Home Pop Culture How to kill yourself in public and create a scene: A study...

How to kill yourself in public and create a scene: A study in the American myth.

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There are many ways to kill yourself if inclined; jumping off bridges because of the stigma associated with one’s sexuality, shooting yourself in the head, hanging yourself live on a chat room session whilst being cheered on, being gunned down for being in the wrong place wrong place at the wrong time (although technically a murder), contemplating it whilst on facebook as one socialite recently did (we hear she is better, which pleases us immensely), write a theoretical dissertation and then shoot yourself at Harvard yard, take copious amounts of pain killers like Michael Jackson did that knocked him out for eternity, overdosing on prescription pills and crack cocaine like DJ AM did last year after a long abstinence despite teaching others to stay the course, hanging yourself whilst waiting in custody in a cell like one promising medical student did after he was presumed to have murdered a young woman he met through Craigslist services, shoot yourself dead after killing your family first because you were served cold eggs for breakfast, jump out of a hotel room like one promising young male model Tom Nicon recently did over the summer and of course there’s always the tried and tested method of heroin overdose that uber hipster Dash Snow displayed for us last year as the media suddenly catapulted him to artistic genius when in reality he was a disillusioned man with heavy society cache and of course if you want to reflect over recent events here in NYC- there’s getting yourself involved with a misbegotten young man and possibly strangled or at the very least comatose with prescription pills at one of the most swankiest hotels and of course if you are really feeling down and out- hanging yourself by a pipe with a dog leash while your two year old son sleeps unawares, waiting to become a basket case one day. To be sure not for the feint of heart, and yet these things go on everyday, in some parts of the world, and probably down the street right now.

But what perhaps is particularly equally gruesome or perhaps more so is the way the media then dissects these incidents. Nay it devours them. What led to the suicide, why today, what does this suggest about certain aspects of society and shall we call them a hero or even better a martyr? In some perverse way it is as if each and one of these deaths that make it public where somehow staged, deftly orchestrated and when it came time the assailant (for lack of better word) would make sure that they carried out their woeful end of the bargain and finally attain our attention, resignation, fascination, adulation and ultimately copulation as we turn them into the people they couldn’t be in their private lives. Perverse stuff, but it makes the see saw go up and down…

One could perhaps just ignore such reports when they come out, but even the most zen like of us is compelled to wonder and choke for a split second. Of course death should always have that effect, because whether you openly realize it – you are right now standing on a large piece of spinning rock in the universe waiting for your own death, whether at the hands of yourself, illness, old age, some freak accident, or let us not forget murder. (cont’d next pg)


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