Saturday, June 13, 2009

More Thoughts on Work and Death

This essay has no other home to go to. I've done all I can with it thus far. It's on its own now.

There is an article titled, “A Practical Guide to Suicide” that I found online one day while I was at work. The author says he’s a Satanist. Satanists are supposed to be big into suicide, I guess, on top of blood orgies and hunting housewives to impregnate with the anti-christ. I learned from the article that suicide is empowering in that it is a test of overcoming the fear of death as well as taking control of one’s own destiny. Also, potassium cyanide appears to be the way to go. The KCN must be stirred into a glass of tap water, after which it will take about five minutes for the chemical reaction to take place. Following this chemical reaction, we now have HCN, or hydrogen cyanide. Once it’s down the hatch, one would have less than a minute before losing consciousness. Death follows between fifteen and forty-five minutes. Remember, an empty stomach promotes faster death! The guide is full of helpful little reminders like these.

All of this doesn’t sound so bad to me, as I am sitting behind a desk, working for a bunch of gullible, socially retarded, new-agers who believe that their guru, a 94-year-old fraudulent pervert hiding out in the Netherlands, will guide them down the path of enlightenment. Whatever that means. My boss insists that when he meditates, he experiences a new level of consciousness. I keep silent, but I still think about how I want to tell him that I feel the same way every time I burn a joint. I also feel that way when I stand up too fast or when I hit my head as I’m climbing into a friend’s car. He is not the first person I’ve met who is so totally irresponsible that he must trust in someone else to tell him how to live. However, he is one of the more annoying of this group. Not only does his guru make all of his decisions for him, he’s also convinced my boss that he has an intimate, spiritual connection with every other being that exists. Whenever my boss gushes about this guru (whom he has never actually met in person), I remember that quote from my religions class; “If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

Even the writer of the guide has bizarre delusions of spiritual transcendence and enlightenment. He talks about the selflessness of the Satanic. Some of it reads like Chicken Soup for the Fucked Up Soul. It makes me sad that I couldn’t come up with something so delightfully queer.

I printed out the “Practical Guide,” some thirty pages, on the store’s printer, feeling very good about the amount of ink I must have used. The employees at the copy store down the street gave me strange looks when I requested a coil binding for the pages, and even though I explained to them that it was a conversation piece for my coffee table, along with Sheldon Patinkin’s The Second City and an 1856 edition of Shakespeare’s collected plays, their behavior remained peculiar. Perhaps they thought that I was the author.

The guide probably isn’t too bad of an idea, really, considering how many people fail at killing themselves. To fail at life and then fail at death could be traumatic, I’d imagine. That is, on top of the bodily injury, it must not be very good for their self-esteem. Poor Self-Esteem can be worse than death.

Poor Self-Esteem is the reason my boss thinks that he needs to pay thousands of dollars so he can be part of a group. Their guru preaches that it is their duty to meditate and, I guess, send out good vibes or whatever throughout the world to promote peace, love, and joy. So now my boss thinks he’s responsible for every good thing that happens to anyone – a boost for his ego, but at what cost? The sanity of everyone around him, I suppose.

Actually, the guide writer has a similarly silly and self-absorbed idea of how his religious practice benefits the world – one contribution being this “suicide for Satan,” which, he claims, is beneficial to those left alive because it decreases strain on the environment caused by the growing human population. Ah-ha. So suicide benefits the environment. That’s a point I will have to remember the next time a hippie stops me whilst I’m walking. I’ll say, “Know how you can really help the environment? Kill yourself. Here’s a pamphlet.”

The strange thing is, I can’t help but admire this man or woman who wrote the guide. At least he/she is making an actual effort to benefit civilization rather than sitting around and doing nothing (i.e. “meditating). Instead, this person sat down and worked on a piece of writing to help as many people who wish to successfully end their lives to do so. And, when I think about it, there is a moderate percentage of the population who could really do no better than to end their lives as soon as possible. One could say that this one Satanist is doing more to help the world become a better place than one hundred thousand 16 to 24-year-olds at the Annual Super Hippie Jam Fest, most of whom are there because they need to fill their brains with drugs and fat beats so they can ignore their Poor Self-Esteem.

So now there is a handbook for committing suicide on my coffee table. I think that the next time I’m at work I’ll print out a few more copies and then mail them to certain people. Anonymously. I wouldn’t want my Uncle Lars phoning up my mother to complain about it. I decide that I’d better not include my essay on hara-kiri that I was planning to send him along with the guide – it would completely give me away. The guide doesn’t talk about hara-kiri, which is a ritual suicide by self-disembowelment. It’s pretty much the manliest way to die ever. It’s a Japanese term, of course. Talk about empowerment through death, not to mention self-discipline. For hara-kiri one must take his sword, stick it deep into his belly, and pull the blade across his stomach so that his intestines are completely exposed. It seems like something a Satanist would relish. But I decide just then, standing in my living room, that if I ever decide to commit suicide, it will be the hara-kiri. I think it’s because it makes me laugh to think that someone will have to clean all of that shit up after I’m gone. Empowerment through death. Seriously.

1 comment:

  1. Taking control of your own life might be empowering, but also very silly. It is better to take control of your behaviour and goal setting which makes more sense to succeed in life.

    http://www.selfesteem2go.com/self-control.html

    ReplyDelete