I lost track of how many times I’ve tried to kill myself. You’d think the obvious thing to do is to just chop off your own head and be done with it. I’ve done this before. Twice, actually. I cut my own head off with a band saw. When I woke up, my parents were screaming at me about wasting power and making a ruckus in the basement with the doors locked. To my astonishment, my head had returned to my body without any evidence of injury. Since this was clearly unacceptable, I sought the explanation for this tremendous disappointment by setting up a camcorder to record my second attempt.
After waking up to the thrashings of my parents once more, I reviewed the tape to discover an appalling horror so scientifically impossible that my curse could no longer be considered a disease, but rather the single, most inarguable fact that true evil exists. My severed head immediately burnt to ash like newspaper would. The tornado of cinders flails violently about the room with some impressive scintillation as the grotesque process of my convulsing body jetting masses of meat and blood dances epically in some revolting circus of chemical rebirth. Within a few seconds, my zombie like head had shape and a short series of volcanic bursts set my appearance back to the way it was before the suicide began. The blood and meat launched askew in this gut wrenching display burnt off the ground and saw, leaving no trace of violence at all. I was out for a total of 56 minutes. Just long enough to be hauled off to a laboratory and forced through a lifetime of experiments that would never kill me, should I ever attempt a suicide in public.
I tried to blow myself to pieces in the shed once. Since I could only obtain gas, the result was more like a towering inferno than an actual explosion. I felt every second of my flesh burning to the muscle, regenerating and burning all over again. That lasted about seven minutes before I ran pusillanimously from my hopeful demise and into the arms of the entire fire department, naked, fat rumbling like a bucket of water balloons, and not a single scratch on me. I don’t even remember what obvious lie I gave them to explain myself, but it got me grounded for a whole year, as if I did anything that grounding would prevent anyhow.
Drowning is out of the question as well. Once, while visiting my grandmother in Pasadena, I convinced my parents to go on one of those nighttime dinner cruises over the ocean. When I leaped into the water, which was surprisingly cold, and inhaled a healthy dose of polluted bay swill, I found only the extreme discomfort of suffocation without the benefit of never waking up. I also found it is a lot harder to sink than expected. I had to extend quite a bit of effort to go down far enough to lose the lights of the boat. By this point, my ears felt like Spartan spears at war with each other in the unforgettable endless loop of exploding, regenerating, and exploding all over again. This seemed like a constant theme in the efforts of suicide. It seemed logical to seek the short and simple. I had always wondered what would happen if I cemented my feet and rolled into the ocean where the depths are uncharted. My imagination convinces me I would just remain alive forever in the crushing depths, forever imploding and regenerating. That might be the one hell on Earth worse than the hell I live now, so I never attempted it and likely never will.
An unfortunate aspect of this physical imperviousness thing is that pain is always present.
I’ve been able to ignore quite a bit of pain since I know injury will never last more than a few seconds. Still, no matter how many times I hurt myself, I am rarely expecting pain to feel as awful as it does. That sharp, jaunting thrust of screaming nerves rings deep within my soul, knowing it will never lead to an end, and peace will never come to me through those channels.