Are You About To Commit Suicide?

Sorry to interrupt, but there is a flaw in your plan

We’d eaten chicken for dinner that night

And chicken is always a damn risk — especially when you eat those Jurassic Park boney bits with slithers of pink in them, even when cooked.

Less than twelve minutes after my last gobful, I ran to the upstairs toilet and ejaculated Willy Wonka liquid cacao from my anus at a speed and volume that Elon Musk would be proud of.

I’ve never minded a good liquid shit session. It’s far more pleasant than its dark cousin, Dr Constipa, which, for the most part, one can avoid by simply not eating sugar and wheat. How often do people connect the dots when their shit is sticky as a goddamn stick insect?

Frank? Are you listening, Frank?

He’s right. But I’m only half listening because I’m trying to roll a cigarette one-handed and watching a deep fake Instagram reel of Arnold Schwarzeniver playing Ace Ventura.

His name is Doctor Paul, and HE is saying all this to me on the phone while I wait for my test results.

Paul has always been a bit informal. He’s one of those casual doctors you see in Hollywood films that plays golf with his clients and attends their children’s bar mitzvahs or whatever.

Anyhow, he tells me my test was negative. And I have one of those strange moments that you get when you’ve made plans to go on a special vacation, but you hate flying, but then it gets cancelled, and you’re relieved, but then you think, crap, now I have to go back to work.

That was the last time I spoke to Doctor Paul because he topped himself three weeks after that conversation.

Sorry to spring that on you. Given the article’s title, you should have expected it to take a dark turn at some point, though.

Am I right?

Also, I wanted to give you the same feeling I had when I heard. It was sudden, unexpected, totally out of the blue. The guy had everything — a Porsche, a top-grade golf club membership, a portfolio of sound investments, a vengeful ex-wife, and kids he never saw.

Regardless, we initially thought it might be one of those Michael Hutchence, tie-around-the-neck, auto-erotic purple-faced wanks gone wrong.

But it turned out he actually fucking hung himself like Dick Turpin in his mother’s lounge room. How dramatic.

And I wish I’d had some time to talk to Doctor Paul, but he was too busy shitting on like a customer service officer on Yerba Mate, and I was too busy wishing he would shut the fuck up and wondering if I’d be leaving this plane in a blaze of glory like Bon Jovi before the year was out.

In hindsight, I realised his talking was a way of keeping himself in the present. It was a way of avoiding his mental pain.

But honestly, who would hang themselves in 2023?

It’s so 1888. Paul should have checked Vogue and the others before committing to a method. He might as well have worn stirrup pants, long boots, and one of those triangle hats and yelled God Save The Queen, Man like Joe Bidet as the rope snapped his puny Equus Quagga Cervicus.

But there was no such historical theatre. Doctor Paul humbly filled his Levi 501s with shit and piss and hung there swinging and creaking like an old chorizo.

And maybe you’re thinking about catapulting yourself into the void aswell.

I know it’s easy to wake up in the morning and think that yer done with the knobheads in suits shitting in the Gazpacho and ruining the goddamn party for everyone. And the terror of waiting to be vaporised by a giant nuclear penis or a hoard of rabid social media zombies, or the horror of that inner voice — the cellmate from hell that never shuts the fuck up.

And look, I know you wouldn’t try and hang yourself. You’re better than that.

But you might go to the kitchen and grab the breadknife that yer grandma gave yer when you were going through that sourdough phase in ’03 instead.

I heard breadknives are so hot right now.

You might take it out to the shed and write down a long fuckin note telling yer Auntie Sue that yer sorry for spying on her in the jacuzzi back in ’12 before yer take the serrated fucker and slip it vertically down yer wrists cos that’s what yer herd on Reddit was the best way to leave this wasted land.

And yer might be right or fuckin wrong. It all depends on yer karma. But I’ll tell you what I would have told Paul if he ever shut the fuck up for one second:

If yer pain is mental, then chopping yer wrists up is like spinning the fuckin roulette wheel.

Cos there’s no proof that the mind doesn’t continue after death.

And what if yer leave this fuckin body n end up with the same mind but in a different body like a fuckin armadillo with tiny arms n legs n a heavy shell, or a snake with no fuckin arms at all, or worse, a fuckin politician?

There’s a sign out on Hollywood Boulevard. But it’s invisible except to those with eyes that see without prejudice

It says,

There’s another way motherfucker.

Don’t kill yer physical self

Kill yer mental self instead.

Commit suicide mentally.

There are a few methods written down on granite slabs if yer can make it to the top of Mount Kailash.

But yer don’t need to go that far to get started.

Do ya know what Nirvana is?

N yeah, go on, get the Kurt thing out the way.

I say again

Do you know what Nirvana is?

It’s the fundamental goal of Buddhism.

Nirvana means cessation. Or it means to blow out or to extinguish.

But to extinguish what?

It means to extinguish the mind.

When I first heard about that, I was like, well fuck that’s quite nihilistic. It’s probably what attracted me initially.

I liked the idea of oblivion. I’d like to say oblivion was also what Doctor Paul was looking forward to, rope around the neck, standing on his mother’s antique walnut chair number four of six.

But that’s one thing they couldn’t teach Paul in his nine years of medical training. He still believed that the mind died with the body cos he never took the time to look closely enough.

According to the Buddhist teachings, you leave the body, but ya take the mind wherever ya go, like Herpes, that handsome Greek Hero.

And if yer not of the suicidal persuasion, or the keyboard player in the gothic band Dark Piss, you probably dread the idea of oblivion anyway.

But that’s alright too.

The Buddhist teaching says that Nirvana is the cessation of the mind. But it ain’t oblivion. It’s mental peace because it’s beyond both continuation and oblivion.

Everything that happens still happens. But it doesn’t happen to you.

And yer think, Frank, well, that can’t be true, cos, that’s like one of those paradox thingies.

And you might be right about that. How can we exist and not exist?

The trouble is, the word paradox implies that there’s something wrong, like we still need to suss it out. But there ain’t. Life is full of paradoxes.

But when superbly refined human minds can’t understand something intellectually, we think the problem must surely be with the object, not us. So we call it a paradox.

N yeah, people go nuts using the mind to try and explain the state beyond the mind but don’t worry about that. It’s like trying to explain the colour blue to someone with no eyeballs.

Just realise that yer body is useful. It’s the best vehicle for wriggling free of the trap known as ‘conditioned existence,’ so don’t flush it down the grid. You’ll end up with more of the same, only worse.

Death ain’t the way out, Kid, unless yer fancy being reborn as an armadillo with an anxiety problem.

And it doesn’t matter if you don’t believe in rebirth. Cos it’s a pretty fucking big gamble to take, regardless.

Just put down the damn breadknife and have a read about the mental cessation of Nirvana before you do anything rash, alright?

And if ya can, give up trying to kill yer body and start thinking about how to shut your mind up instead cos that’s where yer real pain is coming from.