Sam Paul - Why I Committed Suicide

I look into the mirror but I am not Him, even if we both have skinny wrists. I search the depths of my dark green eyes over and over, yet I feel fortunate that I don’t see power or godliness in them. Every so often I’ll feel a deep glimmer buried someplace down in my chest though. Something else is a part of me, a part of all of us I imagine, but it takes a while to separate my consciousness from reality long enough to locate it. When I take the time to really listen, I can feel the plants and earth and wide-open spaces extending for thousands of miles and across time. Expressing these thoughts in words only comes across as a bunch of Zen/Buddhist/Christian bullshit but this whole macrocosm is linked somehow. I can’t explain it nor do I care to.

I get frustrated with artists who deviate unsuccessfully from the works that originally made them popular with me. Similarly, I find myself feeling diluted a lot, jumping from one task to another. The only difference being that I have no defining great work that might disappoint my fans if I stray. I don’t have much at all. Everything I create is just medicine for me. I suppose the pleasure I get out of creating is what’s important. If one commercially viable idea would infatuate and consume me, then I might potentially exploit my work to so that I can be financially worry-free to indulge in everything else I want to do and be with a clear conscience. Money isn’t evil, love of money is evil, but money represents freedom to me right now.

I’m thinking of dying my hair cotton candy pink. Not that I like the color pink in the slightest, blue or green would be much cooler looking, but something about saying cotton candy pink makes the words roll pleasurably off my tongue with the static electricity of a charged doorknob on a cold day. Life is a lot like the “Tangerine” song by The Flaming Lips. They played on 90210 the other night. Some of my friends thought it was a sellout, and I’m sure the band is sick of the damn song by now, but I thought it was very kitsch and cool for them to use their hit song to get on 90210 while it’s still on the air.

I have assumed the indifference of a warm blooded creature. My TV is just furniture. I hope.

Man, I’m all over the place today with these scattered images, the small winter harvest during the colder months delays the importation of my main coping medicine. Jen and I quit fucking with the anti-depressants almost as soon as we started them and now when the haziness wears off, my brain’s unfocused energy runs away with itself sometimes. A crutch is nice but I know I need to learn to cope with all the talking and shite going on in my head, on my own terms, if I’m ever going to get it together. The Germ-anent keeps telling me not to do drugs, except for the ones that make me fall in line. I found out the other day that the U.S. invented methamphetamines during WWII to help the factory workers stay alert and work longer hours. I’ve seen the films encouraging farmers to grow hemp, insisting it was the cash crop of the future back in the forties and fifties. Well they were right about it being a cash crop; it’s now worth a shitload of more money since they banned it.

I’m apologizing here because I don’t think anyone knows what the fuck is going on in my head. I keep unearthing this journal and putting down all the same crap that I wade through over a period of months and none of it helps change anything. What the fuck is going on with me and what am I even doing anymore? I’ve heard that when people reach thirty or have children they get values and shit. Maybe I’m hoping if I write some of this down I’ll be able to look back and see my own naivety. Maybe I’ll shake my head understandingly andhold the hand of somebody who’s looking for truth one day. Maybe out there is somebody who can honestly admit they were confused and frightened when they were like me. Isn’t someone supposed to tell me it’s all going to get better?

Galveston! Here we are on the island for the Christmas holidays, trying to get away from all the drugs and hassles for a little while. It’s gray and cloudy here, empty and cold. All the t-shirt shops and Miami-esque hotels lining the inner coast have been virtually abandoned for the off-season, which leaves me with an odd feeling about the place. We’ve come down here looking to get away for a while after a serious rohypnol and heroin binge with some of our friends. I think we are both looking for another Christmas like the one in Baja, but we’ve both changed so much since then and the bleak weather is contributing to our disappointment.

We walked hand in hand over the sand beaches, which made the entire trip worthwhile to me, but I really wanted it to be more of a sunshine moment for Jenifer. At one point we were so bored we picked the largest hotel near us and cruised up and down in the elevator for a half hour. We ended up in a weird conversation with a lonely little boy whose parents had booted him out of their room so they could get busy. He cruised the elevators with us for a while too. He looked a little enamored of Jen since she was so nice to him and that was cute.

We spurned the tackiness of a local neon-signed t-shirt shop that prostituted everything in x-large cotton sizes. I thought about stealing something from them but my heart just wasn’t in it. I think the island must be spectacular and crowded with revelers during March, but Jen and I never got into the drunken Spring Break thing too much, which is sort of why we decided to drive down here now.

The best part of this place is the cool bridge leading here from the mainland; it’s even larger than the bridges that span the swampland in Louisiana. It’s a lot like living in the Keys I suppose, the thrill of being unconnected to the continental U.S., a “create your own rules” or “maritime law” sort of situation. The bridge leading here is curved so that it will be structurally sound enough to withstand the hurricanes that seem to target this area on a regular basis. People in trailer parks here are a better class of white trash and I’m sure they look down on the “regular” trailer parks populating the rest of the state. I guess there’s a distinction that comes with being wiped out by a hurricane instead of a plain old tornado.

While we were sleeping in the car last night on a concrete pier (isn’t “pier” a great word?) overlooking the roaring ocean, I awoke in the middle of the night to heed the call of nature. I’m afflicted with an as yet unidentifiable disease that causes my body to need multiple bladder relief sessions right after getting zipped up tight and perfectly comfortable in a precarious sleeping position on the coldest nights of the year. After working my way outside of the car, shivering with my tiny dick in my hand, wearing nothing but my boxers and getting black tar on my socks from the cold concrete on the wet pier, I crawled back into our cocoon (car-coon?) of steamed windows and into the mummy bag. I checked on Jenifer, giving her cold pink cheek a kiss and then tried to go back to sleep.

About five minutes later, a car drove up, circled the lot and parked at the far end of the pier closest to the ocean. The occupants got out and started flicking a flashlight towards the sea and after a bit I saw return flashes of light out in the night, indicating a boat was out on the water somewhere close by. I’ve seen enough Miami Vice to know what was going down and since I was still groggy from my wake-up pee I started thinking maybe we could be in some trouble if they noticed our car was occupied. We might be discovered and they might make us submit to bizarre torture involving a shower and a chainsaw or a nefarious garden implement.

I scrunched down in the seat a little bit and watched as the boat slowly approached from a hundred yards away. It was a new looking-trawler; I could see the polished chrome glinting through the mist every time a flashlight would swing across the stern until they got the boat in position. Then the lights were doused or covered quickly and I could barely make out several boxes being hastily unloaded into the trunk of the non-descript car. Simultaneously, the boat pulled away into the night and the car drove past us and off down the road. A simple “Wham-Bam-Thank-you-Ma’am” and they were gone; I have to admit I admired their precision and coordination.