Quick post before I start getting ready to work the closing shift. Not to continue to go on and on about a dreary and depressing subject, but wanted to respond to a general attitude towards suicide and those who choose to commit it -- that suicide is "the easy way out."

That's false. Patently so.

Suicide is not a decision that people come to lightly. It follows much deliberation on the subject, much examination of the potential outcomes -- it is, simply put, a life-or-death matter, and those who consider it do so with all of the mental resources at their disposal. Those who choose to commit suicide have their reasons, and most of the time, even if we may ultimately disagree with the person's decision, we must admit that many of those reasons were quite good reasons. The people who commit suicide do so because they have to deal with so much bullshit and misery that they just decided they couldn't fucking take it anymore, and we can't just dismiss their desire to want to get away from all of that as silly, which is what we do when we shrug and carelessly declare that suicide is "the easy way out." Can you imagine how difficult it must be, for example, to put a loaded gun to your head and actually pull the trigger, knowing that it could very well be the last thing you ever do? Or to stand hidden in the trees on the side of the road, watching the glowing headlights of a slowly approaching truck in the distance -- slowly, because everything moves slowly in life-or-death moments -- and, at the last second, stepping in front of those lights with intent to die? And knowing full well that you may not succeed, and that you may spend the rest of your life in an even worse condition as a result? There is nothing easy about this.

It would be far easier to shrug and tell yourself that one day things will improve -- they've improved for others, after all -- even when you have no good reason to think that things will get better as far as your situation is concerned. It would be far easier to resign yourself to a miserable life that you know full well is unlikely to change despite your best efforts, and to let go of your dreams and aspirations -- for these things can never be achieved, and will only cause you pain so long as you hold them dear -- and to live out your days in dull emptiness. I would choose death over a fate like that, and I confess that I admire those few like-minded people who would do the same -- and who actually do it. Far from being "the easy way out," that kind of thing requires a certain conviction and resolution that I find depressingly lacking in this world of today. If it were not in such short supply, perhaps the decision to commit suicide, and escape from this miserable world rather than give oneself up to its evils, would not strike me as so respectable.

Alrighty, off to prepare for work, where I will be sneered at and looked down on by customers until they leave at the store's close, after which I will crouch down and scrub the toilets they were too lazy to flush -- and I shall do this with a pink sponge no bigger than my hand.