Death and Taxes

I try to keep things light hearted around here, but arguably the whole point of this site is to get stuff off my chest, so I'm making an exception to that tonight. Besides which, according to pop psychology the best way to deal with your problems is to tell other people about them. True, pop psychology can be defined the idea people get of how psychiatry works from movies and sitcoms, where it's traditionally just used as a cheap plot device, but then I've always found it worth it to occasionally consider the possibility that reality as we know it is just the story of some lousy hack. Anyway though, on with the morbid griping. If you're digging through archives by the way, I highly recommend you just skip this rant over. Heck, even if you're reading it live that'd good advice. This is just straight depressed rambling, and likely to be extremely offensive to certain people. Plus I'll probably come off as a horrible inhuman monster by the end. I have a similar outlook to Bean from Ender's Shadow on a lot of things when you get right down to it.

OK, so as I was foreshadowing, I'm not in the best of moods right now, for a number of reasons. I can't really prioritize them, because quite frankly the shock wore off all of them at about the same time. So I'll just kick things off with the one that's already public knowledge and work my way down in increasing order of triviality.

As 90% of you probably know, someone else from RPGamer died about a week before I'm writing this. Heck, practically to the minute now that I stop and do the math. Now, to be perfectly honest, the death here doesn't have me all that upset. I mean, true, someone I know just died, but not someone I knew really well. I've proofread a lot of things for him, and had the occasional conversation about obscure untranslated tactical RPGs, but that's about the extent of things. I knew him well enough to care of course, but not really enough to become an emotional wreck. I don't believe I know anyone else who knew him well enough to really be broken up over it either.

What has me upset is how he died, how I found out, and some of the aftermath thereof. For those who didn't pick it up from that memorial posted on RPGamer, the how in this case is suicide. That in and of itself bothers the heck out of me. I can see circumstances in which suicide is something to be considered. Specifically, if you have some horrible disease where you need thousands of dollars of medical equipment just to survive for an extra few months with no hope of an actual cure. In fact, I've recently been trying to convince my aunt to have her dog put to sleep on this principle. That's really the only circumstance where I can see someone ever considering it though. Any other problems you may have aren't worth killing yourself over. Even if you lose all your limbs in a freak accident and are forced to spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair having to rely on others for everything, you still have plenty to live for. You're going to have good times here and there, people will appreciate your company, you may even have some profoundly positive impact on society at some point in your life. You shouldn't feel guilty about being a leech on society either. Believe it or not, if your in a situation like this, the people taking care of you wouldn't rather have you dead. If they did, they'd just stop taking care of you and let it happen. And if it wasn't a part of human nature to take care of those who can't take care of themselves, we wouldn't have pets, prisons, hospitals, or a lot of other things. So the bottom line is, except in the case of costly fatal diseases, nobody has a good reason to commit suicide, and it really bothers me to know that anyone I know, even casually, would disagree with me on the matter. Evidently not everyone shares my brand of cynical optimism though. Anyway, I'll get back to the motivation issue here later, but first I should get back to that how I found out bit.

As everyone reading this had better know, I run RPGamer's Q&A column on the weekdays, and take the weekends off. Spending most of the week pouring over my inbox trying to separate the questions from the spam is perfectly enjoyable for me, but when I know for a fact there's not going to be any Q&A mail in there, I tend to just give things a quick scan in the morning on the weekends to see if there's anything from my friends, and let the rest sit until it's time for Monday's column. Now then, my weekends start on Thursday these days. So while over the course of the weekend, I overheard the occasional mention of a very depressing letter being sent to everyone on staff, I didn't really think much of it, and none of the subject lines in my inbox jumped out at me, so I didn't look this here letter I received Thursday night until a decent chunk of time later.

That letter of course being a suicide note. Now, I think we all have some idea of what a suicide note is supposed to look like. For a good example, go watch Beetlejuice. There's that one scene where Lydia is constantly revising her because it doesn't seem sufficiently angsty and melodramatic. This letter here doesn't come close to that concept. It's upbeat. It's full of references to videogames and anime. It contains jokes. Honestly you have to read it pretty darn carefully to even notice it's a suicide note. Aside from ignoring it quite a while though, and having the wrong tone, the nasty thing about this here note is the rationalization it gives.

Here's the short form. We have a nerd who spends most of his time playing videogames and watching anime, born in the summer of 1981, still living at home, mooching off the family, but still making the contribution to society of working at RPGamer, a non-profiting but widely read gaming news site. While I never saw any reference made to the fact, evidently he was quite depressed by the fact that he was going to be mooching off his family for the forseeable future. That's it. That's the reason. Seriously not something to commit suicide over, particularly considering that statistically kids are leaving home a lot later in life these days than they used to.

What disturbs me here is how similar this situation is to my own life. Everything in the above paragraph applies to me, except presumably for the degree of being depressed about the situation. Heck, as far as I can tell, my life sucks even more. I'm a tad older, I have the incurable effects of a childhood disease keeping me out of the job market on top of any other issues, and taking a quick head count of the other recipients of this note, I have a heck of a lot less friends and family members to care about me. The bottom line though is that I don't hate being in the position I am. It's that cynical optimism I mentioned earlier. I admit my life sucks by a lot of people's standards, sure. Most people who delve into my personal life say they'd hate to be in my shoes, I even had one person tell me he'd probably kill himself if he were, but I generally don't let it get to me. Does it bother me that I have no means of supporting myself? That I have to live off the generosity of family members? That the only money I ever have comes in birthday cards or donations from people reading this page? That my cousin has to pay 90% of the cost of my upcoming trip to Japan to go sight-seeing with him? Heck yes! I don't dwell on it though. Instead I look at the bright side of my life as it is. I have enough free time to pursue all sorts of creative interests. My mother is so easy going and hospitable that I can live in her house without either of us bothering each other. Those people who take the time to listen to what I say generally find they like to hear my thoughts. Plus one of these days I could hit upon a means of making a ton of money from home, or the internet economy could rally itself making RPGamer profitable, and I'd be sitting pretty. It's just a question of riding out the indefinite lull.

Now then, the final point on this suicide issue. People's reactions to it. Again, this is just a question of hitting too close to home. With all the similarities here, right now I pretty much get a chance to see what the public reaction would be like to my own death. I'd imagine there'd be quite a lag before it became public knowledge. Someone would have to notice I was mysteriously absent, hunt down some contact info on a family member, recover from the shock. Then I imagine someone would throw a somber little tribute up on RPGamer, someone might think to get one thrown up here too, someone from my family would see such tributes and tear up, people would sit around in an uncomfortable silence for a week or two, make morbid speeches, and then move on. Depressing thought, unless you consider the fact that when you die your ego goes with you, so there's not much reason to concern yourself with how long it takes people to cope.

Wow. I had more to say about that than I thought. Suppose I should exercise some brevity in the rest of this.

A friend of my mother's is scheduled to die roughly tomorrow. Been having a rough time of things. First she had some other health problems, then found out she had brain cancer, went through all sorts of things getting it treated, they said it was in remission, then like 3 days ago more or less said "Oh, you know how we said you're going to be fine? Scratch that. You have about four days to live." I've never met the mother here, but I know the friend pretty well. She's still in shock over the thing, trying to schedule a funeral so it doesn't conflict with plans she had to go to parties and such. Not like she hates her mother or anything though, I'm sure she'll be bawling her eyes out as soon as it sinks in.

There now. That's all the death talk out of the way, onto something less morbid.

I don't talk about my family much, as there isn't much to talk about. I'm an only child, my parents got divorced when I was around three. It didn't really bother me then, it doesn't really bother me now. Generally if I ever say the words "my family" it refers to every living relative on my mother's side. Four generations, could be five if me or my cousins had any interest in the whole child raising notion, several relatives in their late 80s, but no males over the age of 23. So I grew up without really having a father figure in my life, but neither did my mother, my aunts, most of my cousins, for all I know even the older generations. Hasn't ever really come up. So again, I'm used to my father not factoring into my life much, and it doesn't really bother me, but I do have one, and it isn't like we ever had some huge argument and shut each other out of our lives. We just have the sort of cards and calls on birthdays relationship most people have with various aunts, uncles, grandparents, and other relatives they never really see, with him occasionally pestering me with the usual irksome distant relative questions: "Have a job yet? Seeing anyone? Have a car? Want to come down and visit me this summer?" That sort of thing. Oh yes, and for the record, the reason I always turn down that visit bit is because for reasons I can't fathom, he moved several years ago to Georgia. Due to those funny little quirks of biology, I'm physically adapted to the cold. 50-60°F is perfect from where I sit, so there's a snowball's chance in hell of me setting foot south of the Mason-Dixon line past March.

Anyway though, the reason I bring all this up is that this year my father failed to send me a card or give me a call on my birthday, which was roughly a month ago. Cynically speaking, it saves me a taxing conversation and all I really miss out on is a $20 check stuck inside a hallmark card from someone I honestly don't know as well as, well, the aforementioned suicide. It does seem to be festering in the back of my mind though. The most annoying part of course is that he DID remember to send a wedding invitation to me that week, this being his third attempt at such a thing. Now, even if I could afford to I wouldn't go, not out of resentment mind you, but said wedding is scheduled for August. In Georgia. See above.

This of course leads one to wonder if he is in fact so enthralled in the coming event that I slipped his mind, or if he just grew tired of repeating the same conversation every year. I also have to wonder who this person is he's marrying now, as on my last birthday he was going on about staying away from the dating scene for a good long while, just having split up with his second wife, largely due to the fact that she had pawned off all the furniture and doorknobs in the house to support various addictions.

On that note, I suppose it deserves pointing out that with the exception of my mother, my father has some pretty horrific taste in women. The aforementioned wife #2 there clearly wasn't the pick of the litter, and the only other long term relationship I've known him to have was with this sick sadistic freak who used to force-feed me rancid maggot-ridden meat whenever I'd visit him, and routinely beat her children with a wooden spoon practically every night. I really should tell you all some of my horror stories from that period some time. Pretty entertaining when you aren't living them really.

There are of course other issues weighing on my mind right now. Stress over the trip I'm taking to Japan in... a week and 5 hours. Stress over the fact that all this stress is having a pretty serious impact on my work output lately. Oh, and of course a list of little constant woes which according to at least two people are bad enough to kill oneself over. All that said though, writing all this stuff down and sticking it somewhere thousands of people could stumble across it actually does seem to have improved my mood. You could chalk it up to pop psychology, but I'm leaning more towards the notion that the physiology of your brain doesn't allow you to sit around brooding for too long at a stretch. You know, whichever chemical backs depression runs dry just like adrenaline does.

So if you're sitting there reading this, and you pity me, save it. Some people deserve it a lot more. If you hate me for saying such callous and insensitive things, try to keep them in context, and if you need some cheering up after all this glum talk, well, the next couple rants here should be pretty upbeat, go ahead and read them. Can't do that if you're reading this live though. Hmm... why don't I just say something incredibly tactless and selfish so you can concentrate on being disgusted with me instead of bummed? Something like, say...

Hey speaking of that trip to Japan, I still need some pocket money so I can hit arcades and buy weird seuveniers. So why don't you hit that there donations page and help make sure I can afford some Hello Kitty nato or something.

See? That's a much more comfortable emotional state, isn't it?