It's an anniversary.
Requiem
Sometimes I think about suicide, not me killing myself, but the act of someone killing themselves, the logistics trouble me. I’m not worried about how they do it, or what leads up to it, but I worry about the banal things, like the note. What if their handwriting is bad, and people don’t understand what the point of this act even was?
“Why did he kill himself?”
“Hell if I know, I can’t read the thing”
That would be the worst. It’s bad enough that someone would put a noose around their neck, or a razor in their wrist, or a gun to their head, or even fly a plane into something big and metallic, but for someone to not know why, would just be the real tragedy.
Would it be better if the person sent out a mass email like the guy in New York City before he blew up his townhouse, or would that be a faux pas? Should they leave it on their PC and hope someone finds it, like in a WORD file? What would they call it, “Note”, “Suicide”, or would they even bother to capitalize it?
Would they make a video and post it on Myspace or Youtube? Should you just use your video camera, or do you use the more expensive film stock, like in the real movies use? It’d be really expensive, but it would look a lot better. The cost shouldn’t even really matter, you can’t take it with you is what they say. What would the budget for a suicide film be? Could you write for a grant for something like that, and how long would you have to wait to find out? Maybe if the person could get that grant, maybe they wouldn’t even feel like killing themselves.
It’s an anniversary. They keep saying that on television. I always think of happy things having anniversaries, like my wife and I or my parents. Anniversaries involve parties and balloons and loud music. Anniversaries aren’t about people crying and talking heads on the television recycling emotions that they probably never had in the first place. Anniversaries are about potato salad and little babies playing with other babies and people who “can’t wait to do it next year”. Anniversaries aren’t people deciding to jump out of a burning tomb rather than to die with the rest of them. But according to everyone else, this is an anniversary. This anniversary isn’t a party like any that I’ve been to; well I’ve been to a few parties that were almost like this.
This is the anniversary of the day that they told us five years ago to not make a big deal about. “If we do that, than they have one” was what they said then. We were a lot more mature back then. This is the anniversary of that Cowboy coming on television and telling us to go shopping; “That will show them” he said.
The closest things to balloons at this party are the helicopters showing that whole in the ground.
We go through our own crap in our own way. I’ve owned two cars in my whole life, and had a total of 2 accidents. But I never celebrated that anniversary.
The bluest skies anyone has ever seen weren’t on that day. The tallest buildings in the world weren’t even in that city. When I arrived there that December the sky was grey and the buildings seemed like they were tickling Jesus’ feet. I arrived 3 months after that day. I hate to admit, but some part of me as I walked near the rows of dump trucks and rubble and the morgue that I didn’t know was still finding bodies wished that all of these people would take pictures of me instead of that. I guess I am just as selfish and confused as the rest of those people with cameras taking pictures of their children in front of the rubble.
It was the same way I felt the other night when I saw the comedians. I had foolishly thought that maybe I’d crack a good joke and they’d hear it and take me away with them.
It was the same way I had felt when the band I had just seen in concert appeared in the bar I was drinking at all those years ago. I wanted them sit with me and take me away from all of this.
The guy sitting beside me in the bar after I saw the rubble worked there. Every day he helped exhume bodies from that pile. All he could talk about was how people wanted to care, but that they shouldn’t.
“They weren’t there, and no one deserved to be there” he said. He had long blonde hair that hung down from his hard hat. He looked small, alone and powerful, like Mother Theresa would have looked in her thirties. “They keep bringing their kids here and crying, and no one should come here. But they all want to be in the circus.”
They all want to be in the circus, they all want to be part of the show, and this is the biggest show around. I can imagine the Cowboy eating steak and eggs tomorrow morning, if that’s even part of his diet, reading his speech and practicing his voice modulation.
“What should I wear to the speech?”
“Well, black with a red tie of course, and a flag pendant” his yes man would say.
After the bar, I walked around the city. I was torn between wanting to take a nap, or go to the museum my friends were viewing, or even to go back to the pile of metal. I just didn’t know if I was in the mood to see beautiful seventeen year old children in dreadlocks. White hippies taking pictures of dark days past.
I guess I’m too cynical. Maybe this is the “post modernism” that I keep hearing about. Would that rubble have so many people viewing it if a welder twenty years ago had forgotten a rivet, the tresses finally buckled, and the whole thing went down? What if they weren’t scary brown skinned men that didn’t believe in Jesus? What if it was a sad little white kid that believed in Kurt Cobain? Or a black kid? Would this be the same “important day”? Or would the movies be smaller, wittier movies, like “the Royal Tennenbaums”?
Don’t make me out to be a monster just yet. Some stupid and crazy people went and did something hideous and left a lot of even more stupid people with a cause behind.
The next day, we walked along the ocean shore, well along the concrete path beside the ocean shore. My friends and I sang Beach Boys songs, stared at a World War I monument, and wondered what the hell was happening to us, and to the world. While they were buying fake Rolexes and watching young black boys perform acrobatics, I noticed a chalk mural on the ground that someone had written “3 months ago today you left us we will never forget you”.
I stopped and took a breath and looked back at the city and wondered where the person was who had written it, and what they were doing, and if there was ever an anniversary like the one that is today, I guess it was that one.
Sometimes I think about suicide, not me killing myself, but the act of someone killing themselves, the logistics trouble me. I’m not worried about how they do it, or what leads up to it, but I worry about the banal things, like the note. What if their handwriting is bad, and people don’t understand what the point of this act even was?
“Why did he kill himself?”
“Hell if I know, I can’t read the thing”
That would be the worst. It’s bad enough that someone would put a noose around their neck, or a razor in their wrist, or a gun to their head, or even fly a plane into something big and metallic, but for someone to not know why, would just be the real tragedy.
Would it be better if the person sent out a mass email like the guy in New York City before he blew up his townhouse, or would that be a faux pas? Should they leave it on their PC and hope someone finds it, like in a WORD file? What would they call it, “Note”, “Suicide”, or would they even bother to capitalize it?
Would they make a video and post it on Myspace or Youtube? Should you just use your video camera, or do you use the more expensive film stock, like in the real movies use? It’d be really expensive, but it would look a lot better. The cost shouldn’t even really matter, you can’t take it with you is what they say. What would the budget for a suicide film be? Could you write for a grant for something like that, and how long would you have to wait to find out? Maybe if the person could get that grant, maybe they wouldn’t even feel like killing themselves.
It’s an anniversary. They keep saying that on television. I always think of happy things having anniversaries, like my wife and I or my parents. Anniversaries involve parties and balloons and loud music. Anniversaries aren’t about people crying and talking heads on the television recycling emotions that they probably never had in the first place. Anniversaries are about potato salad and little babies playing with other babies and people who “can’t wait to do it next year”. Anniversaries aren’t people deciding to jump out of a burning tomb rather than to die with the rest of them. But according to everyone else, this is an anniversary. This anniversary isn’t a party like any that I’ve been to; well I’ve been to a few parties that were almost like this.
This is the anniversary of the day that they told us five years ago to not make a big deal about. “If we do that, than they have one” was what they said then. We were a lot more mature back then. This is the anniversary of that Cowboy coming on television and telling us to go shopping; “That will show them” he said.
The closest things to balloons at this party are the helicopters showing that whole in the ground.
We go through our own crap in our own way. I’ve owned two cars in my whole life, and had a total of 2 accidents. But I never celebrated that anniversary.
The bluest skies anyone has ever seen weren’t on that day. The tallest buildings in the world weren’t even in that city. When I arrived there that December the sky was grey and the buildings seemed like they were tickling Jesus’ feet. I arrived 3 months after that day. I hate to admit, but some part of me as I walked near the rows of dump trucks and rubble and the morgue that I didn’t know was still finding bodies wished that all of these people would take pictures of me instead of that. I guess I am just as selfish and confused as the rest of those people with cameras taking pictures of their children in front of the rubble.
It was the same way I felt the other night when I saw the comedians. I had foolishly thought that maybe I’d crack a good joke and they’d hear it and take me away with them.
It was the same way I had felt when the band I had just seen in concert appeared in the bar I was drinking at all those years ago. I wanted them sit with me and take me away from all of this.
The guy sitting beside me in the bar after I saw the rubble worked there. Every day he helped exhume bodies from that pile. All he could talk about was how people wanted to care, but that they shouldn’t.
“They weren’t there, and no one deserved to be there” he said. He had long blonde hair that hung down from his hard hat. He looked small, alone and powerful, like Mother Theresa would have looked in her thirties. “They keep bringing their kids here and crying, and no one should come here. But they all want to be in the circus.”
They all want to be in the circus, they all want to be part of the show, and this is the biggest show around. I can imagine the Cowboy eating steak and eggs tomorrow morning, if that’s even part of his diet, reading his speech and practicing his voice modulation.
“What should I wear to the speech?”
“Well, black with a red tie of course, and a flag pendant” his yes man would say.
After the bar, I walked around the city. I was torn between wanting to take a nap, or go to the museum my friends were viewing, or even to go back to the pile of metal. I just didn’t know if I was in the mood to see beautiful seventeen year old children in dreadlocks. White hippies taking pictures of dark days past.
I guess I’m too cynical. Maybe this is the “post modernism” that I keep hearing about. Would that rubble have so many people viewing it if a welder twenty years ago had forgotten a rivet, the tresses finally buckled, and the whole thing went down? What if they weren’t scary brown skinned men that didn’t believe in Jesus? What if it was a sad little white kid that believed in Kurt Cobain? Or a black kid? Would this be the same “important day”? Or would the movies be smaller, wittier movies, like “the Royal Tennenbaums”?
Don’t make me out to be a monster just yet. Some stupid and crazy people went and did something hideous and left a lot of even more stupid people with a cause behind.
The next day, we walked along the ocean shore, well along the concrete path beside the ocean shore. My friends and I sang Beach Boys songs, stared at a World War I monument, and wondered what the hell was happening to us, and to the world. While they were buying fake Rolexes and watching young black boys perform acrobatics, I noticed a chalk mural on the ground that someone had written “3 months ago today you left us we will never forget you”.
I stopped and took a breath and looked back at the city and wondered where the person was who had written it, and what they were doing, and if there was ever an anniversary like the one that is today, I guess it was that one.