Suicide

Yes, I know this is a blog about The Fast and The Furious. But it's also a blog about me. And I want to share some thoughts I had tonight about suicide, which as many of you know is something that is often on my mind. So here goes:


We all make decisions with our guts. Sure, we like to think we use all our faculties and resources to choose the correct path, but sometimes that doesn't work and we're overridden by gut instinct.

My gut tells me I should kill myself. I can't explain why it does that -- why, in fact, it wants me to cease to be -- but that's the way it is. For me, it's a fact of life. It's been an impulse that I've had for as long as I can remember.

In the past, I've been told that there's no reason for my gut to say that, and that I could make it stop if I tried hard enough. More recently, I've been told this gut instinct is a medical condition that can be treated with the right pills and counseling.

Sometimes, I wonder about that.

I really shouldn't, because it's painful. When I try to be very honest with myself, my self-destructive gut goes to work, telling me that I am, in fact, a loser, that nobody really need what I have to offer the world, that anything I can do somebody else can do better. And I can't help but listen, because I'm trying to be honest with myself.

Trying to sift through the inaccurate gut thoughts is impossible on my own and next to impossible with the help of others. I have become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Maybe if I didn't bother others with my nonsense about suicide, if I didn't tie that emotional weight around their necks, my existence would be worth something. But I do bother them with this impossible topic, and so I am worthless, and their lives would ultimately be richer if they didn't have to worry about me.

That's what my gut tells me. My friends tell me that's not true, that they love me and they want me around, bad gut and all. But that bad gut never shuts up, and it's says they are lying to me, that they're hiding their true thoughts the way I so often do.

I can't trust myself, but I must trust myself. How else am I going to progress as a person if I can't even be honest with myself?

The truth is I don't know how to be honest with myself. No matter what thought enters my mind, my gut intercepts it and twists it into something intended to achieve its dark ends. My medication is supposed to keep that from happening, but it's not working yet, and so the battle continues.

I don't know how this story ends. Someday I might finally kill myself, and no one would be too surprised if I do. Or maybe I won't. Maybe I'll wage this war my whole life. Maybe the medication will work and this problem will go away. I don't know, and my gut won't let me be too optimistic. My gut says that I will eventually give in and end my own life. Stay tuned.

Day 2: Boobs

Here is a nice screenshot from The Fast and the Furious. I don't doubt I've shared this before, but it really stuck with me when I was watching the movie today:

Day 1: Fast Five release party

Here in Tuscaloosa at the MovieStop we had a massive Fast Five release party on Monday night. Tons of people showed up, and many of them brought their badass cars to show off. There was a mob in the parking lot looking at car engines, and it was basically exactly like that any scenes from the movies that take place right before a street race.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to take pictures, because I was drunk and had run down the battery on my phone by texting a girl who doesn't like me. But, believe me, it was epic. Adding to the epicness is that they only charged me the DVD price for the blu-ray. Thanks, MovieStop!

OK, so today I watched Fast Five, and it's as brilliant as I remembered, and I let go of my main complaint about the movie -- that it's missing a good driving sequence in the middle -- and accepted that as a heist movie it doesn't need it.

Believe it or not, this was only my second viewing of Fast Five. The movie came out during a dark fucking period, as Dewey Cox would say, as it hit theaters two days after that tornado ripped through town, and I only got out to see it the one time. But that's OK, because I'll more than make up for it over the next year.

Let's reflect on my favorite moment in the film for a second. Said moment comes when the whole heist team gets together for the first time and Paul Walker introduces Vin Diesel to Tyrese. The two guys kinda stare each other down and don't shake hands, and you can just feel the jealousy radiating off the two of them, both being Paul Walker's former lovers after all. I watched that scene over and over and laughed every time. It'll never get old. Or at least I hope it doesn't.

This Ain't No Ten-Second Race

Shawn: You know this ain't no 10-second race.

Dominic: I've got nothin' but time.

Indeed. Let's try this again.

Mark 10/4/11 down on your calendar.