box of Jack

I wanted to wear black. That’s about as much as I can remember. I wanted the immediate space around me to be a thick, black smog. A magnetic cloud that repelled you at a distance and sucked you in if you got too close. In class, I stayed quiet as death and kept my head down.

It wasn’t quite a double life. It was more like doing chores before my dessert. I studied dutifully and got my straight A’s and then I went back to being dark. The word ’suicide’ became a piece of gum in my head; a constant smacking, slurping and chewing but an idea so old that all meaning and flavour were gone. I was never serious about it but it remained a central theme to my thoughts. How would my family react? How would my school react? How would that girl react? Who would attend my funeral? Would I even get one?

I doubt I could have ever qualify as properly suicidal and it may be peanuts compared to you but it felt like something to me. The aftermath, the chaos, the poetry of disappearing attracted me like it continues to attract vast crowds of teenagers and misfits. Maybe I was angry at world, maybe I was crying for help or maybe all I wanted was fifteen minutes. But the act itself made me squeamish. I knew deep down that I’d never jump, never cut, never step out of line. My acts of rebellion were frustratingly tepid.

Still, the lesson stays with me. Should I ever think about departing this world, a new voice is there. A voice that makes the decision so obvious, it’s like asking if the pope shits in the woods.

Of course I want to live today. I’m not done.

I read somewhere that suicide is really a phase people go through. I think it’s dangerous to say it’s “just” a phase but I’d like to believe it exists in a well-bounded period of time. They say it lasts about ninety days; I didn’t count. It’s funny to think that one day a person wakes up after three months of resenting the life they were given and they decide to live for days, weeks and decades. How do you change your mind about something like that? Do they worry it will just happen again? Does the universe do them a kindness and let them forget the whole thing?

Does ninety days accurately reflect your experience?

Gott in Himmel, I have six drafts waiting for me in Wordpress. One day I’ll probably get fed up and delete them all. I’m not the kind of boy that keeps drafts around because it encourages a certain level of perfectionism and that is what completely kills my blogging. I want more quantity here and the quality will eventually follow. Practice makes perfect, I’m not trying to win any prizes here.

Amongst the drafts are wonderful topics such as:

• My Top 5 TV Boyfriends (inspired by Tiff)
• I figured out why I’m still single
• I’m doomed to stay single forever
• Everyone hates drivers who break the rules but it’s ok to speed
• What exactly changed your mind about suicide?
• Long distance relationships scare the crap out of me

For all of them, I started writing a few paragraphs and then I lost interest. These are all very worth topics but, uh, I just lost the motivation to write about them. I’m reading more stuff than ever but I’m having trouble just finding the attention span to sit still and write something. I should write blog posts in the morning when I’m still and patient. At work, I am like a toddler being forced to sit still; I writhe and flail my arms and demand to go home and watch Nemo again. Work is boooooooring.

There’s actually a bunch going on in my personal life that I don’t want to blog about. It will probably come out as thinly veiled fictional posts. Because I’m really imaginative like that. Now that I think about it, I much prefer writing the fictional posts as opposed to an accurate account of a real-life event because what I really want to do is capture a feeling rather than tell you what happened. You don’t really care if I had a croissant this morning but maybe you’ll play along if I can conjure up visions of soft flaky pastry and melty butter and French people making snide remarks about my shoes in-between their passionate mid-morning make out sessions. And when they kiss, their cigarettes magically cling to the sides of their mouth so afterwards they stand up, straighten their clothes and continue to carelessly puff away at this tortured existence. Also, it’s very obvious that I have never been to France nor even met a French person. Well ok, my French teacher was actually French and we all laughed when the gym teacher locked him into a classroom.

Welfare is, as I understand it, financial aid given to those who we deem require it. Money doesn’t grow on trees so I guess we need to take money from those that have it and give it to those who don’t. There’s a lot to argue inside this space because sometimes the government takes too much, sometimes it gives too much and the rest of the time the money is completely mismanaged and you lose faith in the system. Great, great. There should be a lot of healthy debate about how the money is spent.

I know a guy who is of the opinion that welfare is largely unnecessary. He said something along the lines of having his money taken from him at gunpoint. I may be misrepresenting him here because I did not do my due diligence and ask him to elaborate further. Honestly, I was just in shock after hearing that statement because my parents worked their asses off and relied on government handouts to make a decent lower-middle-class living. I can’t imagine where we’d be without the assistance.

So maybe this guy has some legitimate gripes. I don’t know his story. Maybe he’s seen the government waste and corporate greed firsthand. Maybe things are done different here in the United States.

Fast forward to a second of such conversations. Such honest wisdom: “I always thought poor people were poor because they didn’t want to work any harder,” and, “I don’t really believe in minimum wage because some jobs just aren’t worth minimum wage.” Again, I was in a state of shock. I don’t know what else to call it. Something rammed into my head at full force and the world went white and all I know now is that I’m on my back staring up at the night sky.

It was as if a grown man had walked over and asked how babies were made. There is far too much to fill you in on, buddy. I really don’t care enough to lecture you about the mechanics of procreation. Besides, I’ve never made a baby so I’m probably the wrong guy to ask. I can only recite what books and TV have taught me.

Honestly? You don’t have to look very hard to see the widening gap between the rich and the poor. There’s plenty of room for debate on how to deal with it but these views this guy expresses is just completely off my radar. Maybe they extend from some sort of hyper-idealism where everyone is born into the same wealth and the world is a gracious meritocracy or perhaps it’s some cynical “every man for himself” deal where if you don’t have enough then you can suck it because I got mine. I don’t know, I don’t really care to know, it’s too much for me to think about.

I have a problem with showers.

I know, I know. You would say, “Well Jack, you are a pot-bellied, twenty-something computer programmer who buys all his t-shirts off the internet. It is absolutely no surprise that you are not on great terms with the shower; a modern marvel of personal hygiene.”

That was uncalled for.

My actual problem with showers is that every time I stay over at someone else’s place, I try to use to the shower and I always have a problem. The pipes might groan and rattle when I push it towards the temperature I want. Maybe the hot/cold labels are reversed. Maybe it’s one of those artsy fartsy shower controls that do not conform to common sense; they are free spirits that require you to push up and outwards for temperature and invert the lever to increase water flow.

The shower I have in my current apartment is kind of weird. It conforms to this new American standard of only having one knob for temperature, water pressure is kept constant and, by default, water will begin spouting out of the faucet to fill the tub rather than the shower head. I imagine we arrived at this strange configuration because of some series of class action lawsuits and corporate lobbyists. American readers will nod their head at this description but I’m sure my Australian friends are thoroughly confused.

Here is the basic process:

1. Turn the knob to a position where you guess the water would be the right temperature
2. Pull the weird thingo on the tub faucet to switch it from Bath Mode to Shower Mode
3. Do your thang
4. Turn the knob to the off position

It’s actually a simpler process than the traditional system with separate hot/cold controls but I’m getting old now and I like to complain when things are no longer the way they used to be.