Chapter 1 Death with rope
You'd think it would be easy to kill yourself: gun (bang), drugs
(gulp), car (crash), jump (splat) and so on. But no one just wakes up one
morning and says "hey I think I'll kill myself" and then pops into
the tub with his toaster. No, there's some suicide prep required:
first you must kill your will to live - and let me tell you: doing in
your bloody will is harder than you think.
And it's not the normal inhibitions that really bite will-wise.
It's not Mom (boo hoo!), the kids (wha??), the ex-wife (yes! yes! woo
hoo!), hey, be nice. Or the friends (Blah, blah, blah, Oh right, Bill?
yeah, blah, blah, blah) that hold you back, rather it's the little things that
you pick up along the way that trip you up on your road to oblivion.
I mean if anyone would be a candidate for a quick exit stage left
it would be me. I couldn't even get my parole officer to give a rip about my
life: She was an exasperated redhead, middle aged and anything but even
tempered: "What are you doing here? We don't get guys like you,
why didn't you plead this down? What do you mean you don’t have a
record? Dammit, not another
legal dumbass!"
I shrug.
"Well don't think just because you're some sort of bloody
emoti-Con that I'm going to waste any time on you because I'm not. I've
got dangerous people to watch. You're going to the computer"
The 'computer' turned out to be a small wizened man looking up
through his coke bottle glasses tap, tap, tapping into an antiquated
contraption in another large, bureaucratic cube farm: "OK, so here's your
global travel permit allowing you to travel anywhere in the world at any time
without asking our permission, but if you want to go into space you’ve got to
get another form…heh, that’s a joke, we’ve never really ever had anyone leave
the earth, I mean not without the aid of drugs, that is……...well anyway, sign
here. Once a month call
this number and after the beep or whatever
it is, type in this code. And remember: other than this computer, you're
not to call us ever. Ok? No matter what. We'll call you if we
need something. Never ever call us. OK? Seriously, never. Well have a nice probationary
period!"
"OK"
I couldn't even get either 'beat the rap' or 'dangerous criminal'
right. No, I had to fall ineptly between the two: I was a legal dumbass
whose parole officer (who, in its defense was a rather old
computer) wouldn't even return my call.
Not that my professional life had gone any better:
"Hey you stole my software code and then sold it back to
me"
Satish, my ex-Development VP was a smooth talking Indian, dressed
in a stylish suit sitting across from me at Panera.
"Well, let's not say steal, let's say leveraged the software
into BippenTech's newest platform."
"But it's the same code you persuaded me to pay BippenTech to
enhance for us, not to sell it to our competitors, you said your brother could
do it for cheap"
"It is enhanced, this is version 1.2"
"Putting Copyright Bippentech, Ltd. India on everything is
not enhancing it, it’s stealing it."
"Well it is for us, enhancing, I mean. Say, just to
show you there are no hard feelings we'll license 1.2 back to you for free, you
can't do any better than free, can you? Of course my brother insists that we
charge you for maintenance."
"You're licensing me my own software that I hired you to
enhance if I pay you maintenance? You son of a bitch!" And
then I hit him. Rather hard, I'm afraid, missing his face but succeeding
in spraining my hand on the iphone concealed in his immaculately tailored
breast pocket.
"Shit! What do you have in there? Ow, ow, ow!”
"What is wrong with you? you're crazy!" my VP in charge
of Fraud cried, backing away from the table, chairs and crockery flying
everywhere, to the bystanders: "you saw him hit me, he's crazy! Boy
this is the last time I try to help out an old friend" And that's when I
snapped. I lunged and
straddling him on the ground hit him over and over again with an oversize
plastic coffee mug. But at
least it was empty.
"I suppose you think this is how you get the State of
Missouri to give a rip about your miserable little life" the red head
parole officer was positively raving now. "Well you guessed wrong
buster, we are not wasting
our time on you"
And the antiquated dotmatrix printer went ztthp, ztthp, ztthp,
printing out a sheet that said 'warning!' on it that coke bottle glasses man
shoved at me with a disapproving glare.
“I know, I know, don’t call you, you’ll call me.”
When I first started thinking about you know, doing myself in I
used to visualize myself hanging. Me
hanging from that tree, me hanging from a bridge, me hanging from a light pole, everywhere really. And it seemed like a pretty good
solution: after all I was pretty good at knots in the boy scouts and rope
was easy to get. On top of that, it was fairly dramatic but with not too much
damage to the corpse so they could do an open casket if they wanted – except if
I got left somewhere and the crows pecked out my eyes and raccoons chewed off
my face, then it wouldn’t work – but I’d just do it somewhere really visible so
they’d see me and take me down quickly.
But then I’d be on the nightly news (that night they’d change it
to the nightly noose, har, har) with Action 7’s Kim Roderick standing next to
my dangling corpse interviewing the slacker who found me “yeah I sawr him up
here. He tweren’t doin’
nuthin’, just danglin’ this way and that. Danglin’ an’ danglin’ an’
danglin’.”
And then the EMT who was supposed to take me down would explain by
the use of a retractable pointer just why I was dead, “It’s your fracturing of
the third and fourth vertebrae that sever the spinal column that does it,
you’ll note that it often leads to a loss of bladder control here” points to my
swaying crotch, “which is what happened in this subject’s case.”
Hmmm. Perhaps
not.
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