Find those
things. Crawl across broken glass to reach those better things. They needn’t be
major. Eat grapes. Relish the sound of popcorn springing to life. Catch another
sunset, or sunrise. Ease out of those shoes. Smell the radio. Listen to
strawberries. Mix up your sentences.
*
I was trying and failing to put a story together. (And yes, it’s important to fail. Try again.) The tale? MURDER BOX. A game of murder in the near-dark. I’d absorbed a load of stories in which this or that became legal. Why not write a tale of my own?
A game of
murder. Survival against waves of killers. But wait a bit. Not legal.
Therefore, hidden away. Not broadcast. What? NOT BROADCAST.
Are you fucking
kidding me?
We’ve reached a
peculiar point in our technological evolution. The nightmarish dystopian future
is no longer one in which reality is broadcast – it is the one in which reality
is not.
I hummed and
hawed over the notion. There’s an underground murder game. Strict invitation.
Recruiting killers. Looking for homicidal participants who won’t sneak
transmission devices into the venue, spoiling the special mood.
Add a
strip-search. Metal detectors.
Next, add
cameras built into press-on fingernails. So we do have a broadcaster inside the secret show. I ran a cheap movie
idea. The lead character would give her middle finger to the bad guy,
broadcasting his face to the world.
I laughed, and
abandoned the notion of some super-twist to the tale. This needed a rethink.
Maybe the game was legal. Still not broadcast, though.
Add a strip-search.
Metal detectors.
The event was
always called MURDER BOX. With the
set-up illegal, I decided there’d be shiny plastic posters tied to fences and
rails. Showing a red box. Red box wasn’t quite right. Turn the box, and you
have a diamond. Welcome to the underground.
A red sign of
double danger. What to put inside the icon? MURDER
BOX. Too literal. I had my star. Gwendolyn. Why was she going to
participate in the hunt?
Revenge. Chasing
her sister’s killer. Boring. No
guarantee of meeting the killer, just a killer. It’s all secret.
How do you find out about this in the first place if it isn’t broadcast – only
covertly advertised…
People who
participate leave clues. No. People who participate don’t want to lead the cops
straight home. No clues. And no covert broadcasting.
I swirled the
story around. Gwen ran the whole thing, and decided to feel the experience for
herself – revealing her position to other contestants.
Bonus kill for
someone, nailing the owner of the franchise. Explains how Gwen knows about the
set-up, true. No. I dump the obvious twist.
Swirl, swirl.
*
Okay. This calls for research. So what’s the game to be? Legal thing. The posters are arranged by the government, making the contest a legitimate (taxed) form of homicide and suicide. Suicide is for cowards, it’s often said. This game could be murder as suicide for cowards who are too cowardly to commit suicide. Arrange your own killer? Twisty. Deep. Getting there.
*
Bleak stuff, I know.
Research. Start
with the personal, if you can.
I recalled a
conversation I had in San Francisco Suicide Forest ,
in Japan
That forest is a
top suicide-spot so well-known that running an internet search on Suicide Forest will turn up footage of
spooky trees. Trees you’ll find in…
Aokigahara.
The Golden Gate Bridge
Yes. The jump is
survivable. Surviving that, leapers may still drown or die cold.
One conversation
on dealing with the Golden Gate …
A man talked
about his time with the coastguard. He found retrieving bodies from the bay
difficult. Particularly the corpses of people who left unrequired clothes
ashore. (The bridge being considered too conspicuous to jump from, by some.)
When retrieving
bodies, you can snag a hook on a jacket far more easily – by an order of
magnitude – according to those in the know.
Maybe there’s a
heavy psychological aspect to retrieval, too. People employed to deal with that
stuff find it easier to snag clothed bodies. Possibly. It’s the tiny details
that get lodged in the telling. (Blankness persists. That guy from the
coastguard left out as much detail as possible.)
My other
conversation was with a man who observed America
The observer
said suicide was cowardly and brave in the same breath. Ending it all was a
cowardly way out. But he was amazed at the courage required to literally take
that step into the void – as far as the bridge was concerned.
Then again,
maybe he was fixated on the height and the watery landing – hence his
perception of courage. His view of cowardice came from another culture…
Having moved to America United States
*
I almost had my way into the story. Disrespect reared as a theme on the internet. The disrespect for the dead mentioned by people who found footage of spooky Japanese trees distasteful.
How they
navigated their way to that stuff on the internet to complain about it, we may
only speculate. Perhaps it is disrespectful to run an internet search.
From the
internet, I took a great degree of sarcasm and disrespect – as a feature of my
story-to-be. The murder game accepts people who want to die and people who want
to kill. This is appalling.
Hey you guys, get a room. So. The game
is a legal form of suicide and state-sponsored murder. Promoted by posters.
Actual physical posters, not internet ones.
The event is not
broadcast – to give that truly exclusive feel. Yes, the seclusion of the
forest. Throw in a few murderers, and you have the near-guaranteed death
usually provided by the long drop from the road-deck of a very famous bridge.
Almost there.
Research. What do I look for? Suicide.
But if I run an internet search on that, I could uncover suicide-bombers,
pro-suicide groups, how-to guides,
actual footage of the deed, and a world of hate.
Bile of the JUST KILL YOURSELF variety.
Who would say
that? Loads of people. Virtual keyboard warriors, tapping a virtual keyboard on
a phone. Thumbsters.
There’d be
positive messages, and bile swamping the positive. Almost there. I was going to
write a story about legal murder-suicide treated as a game. Unbroadcast – not
for reasons of unbroadcastability, for nowadays there ain’t no such thing. But
for the snobbier reason of exclusivity.
*
We could broadcast, but, being above all that…
Hey, we choose not to.
This really is something you can’t get
anywhere else.
Solid gold status for losers and cowards who
want someone to step in and do the job.
No long drop or expensive trip to Japan
Or. The ultimate hunt for the killer in you.
*
Sick – because it is taken as normal in the fictional world I created. And sick because the idea is tame, too. There are far wilder stories out there.
I felt the idea
needed a slice of mundanity without boring the readers. This was never going to
be the be-all and end-all of end-it-all
stories. Some of the action had to be tame, to bring it to life.
Matter-of-fact,
rather than utterly tedious.
So I looked at
the internet and I searched for entries on suicide.
If you do that, you’ll be directed to songs, bands, and scantily-clad women. (No,
really.)
Now my blog post
is out there, you’ll be directed to these words.
Soon the videos
popped up. The mistaken news broadcast of a suicide…using the word live. True irony. Tribute movies to
those who’d gone. Sadness there. An ocean-sized wave of bile in the comments,
too.
What was missing
from my story? More sarcasm. Additional bile. Further invective. I added SUCK BLEACH! to the narrative, and the
cover. Did I have a message? Yes, and it wasn’t to suck bleach.
How many of
these internet movies did I watch? Enough. One came in near the top of my
search, and I viewed that with a sense of trepidation.
Okay, I get
reality. One day, everyone who posted a video on the internet will be dead.
In this case,
watching a film on the topic of suicide, her attempted suicide, I couldn’t be
sure the woman was dead or alive. Was I going to scroll through more recent
videos and find a tribute to her because she’d gone? This was all a bit spooky
– mainly as it was so mundane.
Really casual.
What I was looking for, truth be told.
A young woman
sits in front of her machine and talks to the screen. Talks to the world. About
death. With minimal focus on the attempt she made, and much more in the way of
chat dealing with support for others. She spoke of consequences.
Seeing relatives
ripped to shreds by her actions. Consequences. This was a very positive film.
About the future. Not the past. People make movies, and face that ceaseless
wave of bile from thumbsters chanting SUCK
BLEACH!
But the insult
can easily splash back on those idiots. Splash it back, I say. They tell you to
kill yourself – you tell THEM to suck
bleach.
About four hours
went by, after I created the bleach slogan. Then I discovered a suicide-themed
video mentioning bleach. Spooky. But no, not unexpected.
Running a search
on suicide as a general topic will lead to specific digital alleyways on
methods. Slowest and most painful, as well as the expected entries for quickest
and most painless. That set me thinking about different approaches to the
subject.
There’s no easy
path to outlining my research – I’ve had to turn the dial down on these notes.
If that makes me seem impersonal, it only makes me seem impersonal.
You can solve
just about any problem in your life, given some time and thought. Slitting a
wrist may be the mistake you wish to take back, with little time and thought
left to you. Think better of yourself and the world you inhabit.
*
I looked into the male perspective. A guy tried to kill himself when he was much younger. His telling of the tale was more squeamish-sounding than the woman’s story. She was matter-of-fact about the nastiness of it. He really threw the awfulness of his chosen method in your face.
Not graphically.
This guy didn’t appear in his video, but he used a really smart non-appearing
way to slide his point across. There was a sense of humour to his approach. And
a slice-o’-life stint of mundanity. Ordinariness.
Her method was
no less awful than his was, and had grim consequences for recovery. Still…
His method was
fucking ghastly. How did she survive? Inexperience. How did he survive?
Inexperience.
This research
wasn’t quite enough. I went looking for the opinion of an observer. That took
me off at an angle. I found a guy considering the potential absence of a
selfish fucker of a friend who contemplated ending it all.
That observer
came across as selfish when he said it’s
all about me and how I feel about your stupid selfish wannabe suicide. Which
was just a cry for help and not a real attempt. I am so hurt by what you did.
Me me me me me me me.
And that went
way beyond close friends, relatives, being cut to shreds. It went into the
selfish world. Your pain has
inconvenienced me. (At this point, I don’t really have the words. Unless
those words are fucking and hell.)
What was I
building to?
Maybe you should go and kill yourself…
SUCK BLEACH!
Bile floats
freely. The woman who made her video was one of many who faced internet vomit.
Often, these people were accused of lying. A woman tried to kill herself and
failed. Response. Not a genuine attempt,
blah, blah, blah. She didn’t mean it, and didn’t even do it.
Yes, because
there were Global Conspiracy™
spy-cameras filming her every move
and she seemed too upbeat to be a real contender. If it doesn’t happen in front
of an internet troll, it isn’t real. And if she smiles once in her life long
after the attempt, the attempt didn’t count. Yeah…
Get me started
on that one.
The theme of
fakery proved popular in many a video’s comment section. Fact. People who
discuss suicide in videos – they are all sophisticated animatronic puppets.
None of that footage is real. CGI. Vast conspiracy. Trolls are in the same
boat, not being real – with sticks up their arses.
I think I found
the level of bile I was looking for. As for seeming too upbeat. Look into the
concept of the smile as camouflage. It’s only there tryin’ to fool the public.
That woman decided
to present an upbeat tone in a video meant to be positive. What do the trolls
expect? A live broadcast from Casa Addams, complete with thunderstorm and
mascara flooding over the screen?
*
Research. I still hadn’t used research from my own computer. Would I consider that stuff? I have received suicidally-themed e-mail. I’ll outline here, keeping some details back. Information was edited, for protection.
In my response,
I stated I had no desire to betray a confidence. That’s still true. Is there
ever a reason to betray a confidence?
Yes.
To save someone.
Or to attempt to save someone – not quite the same thing, I know. To save
others. Make an effort to prevent harm. In mentioning my receipt of
suicidally-themed e-mail here, I may help people in a general way.
Some have a void
in life. What to do about the void? Keep going through it, looking for a way
out that isn’t final. I know that advice is boring and conventional. Sounds
tedious, but it was the advice I gave in response to the e-mail.
That incoming
e-mail was about ending the pain – permanently.
I can’t let something like that pass without comment. You
may have a heart of stone. How’s that working out for you? No, that wasn’t a trick-question
– it was a sarcastic one. I can’t lighten this text with fluffy humour and
clowns – some people are scared of clowns.
#CLOWNS.
#INSENSITIVE.
Well, I did my best to talk the person through some things.
And I did that in very different ways, as I saw more casual suicidal comments
coming out. The problem with a casual suicidal comment is that there’s no such
thing as a casual suicidal comment.
Now the other person I spoke to is getting on fine, and has
okayed my chat here in this text. Vast improvement. Getting through to people
in an e-mail can be impossible when dealing with that sort of talk.
I was thanked in a roundabout way. Not for that stuff –
being thanked for something else looked like a means to avoid talking about
thanking me, awkwardly, for the main thing.
Extract from my response. I correspond with Americans for
the most part. Why don’t I set the other half of this tale in America
*
Okay.
*
On reflection, hang in there isn’t the best phrase to use under the circumstances. I have to file that one under grim irony. Don’t shoot the breeze either. I could go on, but you’ve had the idea ladled to you.
As far as the other person is concerned – I didn’t do the
work. All I did was minimal stuff. Maybe I helped tremendously. Perhaps my
so-called help wasn’t needed.
The point is – it’s hard to help suicidal people in an
e-mail. I know I was thanked, and that was fine. If that person commits suicide
in the future, I’ll be upset – but I know I did my bit at the time when things
seemed grimmer. You can only do so much from overseas. I didn’t want to let
someone down.
What if you came to my blog for other reasons? Only little
things can improve your outlook, unless a major event comes along. Don’t wait
for a major event. Tackle some of the little things. Not all. Some.
Is it really about wanting to die? Come on. Isn’t it about
struggling to live the way you live? Change the way you live, but not THAT
fucking much. Not permanently, no-way-back. Find a better way to live. When
life hands you lemons, at least they aren’t oysters.
Consider the raw honesty of people who come out with these
suicidal statements. That e-mail – I was more shocked by the honesty than
surprised by the self-destructive element.
What to do, this time around, for readers who came here
looking for suicide and who read this far? Why not take a quick dip into my
response…
*
Because I’m half a world away, you made a statement to me that doesn’t come with every incident in your life attached. So there’s a stark nature to the statement, and it can be taken as very severe.
If you are telling
me for a while I was afraid and
that’s really secret code for I am still
afraid, then you need to talk to people on your side of the Atlantic in an emergency. I usually only check my e-mail
once a week. If you miss me by a few hours, a whole week goes by before I read
something. That’s not useful to you if you send an instant cry for help several
thousand miles when you should be calling people nearer you.
I’d listen and
respond belatedly, of course. This isn’t about me, and how worried I’d become
if I suddenly read an e-mail that said you’d taken drastic action. How worried
a person in receipt of news is – that becomes irrelevant next to the safety of
the person who cried out. That’s the person who is in trouble. The
sender of the message, and not the receiver.
You can talk about
suicidal feelings. There’s no taboo here. And there’s NO WRONG here. I admire
your courage in speaking out. You don’t indicate that you still feel that way.
So I’m going to
ask you. You felt that bad. Do you still
feel that bad? If you do, you can vent steam in a gloomy e-mail to me. In fact,
if you have persistent suicidal feelings, I encourage you to let rip with the
depiction of those feelings. Don’t hold back gloomy thoughts. Write it all
down.
Boring advice.
Suicide isn’t the answer. Keep going. Yes, I’m a little worried by your
roundabout expression of all this. Well, now alarm bells are ringing. Is the
crisis over, or not?
Try not to put an
exact value on help. Help should be give and take. Not all GIVE on one side and
all TAKE on the other. Give and take. Keep going. If you feel suicidal, talk it
over with someone. Even if you have to go on an anonymous telephone hotline. That
may not be your thing. One step back from that is to have the telephone hotline
number built into your phone. Just in case.
Find something
wonderful in the day. And if you don’t, there’s always the next day to hunt for
something. Sometimes the hunt for something wonderful leads on such an
unexpected trip that you stumble on something else.
I’ve read over
this waffle. The advice the suicidal don’t want to hear is IT’LL GET BETTER. Well that’s not necessarily true. Shares can fall
as well as rise. It goes on. And if you feel grim, you’ll think it goes on and
on and on and on…
Depressing, I
know.
Right. I don’t
know how deep in you are. And I can’t help you from here if you have your head
in a guillotine with a phone in one hand and a rope in the other. If you do
feel suicidal, yes, talk to me. But talk to people who at least have a
semi-decent chance of kicking a door in and dragging you from the guillotine. I
think the guillotine image is a bit strong, but I’ll leave it in this message
to you.
Astonishingly, I
can’t kick a door in across the Atlantic . So
have a local contingency if things get bad. And never give up.
*
Okay, I think I should add clarification. For those who don’t know, I’m Scottish. I now check my e-mail more than once a week. Some of you may think I was callous for mentioning a guillotine in an anti-suicide e-mail. Think what you like. Made sense to me.
The bit about give
and take was edited out of a much wider context, and has lost a significant
amount of meaning here. Just be aware of that, if you were puzzled by it.
There was
further discussion. The person concerned apologised for being a burden on me.
That was nonsense, and I said so in a follow-up…
*
You don’t have to be apologetic about anything – you didn’t put me through an ordeal. I had a stressed-out day for other reasons, and, strange as it sounds, reading about someone else’s troubles was a temporary distraction from the bad day I had. So I was fine about your e-mails.
The initial comment
you made was vague in its suicidal content. So I had to ask the basic question
– are you okay? That way, the other
person can say yes or no. If the answer is yes, that’s that. And if that depressed
person finds the answer is no at a
later date, there’s the memory of the question’s asking. So there’s
always scope for the depressed person to go back and talk to the person who
asked. If the situation deteriorates. Or if the situation is the same, but the
person wants to leave the vagueness behind.
That’s how I see things, anyway.
I felt it was important to let you know that
you can talk if you have to, and not feel bad about hitting out with a whole
world full of gloom.
*
Time passed. I stick by what I wrote there. If someone hints that all is not well, how selfish are you going to be in response? You ask the question. Are you okay? Yes may lead to no later, as circumstances shift, and there’s always further opportunity to talk.
Okay. There are
failures. People go through with suicide. They become faces in grim compilation
movies on the everlasting internet. Behind each face, you’ll find a hidden
group of family members grieving. At least, you’d like to think so.
*
What of my murder story? Making light of suicide through sarcasm? Of course not. Noting a trend on the internet. You could be the most amazing person on the internet, kill yourself, and still be hated by people with time on their thumbs. Thumbsters.
Anyway, I wrote
this blog post as a means of propelling myself into writing that murder story.
No matter how I slice it up, as a topic it’s still rough when fictionalised.
This blog post will appear in the notes at the conclusion of my tale.
As for the
book’s cover. Remember the slogan is used against those who tell you to kill
yourself. They are the ones who should suck bleach. That’s awful of me, I know,
thinking that of internet trolls. When thinking of trolls, remember these two
entirely unconnected statements.
You should never
wish death on anyone.
Patience is
there to be tried.
*
If you have suicidal thoughts, type SUICIDE PREVENTION into your search engine and follow every link. Every link.
*
What to say of that blog post? Many sources went into the generation of the piece, and I blurred a world of lines to create a post that might prove useful to anyone who went to read it for all the wrong reasons.
There is no
single person, pink-haired or otherwise, who fell off the internet and appeared
in this story or the associated blog post.
During a
not-so-grim research phase, I discovered an army of women with improbably-hued
hairstyles. Most were prepared to talk of self-harm, suicidal thoughts, and
other deep dark disturbing topics.
It’s not all
about style-tips.
The research was
not-so-grim as these people had a sense
of humour. Self-referential. Bleak, true. Too much to take for some observers.
The humour was in abundance. Oh, there were tears under the pink and green and
blue and platinum coiffeurs.
At times,
judging from the opening shot of this or that twenty-minute YouTube video, I
didn’t relish the prospect of sitting through a raging gloomfest. Research is
research, and I persisted. Those raging gloomfests were articulate,
informative, heartening, and not as raging or as gloomy as…
The troll
comments. Those people have no, but NO,
fucking sense of humour. A troll could watch a ruby-hued woman commit suicide
wearing a SUICIDE T-shirt, and
declare you are not really suicidal
though, are you…
My spelling is
too tidy to be trollish.
The MURDER BOX is the internet. People
wander in and comment on everything. If there were no acid comments, I wouldn’t
have written this story. I’d be a poor defender of free speech if I only
concerned myself with stuff I liked.
Yes, I hate the
bile. But the bile acts as a sign warning me off those people, so I accept the
freedom of speech along with the vile talk. Provided no other laws are broken –
incitement to commit suicide may constitute a crime where you are or aren’t.
The internet is quirky that way.
Tastelessness is
unfortunate. It’s even more tasteless to censor the tasteless. For taste is
taste, and varies from mind to mind. Some readers are sure to find my tale
tasteless. There’s little to say on that topic, bar the preceding sentence.
If opinion were
fact, the world would be a different place – and that’s a fact, or an opinion.
*
The story? I was tempted to write the entire tale inside quotation marks. Direct speech only. But no. With enough contestants to fill the warehouse, I also wanted to avoid…
“Now you die.”
“Come and get
me.”
“Fuck you.”
“Eat me.”
“Bite me.”
“The hell, I
say.”
“Where’s the
exit?”
“Go in through
the out…”
“Did you hear
that?”
“No. Did you?”
“Depends. What
was it?”
“I can see the
pub from here.”
“Nurse, the
screens!”
How many
characters were speaking? Thirteen, or two? The idea of numbering characters
made it easier to pull switches. Two plus
two is 22.
8Player
Seven here.8
This is not a pipe.
After I spent
time fixing numerical detail into the story, characters were lost in a
mini-maze of boxes that didn’t need to be described again in every single
sentence.
I kicked a lot
of bovine shit out of this tale as I fixed details to the page.
The action
occurs inside a massive warehouse. Time and space bend themselves to
accommodate slack writing. Slack writing is spotted and shot. I run a clear view
of numbered contestants appearing in ascending order, following a clockwise
direction.
So clear that,
in slack writing, I mistakenly reversed the order part of the way through. The
characters moved across the same map. And they moved in the right order. Except
when I threw in an explanation, to clarify.
I frazzled the
so-called clarity and returned to a degree of normalcy. Maps with arrows
showing direction of travel won over perverse text, every time I strayed.
Atmosphere.
Character. Continuity draws the shortest straw and the longest stares. I tried
to keep things stark, to set the readers thinking.
If MURDER BOX were real, would it be kept
out of our clutches? No TV? Absolutely no broadcast? Nothing on YouTube except
fakers and parodies of fakers? Three guys in orange rubber suits, running
around a factory during lunch, throwing wet sponges at each other.
I think I’ll
stick to my guns. The nightmarish
dystopian future is no longer one in which reality is broadcast – it is the one
in which reality is not.
Feeling trapped?
Exclusivity is prized beyond the lure of making money from broadcasting. Even a
public accustomed to gladiatorial combat turns jaded in time. Harvesting
estates from dead participants – that never grows stale. I left the
conspiratorial side of it off the plate…
People aren’t
manipulated into joining MURDER BOX.
Except in the sense of being made aware of the situation through posters.
Huge conspiracy?
Then you are into the dystopian turf of giving your (male) star a
revenge-motive and enough juice to bring down the whole rotten system. Usually
with fisticuffs in the closing minute.
Pardon me while
I yawn. If the story is about murder, and suicide, then the tale has to be
personal to the (female) star. Just as it aims to be personal for many
different readers. Despite the gloom, positive, I’d hope.
Once I had the legal idea worked out, I resolved that Gwen went
into the box as a participant. I left it to the readers to decide if she went
in as an eager killer or a willing victim. As mere author, I hold no view
either way.
*
In creating the blog post, I clicked on many a YouTube video. I also called on the services of individuals who cannot be named here. They know who they are, and receive my covert thanks. There are a few unusual suspects I’ll also thank without naming.
Bringing focus
to the topic required the assistance of a mental health advocate, and I’d like
to thank YouTuber and Moroccan carpet purchaser Melissa C. Water for her
comments. She characterised her input as addled from lack of sleep. Only her notion of having addled comments was
addled. The comments were fine.
For clarity, Melissa is Canadian. The carpet is Moroccan.
Melissa has
posted many YouTube videos dealing with suicidal thoughts, self-harm, and other
related issues. For those interested in her perspective, here’s the YouTube
link: idranktheseawater.
*
And, supposing you missed this…
If you have
suicidal thoughts, type SUICIDE PREVENTION into your search
engine and follow every link. Every link.
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