Darkness Visible
I'm not a computer person, and I don't have any i-gadgets, so I'd never heard about Bill Zeller's death (or Bill himself, for that matter) until tonight when I was scrolling throgh recent posts on Shakesville, but I followed a link to Gizmodo and read about him and cried at my desk. Jesus Christ.
Basically, he was a young, gifted computer programmer who was molested in childhood, never told a soul, haunted by what he called darkness for his entire life, and then on Friday attempted to take his own life (he died in a hospital). Heartbreaking.
The thing is, if you follow over to his Twitter account, he was fucking hilarious. Like I wish I'd known the guy.
I don't have a big long thing to say about him and his circumstances because I didn't know him, and I don't have a big long thing to say about how awful what happened to him was, because that's self-evident. I just want to say that if you read this and are in even remotely similar circumstances, please for God's sake get help. Open up. Trust somebody. It's better than taking all that magic you possess that you don't even know about--and not just the kind you do know about, the being funny and liked for the things you can control about yourself; I mean the things you are to other people that are great and that you by definition can't know about but trust me, they're real--and throwing it into the void.
I've been leaning more and more lately, by sort of natural attrition, into believing that everything is random and there is no God (from a perspective of logic, not nihilism) and pretty much you die and you're dead and that's it. And this makes me more than anything want there to be an afterlife where wounds get healed and the deserving find joy and God can explain exactly why shitty things happened to you and now they'll never happen again and really, sorry about all that and here, have a sparkly pink pony on the house, the cupcake party's at five.
And that people who precipitate this kind of thing have a long, intense chat with a dark man in a flaming suit who knows all the horrible things they did and never blinks while describing their final reward for said things.
Basically, he was a young, gifted computer programmer who was molested in childhood, never told a soul, haunted by what he called darkness for his entire life, and then on Friday attempted to take his own life (he died in a hospital). Heartbreaking.
The thing is, if you follow over to his Twitter account, he was fucking hilarious. Like I wish I'd known the guy.
I don't have a big long thing to say about him and his circumstances because I didn't know him, and I don't have a big long thing to say about how awful what happened to him was, because that's self-evident. I just want to say that if you read this and are in even remotely similar circumstances, please for God's sake get help. Open up. Trust somebody. It's better than taking all that magic you possess that you don't even know about--and not just the kind you do know about, the being funny and liked for the things you can control about yourself; I mean the things you are to other people that are great and that you by definition can't know about but trust me, they're real--and throwing it into the void.
I've been leaning more and more lately, by sort of natural attrition, into believing that everything is random and there is no God (from a perspective of logic, not nihilism) and pretty much you die and you're dead and that's it. And this makes me more than anything want there to be an afterlife where wounds get healed and the deserving find joy and God can explain exactly why shitty things happened to you and now they'll never happen again and really, sorry about all that and here, have a sparkly pink pony on the house, the cupcake party's at five.
And that people who precipitate this kind of thing have a long, intense chat with a dark man in a flaming suit who knows all the horrible things they did and never blinks while describing their final reward for said things.