November 1996
Jen approached me during class break during a night class. I was sitting out on a table in the hall and she came up to me and we just started chatting. She’s originally from Long Island and she started going to law school in New York, but then she transferred out here.
She intrigues me. I’m still not sure what I think of her or whether I like her or not. I’m leaning towards the not, but she is a character. She plays bass. I don’t expect our acquaintance to last very long, she’s just not my type.
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Forget it. I’m conceding. My life is not going to get any better, and even if it did I can’t bring myself to convince myself that I would care. Everything is wrong and I’m just simply sick of it. Everything went wrong, every path I’ve taken has been wrong, the road that I’m on is wrong. I don’t like anything about me and my life, and any reason I can think of for staying is bullshit. Fear of death, fear of what comes next, fear of missing something? Enjoyment, music, living, breathing, seeing, photographing? This is pathetic.
My life is pathetic and living it is pathetic. I’ve been waiting so long for something to change. Not even something in my life, just me. I’ve been waiting for me to change and it just isn’t happening. I still don’t like myself. I don’t like how I am in this world. I don’t like anything I do. I don’t like being in this skin. I don’t like thinking my thoughts or seeing through my eyes. I don’t like eating, sleeping, showering, shitting, peeing, thinking, being. I don’t like this world. Everything I like about life and this world is ruined by human beings. I hate people, I hate my relations with people, I hate my interactions with people. That’s why I keep disappearing from people’s lives.
I used to worry about what’s going to happen to my stuff, what people around me are going to do, how they’re going to react, and what they’re going to have to go through. Fuck it. Why should I care? What about what I have to go through? Do they think suicide is fucking easy? Let them deal with it. It happens. Shit happens. Let them throw all of my shit away, send it back to the ‘rents. Whatever. That last barrier that has kept me alive is finally down. There is nothing to stop me now. Nothing that will change.
Tomorrow, why not?
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Damn! The feeling didn’t last. I hate missing a moment. I don’t think I’ll set these dates anymore. All they are anyway are time outs; buffer time to allow me to cool off. When I decide to die, it’ll be in one of those moments, but it will be real with no waiting for tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. If I can’t do it right at the moment, then I’m obviously not going to do it. What I do know for sure is that it’s been a long, long time since I’ve had a day worth living.
It was Pete’s birthday, and I thought it would be a nice gesture to go out with them after rehearsal. After rehearsal, I told them I had to deliver an amp to a friend, so I had to meet them at the bar later.
So I went to Jen’s to deliver her amp, she came along with me to the bar, and afterwards I drove her home and she asked me to come in. So I ended up at her place and was slightly drunk so I crashed at her place. But by then I pretty much knew what I thought of Jen and then left first thing in the morning.
I’ll stay in touch with Jen for a little while longer. She is fun and social. But I can’t say I’m impressed by much else about her. I can see her getting annoying after a while. But the main thing that sets things in stone between us is that she voted yes on Prop. 209, to ban affirmative action:
Paper for Jurisprudence class which I handed in the day after Election Day after it was known that 209 had passed:
“Recently, in two separate Southern cities, race riots were ignited when white police officers shot and killed black motorists. In the St. Petersburg, Florida incident, the mayor said that he was surprised that it had occurred and that he did not believe that St. Petersburg had a problem with racial tensions. Race riots, however, rarely are the result of a single, isolated, anomalous incident. They are usually catalyzed by a single event that serves as a flashpoint after years of racial tension, discrimination, and neglect. It is far more likely that the mayor’s lack of awareness of racial tensions is an example of precisely why the riot occurred at all.
“In her essay, “The Obliging Shell: An Informal Essay on Formal Equal Opportunity,” Patricia Williams discusses the rhetorical ways that race is (not) dealt with in the law and society. Although equal treatment is the proclaimed goal and ideal for society, the law uses the concept and language of ‘equality’ to either maintain or ignore the reality of continuing inequality. Liberalism, which may claim to be an instrument of equal opportunity and equal treatment through positive law and personal rights, fails to perform those functions in a dynamic where past racial inequality and its continuing repercussions are inadequately redressed.
“The effectuation of the principles of liberalism is necessarily biased and curtailed, even when the word of law is remedied, when a society was based and then developed on principles of racial inequality. Williams argues that racial omission was a literal part of the original intent of the Founding Fathers (Williams, p. 10). The Constitutional omission of other races was not based on mere ignorance or oversight, but was assumed and incorporated into the structure of law. There was no question that “all men created equal” meant white men. The American consciousness of race was defined by the assumed inferiority and underclass status of blacks.
“Through most of this country’s history and development, blacks had little, if any, effective recourse to the law. It was not until the 1950's and 1960's that the Supreme Court realized the slippery nature of the word “equality” when it found Plessy’s “separate but equal” doctrine, which had been enforced for over fifty years, untenable. By that time, the U.S. had completed its westward expansion, underwent the industrial revolution, and was well into modernization.
“Affirmative action plans were an attempt to affirmatively re-place blacks, women, and other minorities into the law and to uplift and equalize their position in society. Affirmative action was also an affirmation of historical inequality and a recognition that true equality under the function of liberalism was only possible if those inequalities were remedied and redressed. “Action” meant that something had to actively be done. Equality was not possible through passive, indirect action; by merely altering the rules and to start treating people equally.
“Yet less than fifty years later, affirmative action is under attack and the Supreme Court has once again revealed the elusive nature of equality and the shifting dynamic of race analysis. Williams discusses the Supreme Court’s decision in City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson, 109 S.Ct. 706 (1989) to demonstrate the Supreme Court’s manipulation of language and logic to accomplish a holding which is no less than astonishing and has the potential of undermining affirmative action in its entirety.
“Very simply, the Court found that there was no evidence of racial discrimination just because a city has a population of more the 50% African Americans and awards less than 1% of municipal contracts to minority-owned businesses. The Court accomplished this holding by using a host of adjectives to diminish the relevance of facts and statistical data and “conjured mythic dangers” to diminish the Court’s role and ability to deal with racial issues in general (Williams, p. 1-2).
“The Court used the narrowest possible interpretation of “equality” to guide their decision. It referred to the Constitutional ideal of “equality” where race is “irrelevant to personal opportunity and achievement” (Croson at 727). The Court’s interpretation of the Constitutional ideal of “equality” is now correct, regardless of the intent of the Framers, but it conveniently forgets that the intent of the Framers had a direct social and historical impact that was maintained for almost 200 years. The fallacy of the Court is in its faith that the effects of almost 200 years of injustice and inequality can be reversed and remedied in thirty years of affirmative action and the subsequent removal of race from the consideration of the law.
“Equality, even with thirty years of affirmative action, has never been reached. It has only revealed how pervasive and ingrained racism is into the fabric of the U.S. social structure. The Supreme Court has held that the government and the courts are not responsible for remedying societal discrimination; only for governmental discrimination. Unfortunately, the effects of the original Constitutional omission of African Americans has directly contributed to societal discrimination. Instead of taking responsibility for the effects of past discrimination by upholding affirmative action as a way of acknowledging the continuing existence of racism and inequality while continuing to proclaim the Constitutional goal of true equality, the Court has chosen to adhere to the Constitutional proclamation of equality and ignore any effects from the past.
“The position that the Court has chosen in the Croson opinion is a positivist one. They interpreted the word “equality” strictly and narrowly and decided that any program based on race which is not remedial of actual, provable, intended discrimination is contrary to the Constitution proclamation of equality. The disparity in a group comprising half the population of Richmond getting less than 1% of municipal contracts, absent proof of intent to discriminate, means absolutely nothing in the eyes of the law.
“The Court chose to emphasize what was not there (proof of intent to discriminate), rather than what was there (a statistic that Justice O’Connor once might have called ‘prima facie evidence of discrimination’). Williams compares this technique with the Parol Evidence Rule which seeks to exclude, as “extrinsic”, evidence that is not probative of the meaning of a document or the intent of the writers.
“The Croson Court’s analysis used what would be the first level of the Parol Evidence Rule, the “fully integrated” document which limits the document to its plain meaning. However, the Court uses a negative as the basic document: the lack of hard proof in the Constitution that there was an intent to discriminate. The Court excluded all other evidence which changes the meaning of that lack of intent to discriminate and concluded that there was no intent to discriminate.
“What the Court effectively excluded was the experience of African Americans in Richmond. There was no racism in the awarding of municipal contracts in the city of Richmond, Virginia. The Court treats race as it always has been treated in the United States. It subordinates it and then uses that subordination as a reason for ignoring it. As Williams puts it, “when segregation was eradicated from the American lexicon, its omission led many to actually believe that racism therefore no longer existed” (Williams, p. 9). That is precisely the position the Supreme Court takes in prescribing its narrow view of equality. It is a flawed view, however, that affirmative action has already delivered the equal treatment that it promised.
“The rules may be color-blind, but people are not” (Williams, p. 10). Societal discrimination is directly related to how the government and courts have treated race and how they continue to treat race. It is not enough to change the rules and proclaim equality has been achieved. In any human race where white males are given a substantial lead of generations of advantage over and at the expense of women and people of color, there cannot be equality. Attainment of the liberalist notion of equality is not fully possible until the generations of societal discrimination has been adequately addressed and redressed.
“Race needs to be recognized by the law so long as society recognizes race. It is the law’s responsibility to recognize race because it is the law that has made women and people of color to “compose and literally define both this society’s underclass and its most underserved population” (Williams, p. 1). If the law chooses to ignore race under the Constitutional proclamation of equality, equality may eventually be achieved, but it will take a considerably much longer time, and an even longer time for the law to figure out why race riots occur.”
Jen’s smart, but she’s offensively clueless as to the issues. Or she’s a Republican.
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I must say. As much as I care to emphasize the similarities in various religions and spiritual beliefs and reconcile them in unifying way, I must reject the proposition that each person has only one lifetime - one period of responsible moral choice - which is irrevocably decisive in determining a person’s eternal fate without appeal. I reject the belief that our time on earth, from birth to death, is all there is and all that matters on Judgment Day, however that concept is interpreted.
It is exorbitantly egotistical to put that much importance on each of our individual lives. That is more of an expression of human psychology, the need for self-affirmation. I don’t think God, however that is interpreted, has a vested interest in the good or evil of each individual soul that ever experienced the random accident of birth on this planet.
I doubt that "God" is so vain as to handpick which people, freshly raised from the dead, will go to heaven and which will go to hell. I won’t even entertain the idea of God as being anthropomorphic, as a being that makes rational, logical moral decisions, in the manner of human beings, as to where a soul goes. Those are human projections of themselves onto the concept of God. Humans are limited by their knowledge and being to understand the nature of God, so they naturally project human attributes onto God. Such projections are suspect.
What lifetimes are subject to judgment? Only human lifetimes? Who lived the first human lifetime? Was it the first soul that could be said to have evolved out from being considered ape? Or after Neanderthal? Or after human morality developed the concepts of good and evil? Morality is really quite arbitrary when God is couched in such simplistic terms.
At the time of any given formulation of what is good and what is evil, there has been limits on human knowledge. Morality has only been able to be informed by the knowledge and information available at the time. There are now things that we don’t know and haven’t even considered. What happens to morality when we have a better understanding of metaphysics and multiple dimensions. Time goes on, discoveries are made and new knowledge is added. Concepts of good and evil, as far as human beings can define them, are malleable and the standards change.
Delineating a single human lifetime as the moral basis to judge that soul seems arbitrary. It doesn’t make sense. Human character is shaped by circumstance, so once we start asking “what if...” and “what about...”, we start seeing that it is not only arbitrary, but wholly unfair. People are born into advantages and disadvantages, they vary and their experience differs. So how can there be only one moral yardstick to judge their character?
It assumes that everyone is given equal moral choice. People are not given equal moral choice because the advantages or disadvantages people are born into defines what moral choices are available. The delineation of a single human lifetime as the basis for judgment was probably just a projection of a dominant hegemony that didn’t realize that the life of a soul transcends any single lifetime.
The counter-argument to this would be that none of this is relevant and each one of us is alive, and to the extent that we are aware, we are responsible for our own moral behavior. Any complaint as to the definition of a human lifetime or to the uncharted boundaries of human epistemology is irrelevant. Fair enough. But then I would then hold that a “single human lifetime” means any series of human lifetimes, cycles of rebirths, occupied by the “same person”. I don’t know what the “same person” means, but it has something to do with what gets carried over from lifetime to lifetime. The soul.
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God is not a being who will be making the big decision of who goes to heaven and who goes to hell. Rather, Judgment is a process that involves the nature of “God” that is within us all. God is that process. God as a part of each one of us, that which gets passed on from lifetime to lifetime. Anyone who believes God is an external agent is afraid of being accountable for oneself. Judgment Day involves a deep introspection and realization of our own natures and the “big decision” is an inherent part of that.
I’m not aware of the concept of a Judgment Day anywhere in Buddhism. At least not termed or conceptualized as it is in Western traditions. It may be incorporated, but not explicitly. Anyway, borrowing the term, I do believe in it to some extent. I haven’t quite finished formulating the mechanics of it.
I mentioned already that I don’t believe in the one lifetime theory upon which all human action is to be morally judged. So I don’t believe that you live your life, get buried or burned, and are kept in stasis until Judgment Day comes when all people will be resurrected and returned to life for judgment. That’s a little sadistic. I do, however, view the concept of resurrection as the Buddhist analog of remembering all of one’s past lifetime; a critical component of enlightenment.
I think resurrection means the returning to life of all past lives through remembrance of those lives, and it is on the moral behavior of all those lives that a soul, born and reborn through many lifetimes, will be “judged”. The mechanics part that I’m still not sure about yet is that in Buddhism, the remembrance of all past lives is a precursor to enlightenment, but according to Western eschatology, bad people go to Hell, i.e., they don’t attain enlightenment. How can you get to the threshold of enlightenment and then be judged as not attaining it. If it’s a given that once you reach the threshold of enlightenment, the remembrance and judgment, you will be enlightened, then what’s the point of judgment? The judgment already occurred.
Further, those who have reached enlightenment have supposedly remembered their past lives. Does that mean they have already experienced Judgment Day; i.e., their past lives have been resurrected? That necessarily changes the very nature of the Western eschaton. That would be seriously impairing the Western doctrine in favor of Buddhism.
It’s the God-nature within us that does the judging. Upon remembrance of past lives, the individual can recognize and distinguish between good and bad. I think by the nature of Judgment Day, there is no chance of deception or subjective biasing. There is an objective measure of “good” and “evil” that is beyond any of us. Truth is truth on Judgment Day and each individual can see for him and herself whether they go to “heaven” or “hell”.
I have no idea on what basis judgment will be dispensed, but I do think it is the individual that does his or her own judging and to the extent that the judgment is based on their God-nature, God is “sitting in judgment”. That’s all.
I haven’t done much figuring the different levels of heaven and hell. That comes to mind when I remember that living on earth is one level of hell. The “life is suffering” maxim represents that.
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I have no more justifications or rationales for dying. There never were any. I don’t need any. I simply do not want to live this life anymore. I don’t want to be here. The unbearableness of being. It has nothing to do with parents or family, or life, or what I’m doing, or what I have to do, or being human. In some ways I don’t feel like I’ve ever been here, I don’t feel that I belong here. I don’t want anyone to understand and don’t care if anyone does or doesn’t.
I’ve got another day set, even though I said I wouldn’t set them anymore. Force of habit. It’s how I get by day to day, week to week. It gives me something to look forward to, something immediate to strive for, even if my feelings have shown a pattern of changing before I actually do anything. Setting dates by which I want to die gives me a reason not to do it today, right now. I need to know that my current feelings can have a foreseeable end.
Am I prepared to kill myself right now? Most moments are pretty bad, but occasionally a not-so-bad one surfaces. Or at least a neutral one. It rained this past weekend, and I could have done it at any time. If that mood persists next weekend, I would think I’m ready to go through with it. After all, what is my life anymore? What has it come to? What is it made of anymore? Certainly not living material.
People kill themselves when something happens or changes that finally makes them snap. I’m the opposite. I’m going to kill myself because nothing is happening or changing. It’s a little frustrating knowing the feeling probably won’t last. But of course all I need is one time when it does. And I should note that every time I survive, there’s no real release, everything is still building up as it always has.
I know a lot of this feeling has to do with school stress. I have a 20 page paper on Islamic Law due at the beginning of December on the same day that I have a 5 page paper due in Jurisprudence. In the meantime I have to facilitate a discussion on post-modernism in Jurisprudence class on the same day that I have to present one of the essays on Law and Literature.
And I think to myself that I can get by. In the pinch, I can make it through all the presentations and papers and then exams on top of that. I can get the work done. But then I look beyond that and look for what’s there. So what if I can get through this month of concentrated stress and achieve yet another catharsis in my education? So what? Look at next February, what’s there? I’ll be getting through all this just for the sake of getting through all this. Nothing’s going to change, nothing’s going to be accomplished. It’s not about survival. It’s about what I really want. It’s about whether I really want to be playing this wretched game anymore.
Then there’s bullshit going on with the band, and finding the one person I liked in law school voted yes on 209 and that she really isn’t all that cool. It’s been so hard to meet people, I meet someone, look what I get. I get Jen. It’s been so hard to get into a band, I get into one, look what I get. I get these bozos. Great life. I’m wasting four years of my life, I still don’t have any marketable skills, and I’m 27 and I still have never held down a real job. Wish I had family, wish I had friends, wish I had someplace warm to spend.
I have to justify nothing. I don’t need to make anyone understand. The presumption will be that I was a nut that cracked under pressure, a basket case, emotionally depressed and disturbed, history of mental problems. That’s what people will look for first and read into whatever I write. Fine. Patterns of psychosis and delusional behavior, fits of depression and paranoia. Anti-social, a loner, suicidal. Troubled family background, poor upbringing, neglect, possible emotional abuse.
Preconceptions of what was wrong with me will be read into whatever rationale or justification I come up with. He concealed a dark double-life that he never showed and no one knew about. Good grief. The psychological mechanisms he employed to justify his suicide and to conceal or displace his psychosis were very complex. Here we have an example of an individual who may have been emotionally neglected, obviously depressed and suicidal, but complex and self-aware enough to detach himself in order to analyze his feelings from an almost objective voice. Of course, that objective voice was a perpetuation of his psychosis and may even be symptomatic of schizophrenia. Good grief. Fine, let them say what they must.
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In the sea of love, there are no shores, and there is nothing to do but drown. Rumi. When you fall in love with someone, you just know it. At each step, you fall in love again and again, more and more. You can never lie. If at any point you lie, you are not in the sea. If both are true to themselves and fall in love and let it be known, then there is no escape, and all you can do is drown. And if you resist, worse - if you succeed in resisting, you will die.
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Now it’s just getting curious. Why am I still alive? I tell myself I can kill myself at any moment, but then why not right now? What’s stopping me right now? I haven’t the slightest and I find that very, very curious.
I can’t imagine a better time and better circumstances in which to go ahead and do it. I have no pending obligations, I’m not in a moment of high stress, which allows me to clearer about it, and I want to do it. I’m calm and I’m in a moment of relative peace. The night is clear and the moon is close to full.
I still feel that my existence is a joke and it won’t make any difference however much longer I live. Nothing is going to change and my existence is not going to get any more bearable. What will next Spring bring? Only more of the same. There is an amorphous possibility of some change, but that’s not why I’m alive, it’s not good enough of a reason, it’s no reason at all, it’s just a lame excuse - to live just for the possibility change? That’s not living. To stay alive to strive for creature comforts which I know are fleeting? No thanks.
I know that theoretically suicide is not the only option. I could find and join an appropriate religious community. I doubt I’ll find anything perfect to match my beliefs, at least in this country, but it may be the proper environment in which I can live with my conscience and accept my existence. Do I not have the strength? Do I have the desire but not the commitment? What am I? What am I doing here? On the other hand, said community might also end up annoying the hell out of me.
There is a part of me that tells me that suicide is the proper path for me in this life, or that it’s at least an acceptable component in a series of lifetimes. If I don’t kill myself, I’m going against something, the way it’s supposed to be, something primeval.
I have not lived my life in a worthy manner. I leave no legacy or last words. When I die I will die alone, and unknown. I will have no ritual except to the sea and the stars, the wind, the sand, and the four directions. I will die never having touched another person, never having known another person’s heart. I hope that I have been good and that I have lived true to myself, and that I may be forgiven for the harms I’ve caused others.
