James FitzGerald
Speechless
by James Fitzgerald on 12/19/11Friends, Morons, Countrycousins, ask not what I can do for your speechwriting, rather ask for my qualifications. Four score and seven touchdowns ago, I had a wet dream: Give me Freedom, and while you're at it, give me Disney World. Until you pay me for my last speech, I will fight you in the Beaches, in High Park, in the Annex, in Forest Hill, in Rob Ford's driveway. I will never surrender my bad character. My father's house has many monsoons: I have a nightmare that one day I will live in a condo where I will not be judged by the colour of my jokes but by the table of my contents. And now abideth these three Curly, Larry and Moe; but the greatest of these is Moe.
A Brief History of Suicide: A Temporary Commitment, Part 7
by James Fitzgerald on 05/25/11
Hallowe'en 1999:
Attention, passengers:
EgyptAir Flight 990
is now descending vertically
into the
Please extinguish your cigarettes,
secure your seatbelts and
stow your emotional baggage in the fart-tight compartments
above your heads.
The pilot is feeling down.
He is not alone:
of the 217 people on board,
67 feel mildly depressed,
13 downright hopeless,
92 semi-OK,
and the rest
undecided.
June 27, 2000,
New York techno-scientist
Natalie Jeremijenko,
35 year old mother of three,
videotaped a string of suicides
off the
for 100 days
with her "Suicide Box"
and called it modern art.
WTC, NYC, 9/11: Notice how the traumatized (and traumatizing) mass media, desperately seeking WMD, find acronyms instead? (I blame NBC, the FBI, the CIA)
I guess it's a way of being nice and precise.
Tuesday, September 11, 2001, 8:45 am: a non-Christian sadomasochistic martyrdom cult
flung two jets
driven by 19 body-hating, homophobic misogynists
at the twin erections of rapacious consumer capitalism.
2,792 consumed bodies
divided by 19 dead terrorists
= 146.9 victims
each.
Atta boy, Mohammed:
you justly deserve all 72 of the pliant virgins
promised in Islamic paradise.
But don’t blame me
if you find yourself sipping high tea
under a harpie-tree
with 72 clones of Heinrich Kleist
deep in the seventh ring of hell.
July 17, 2003:
U.N. pathologist and
pathological truth teller David Kelly, 59,
caught between
closely inspected the blade of his knife,
(a weapon of individual destruction)
before passing final judgment
on himself.
*****
Superman Commits Suicide
Beverley Hills, California, June 16, 1959 (AP) -- The bloody body of actor George Reeves, 45, who portrayed the popular comic strip hero, Superman, in a 104-episode TV series from 1952-1957, was found in his garishly furnished Beverley Hills home today, a victim of a massive, self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head.
Born George Brewer in
In 1939, movie mogul Jack Warner changed the actor's name to George Reeves from George Besselo, the adopted name of his step-father. Mr. Reeves sole mainstream film appearance occurred when he played the small role of Stuart Tarleton, the twin brother of Brent Tarleton, both competing suitors of flighty southern belle Scarlett O'Hara in the ballbuster, sorry, blockbuster 1939 film, Gone With The Mind. In the film's credits, the names of the actors playing the fictitious twins were mistakenly reversed -- a narcissistic wound that gnawed at the muscular, square-jawed thespian Reeves for two decades.
Raised in broken homes -- his mother married and divorced twice -- Mr. Reeves divorced cocktail waitress Ellanora Needles in 1949. “George suffered from a lifelong identity crisis,” the former Mrs. Reeves recalled. “Amourous southern gentleman, mild-mannered reporter, invincible he-man, a bird, a plane, a locomotive, an out of work actor -- life was painfully confusing to him. It all seemed like an endless act.”
Mr. Reeves was not related to Christopher Reeve, the actor who will assume the Superman identity in a subsequent cinematic incarnation. (In 1995, Reeve, 43, a prep boy raised in a broken home, will be flung headfirst from a balking horse. Severing his spine, he will never fly again).
Taped to George Reeve's bathroom mirror, the following poem was found by
Truth, Justice and the
Faster than a speeding bullet!
More powerful than a locomotive!
Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!
Look! Up in the sky!
It's a bird! It's a plane!
No! It's Superman!
I live in hell.
When I'm Clark
daily typing
my tight, terse stories
for The Daily Planet,
Lois barely gives me
the time of day.
She never returns
my calls,
my X-rated,
X-ray visions.
But when I remove
my black horn-rimmed glasses,
dashing
sexy but myopic
from the phoney booth,
she's all over me
like a kryptonite rash.
I hate being
strong
and
handsome.
Faster than a speeding bullet?
I don't think so.
I miss my mistress,
the carissima of my mute distress,
my ice-cold
Fortress of Solitude.
_____
Suicide,
homicide,
genocide,
regicide,
patricide,
matricide,
infanticide:
which side
are you on?
American Way
Better Way.
A Brief History of Suicide; A Temporary Commitment, Part 6
by James Fitzgerald on 05/25/11
Did Kurt Cobain
snort cocaine
to feel the thrill
or kill the pain?
Born on the day-glo lip of
The Summer of Love,
Nineteen Sixty Seven,
Kurt chose to
go to heaven,
via Nirvana,
lonely and hurt,
age 27.
A Product of His Age,
he rolled his rage
across the stage,
the holy rock of ageless
rockers:
Hendrix, J., 27,
Joplin, J., 27,
Morrison, J., 27.
Or did
he (and they)
go to hell?
Never trust
a journalist
under
-- 30 --
A selected excerpt from
Kurt Cobain's
suicide note,
immortalized
on the ever-mind-expanding,
globalizing internet,
edited for
considerations
of time
and space:
“I'm too sensitive...
I need to be slighty numb
in order to regain
the enthusiasm I once had
as a child...
I can't stand the thought
of my daughter Frances
becoming the miserable,
self-destructive
death rocker
that I've become...
it's better to burn out
than to fade away.”
Is it, Kurt?
Is it better?
Is it, in fact, a
Sure Thing?
I Confess:
I Don't Know.
Maybe Yes.
Maybe No.
Meanwhile,
we all worry,
don’t we,
about
Thomas Hamilton, 43,
former boy scout leader,
shoots 16 kindergarten kids
and a teacher,
then himself,
in under three minutes.
Was there
a Plath,
a Hemingway,
a Van Gogh
sprouting like sunflowers
under the teeter-totters?
B-actress Margaux Hemingway, 41,
(Lipstick)
granddaughter of Ernest,
(35 years to the day, minus one),
succumbs to self-slaughter
via three vials of Klonopin,
the fifth Hemingway suicide
since 1928.
Oh, those doctors,
those writors,
those actors.
What are the factors?
It is easier to enter
the
than the Heaven's Gate
suicide website.
Rancho
Adam-like,
Marshall Applewhite,
bit into the blood-red Macintosh while
21 women and 18 men
religiously took mass
doses of barbiturates.
The sad earthly containers of their departed souls
were found
black shirts, pants, Nikes, purple shroud.
The alien-driven space craft
lurking behind a streaking comet
failed to deliver them to
the next level of existence.
Hale-Bopp!
Michael Hutchence,
lead singer of INXS,
prescribed prozac in excess,
was found swinging
starkly naked
from a sparkling crystal chandelier,
a diamond-studded belt looped
round his troubled voice box
like a frayed Stratocaster strap.
Fanned by his fans,
rumours of autoerotic asphyxiation
(a Double Life in
sifted through the stratosphere
like the divine
whispering wind.
as reported in the Toronto Star,
former Canadian heavyweight boxing champion
George Chuvalo
(wife and three sons, all suicides)
meets with novelist David Gilmour
(stockbroker father a suicide)
and former Tory finance minister Michael Wilson
(banker son a suicide)
to discuss the fledgling science of suicidology
among an elite
gathered at the elegant
(son of a doctor, not a suicide).
A class act:
You take the high land,
I’ll take the low land.
(No Innu Invited).
A Brief History of Suicide: A Temporary Commitment, Part 5
by James Fitzgerald on 05/25/11
John Robarts, 65,
ex-premier of
(1961-1971),
macho & mustachioed,
brilliant & barrel-chested,
avid hunter & fisherman,
boozer & Lothario
of Hemingway-esque calibre,
was found in his shower
with his head shattered
by shotgun blast.
He was being treated
for a string of strokes.
By the way,
his son Tim was found
(not in a shower)
with his head shattered
by shotgun blast
on his 21st birthday.
Papa John, it was said,
brought
in the world.
The least we can do
is baptize
in his name.
March 3, 1983:
Calling Dr. Kevorkian!
Euthenasia Advocate and
Aging Intellectual Wrestler
Arthur Koestler,
(Darkness At Noon, 1940)
when terminally ill,
took some pills
with his healthy young wife,
practicing what he preached.
1983: Peter Spock,
grandson of Benjamin,
celebrated author of the best-selling
Baby and Child Care (1946)
took care of himself.
Your time is up:
Ken Adachi, a Toronto Star book critic of Japanese blood,
killed himself
after it was revealed
he plagiarized a Time magazine article.
March 4, 1986:
The Night They Drove Old Dickie Down.
Richard Manuel, 42,
sang sadly for The Band,
then hung himself in a motel room in
nowhere near the cold comfort
of his Canadian sunsets.
(King Harvest Has Surely Come).
Tears of rage,
tears of grief,
why must I always
be the thief?
Come to me now, you know
we’re so alone
and life is brief.
1986:
when a barrier was erected
on the
suicide rates rapidly
plummeted.
(It don’t mean a thing
if it ain’t got that mood swing,
do wah, doo wah, doo wah…)
Chemist-turned-writer Primo Levi, 67,
a weary wearer of worn genes,
fell and crushed
his teeming skull,
the noble tower of his medicated wits.
He survived
but not the three-storey staircase
(cruelly aping the zigzag insignia of the SS).
Primo’s three story-books --
Survival in
The Periodic Table
The Drowned and the Saved
-- survive as the world’s greatest
suicide note.
Spandau Prison,
Der Fuhrer’s Demented Deputy,
Rudolf Hess, 93,
spent over 40 winters
in the slammer,
over-detained by the avenging
sickle and hammer.
Mad as a hatter,
he cordially strangled himself
with an extension cord –
but it just didn't matter.
Manic-depressive yippie
Abbie Hoffman, 52,
he of the Chicago Seven
took far more than seven
scotches and barbiturates
in a
author of The Uses of Enchantment
and alleged quack therapist of
Bruno Bettelheim,
lied and died
by deadly drugs,
age 86.
Polish Holocaust Survivor
Jerzy Kozinski, 57,
Bettelheim-esque dissembler
and author of Being There,
pulled a plastic baggie
over his curly black head
and suffocated in the tub,
inhaling his own CO2.
You Had To
Be There.
“I’m going to put myself to sleep now
for a bit longer than usual.
Call the time eternity.”
Factoid:
40% of suicides
leave notes.
(60% don’t).
A Brief History of Suicide: A Temporary Commitment, Part 4
by James Fitzgerald on 05/25/11
When I heard that the suicide attempt “failed”, I much later wondered: is this really the word we’re looking for? Isn’t a failed murder actually… a success?
Tokyo,
1970: Chris Hubbock, 6 o’clock anchor of
1970: MASH was a box office smash, its lovely, lilting theme song Suicide is Painless a hit.
March 1971, Belfast,
April 25, 1972: Bilious and supercilious English asshole George Sanders (Best Supporting Actor, All About Eve, 1950, the year of my birth), having ploughed through seven psychiatrists, then seven vials of nembutol, left us a note: “I am leaving because I am bored. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool.”
Is he in seventh heaven?
October 4, 1974: Anne Sexton, 45, baked a tray of cookies for her daughter Joy, then joylessly tramped from the kitchen to the garage. Locking herself inside the steel, four-wheeled confessional box -- (No, Father, I never had much sex) -- she inhaled enough carbon monoxide to kill an ox, or certainly a radical
June 29, 1975: mad hippie musician Tim Buckley, 28, gives smack a chance. Remember that scene in Coming Home (1978) when venting
Another singer, of the protest stripe, Phil Ochs wrote “Draft Dodger Rag” and “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore” smiting the likes of Nutty Nixon. Mugged in
The following month of May, Ulrike Meinhof offed herself; Was Andreas Baader worse?
Jonestown,
Life Imitates Art, Part II: Anna Karenina–like, Tolstoy’s wife Sophia, oft inspired by her hubby’s suicide plots, threw herself in front of a train, only to survive and outlive Leo.
When famous fictional characters (Anna Karenina, Ophelia, Hamlet,
