Oil-Slick Rainbows

        Lackadaisically sitting on the back patio of his medium sized house in Claremont, California a forty six year old writer ineffectually fiddles with a piece of rope in an attempt to tie a noose. When one organizes for their suicide they do it with a particular blankness of mind. There is a quiet politeness about the whole affair, that's why most jumpers leave their coat neatly folded up on the railing of the bridge. That’s what people don’t realize about depression, True depression is not crying into a pint of ice cream or being incapable of getting out of bed in the morning. No, true depression is living your life in a relatively normal way without any emotion or even a real longing for emotion: depression is wanting to want to want something. In other words, all the insipid clichés about suicide are only clichés.  So, as the middle age writer tied his noose, it was in a state of utter blankness. He felt the heat of the setting sun on his forearms.  He had written the note for his wife already, obsessing over it with many drafts.  As the writer ties the noose to the door frame and gives it a firm tug, his mind wanders off to all the other artists in this particular set of circumstances and he wondered if they had the same blankness he did. He thinks of the twenty seven year old painter sticking a needle in his arm for the last time. The thirty year old poet sticking her head into an oven. The sixty one year old literary titan opening his mouth just wide enough to stick a shotgun barrel into it.  He then thinks about the irksome asymmetry of not involving the verb ‘sticking’ anywhere in his own death, how rude of him to ruin the pattern. Standing on the chair and putting the noose around his neck makes the middle aged writer stop these considerations. His death had ceased to be a problem of ponderance and became sharply real. Looking down from the chair, the ground seems to be miles away. An infinite distance. Looking into the expanse, the writer realizes that he just stuck his head into a noose. For some unknown reason this realization puts him off the entire concept. As he begins to take the noose off, the writer slips and falls. Instead of having a rush of doubt, fear, or anger; or having something depressing and profound come to mind; the writer's last thought is how strange that cracking snapping sound his neck made was. A hollow snapping sound. 

There, swaying in the wind of his back patio, hung David Foster Wallace with the sun reflecting off his glasses to show an oil-slick rainbow.