, they SAID that Shaft was one bad mutha…” Grade: F

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