We Clean Up Suicides, So You Don't Have To

OH...and I almost forgot. The most important thing that's happened to me in a bit of a while. I went to Dallas with my brother to see the Cowboys' football game...good time, a long drive, bad traffic around the stadium. But, on the Way There, I was in a half-comfortable half-sleep, probably dreaming about women, glasses of beer, and shoving a snake into a pilot's face, then falling into a river and turning into a woman (who had just dumped Brad Pitt after riding in a bobsled-like-taxi from Italy). So, what did I see in a billboard as I was waking up one fateful moment? A sign that said (I kid you not at all): We clean up suicides/so you and your family don't have to.

I believe that I have been searching for some representative expression of the particular insanity of our times (all times are insane, or perverse, with their own diversions from what is good and godly). I may have just found it. "We clean up suicides so you and your family don't have to". It doesn't get much better, or worse, or more microcosmic, or symbolic, or important, than that. I thought I was on to something (though admittedly one-sided and obvious) when my father told me that I had to go out and buy a lot of peanut butter when there was a vague possibility that we might have a tropical-storm here in Austin. As though, somehow, BUYING peanut butter would save us. (Keep in mind that we have about 3 weeks worth of food for four people in this house.) In the face of possible insecurity and discomfort, my otherwise sane father becomes enamored with peanut butter's life-saving qualities. This deeply instilled rich white WASP cookie-cutter neighborhood reaction of BUY when something might go wrong. The advertisers have successfully turned the Fight or Flight response into a Buy or Buy response. SAM's...which is a HUGE store...was OUT OF BREAD. Look at the coast. Look where Austin is. Not-Sane.

Anyway, those are my two representative building blocks so far. Hopefully these things come to me in ever more absurd, less obvious ways. I'll find it someday. Might also have to do with Nicole being unafraid of stammering into abandoned buildings while being scared to death of people doing ROTC exercises on the CSU lawns. Maybe, in the end, it just comes down to the beauty of nature, or the holiness of God, or the sweetness of two thin bosomy tight-sweatered girls kissing with wet moaning lips and stroking each others' growing nipples with delicate smooth hands.

I think I might write a movie about the 'We Clean up Suicides' people. There seems to be a sub-genre of the feel-good comedy that is about the little-guy's business about to go under and then being saved. (Billy Madison, Tommy Boy, Dodgeball, etc.) Except, now, that little business is 'We Clean Up Suicides,' and there is something in the script about how a morbid, suicidal guy signs up for the job,but upon seeing dead people, realizes how precious life really is. It relates to a theory I've had that part of the reason for the specific depression, lack of reverence, lack of holiness, lack of sanctity etc. in our times is the absence of actual experience or seeing of death. "The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living..." But if we never see the dead, or only see them in pornographied (Pore-nah-gruh-Fide [as in hide]) action movie ways, then we never receive that communication, which is a combination of 'you, like me, will die' and whatever you add to that, whether it be 'life is holy' or 'life is meaningless.' I prefer the former.

I was talking to my friend anthony online. He's in Iraq. This is a bit surreal, because on one level I want to ask him in-depth journalistic questions about his experience in the army, on another level I'm too lazy or scared to do that, and on another level i just feel like I'm talking to him normally. In any case, in his situation, he has expressed something about the newfound reverence he has for life (I suppose one could argue that such reverence is essential to even try to live through a war, and therefore something ofa necessary/shallow epiphany) but it did get me thinking. It was also very strange...when I started talking to him about ACL, I began to get into my bit about how Hot it was, 107 degrees, and in that half-complaining half-bragging way, describing the effects of the heat and that moment when Jude threw water on me and the water was so hot that it burned. And then realizing that Anthony's in Iraq, where it's basically always that hot and that dusty, and, instead of seeing the Decemberists, drinking a beer, and worrying about talking to some girl he has a momentary crush on, he's getting shot at. I haven't asked him if he's shot anybody yet. It's a strange thing to imagine him doing. I don't know what he's doing there, really. Intelligence stuff. 'Making people feel good,' I think is what he said. It seems quite hush hush when I get to asking him questions about it.

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love
Brett