My left foot

..(Maybe that accounts for my neighbours breaking into fits of sniggering
whenever they see me).
It turned out that I’d cracked my left foot a mighty whack on the side
board, but there was nothing much else worth reporting. My foot was sore enough,
but it was obviously not broken, so I counted myself lucky.
I limped a bit for the rest of the day, more out of respect than actual pain,
and while a bruise started to appear the next day, the pain had diminished
considerably, and I was beginning to think I’d got away with it extremely
lightly. The next day, however, my left calf started to hurt, causing me to
limp again, but this time seriously.
Long story short, the calf got progressively worse, until it seized up altogether
a few days later. It’s on the mend now, but it’s a salutary reminder
that a) everything’s bloody connected and b) I can’t
expect things to heal the way they used to. Bugger. But, prolonged indignity
aside, I’m not about to top myself as a result..

I was over at my friend Warren’s place the other night. Warren and
Marg have brought themselves and their shiny new doctorates over to Melbourne
from the outskirts of windy Wellington to start a new life here. Marg’s
fully immersed in her new job already, but Warren’s still waiting for
his research assistant job to materialise. Warren likes to get down and talk
dirty about his life’s work, which you could loosely define as concerning
trends in education, and at one point we found ourselves seriously discussing
how the alarming youth suicide rate might be due to a lack of spirituality
– interesting coming from me I suppose, being a self-professed atheist,
but I argued that denying the existence of God is a sign that you’ve
at least thought seriously about the topic. (If being a ‘nominal’
Christian is a complete waste of space, thinking that you’re taking
a more intellectual position by declaring yourself agnostic is even feebler
– see the episode of Hyperdrive where Chloe Teal sings the
agnostic hymn, ‘He may have made the sun, Oh, thank you if you are there,
if not we shan’t despair’).
Is there a youth suicide epidemic, as it’s so often characterised by
the media? I don’t remember any of my school friends or acquaintances
taking their own lives, and I don’t recall it being even the subject
of scurrilous rumour about kids at other schools. Maybe such things were hushed
up in those days, as teenage pregnancies most certainly were, but I think
we would’ve noticed if there were young people unaccountably disappearing
at the rate they appear to be these days.
So, what’s the cause? To baby boomers’ eyes, the younger generations
today seem to have it all, materially at least. To say that youth suicides
are ‘trendy’ is cynical in the extreme, but in the context of
kids seriously aspiring to celebrity status for its own sake, it’s perhaps
worth considering as a contributing factor. When the glare of the media spotlight
inevitably moves on, the psychiatric beancounters will measure if there’s
been a corresponding drop in the youth suicide statistics – that’s
if they can still be bothered with such an untrendy phenomenon..
You might have forgotten, or never knew, that the jaunty Ariel single, Jamaican
Farewell, was about a (literary) suicide. My late wife recommended that
I read Salinger’s Rise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour:
an Introduction, and one (or both) of those novellas was about Seymour’s
suicide as I recall. I think I even had a dedication on Jamaican Farewell’s
label ‘For Seymour’ or some such twaddle, which sadly I can’t
verify because I don’t have a copy anymore. Anyway, I was trying to
capture the puzzlement and hurt of those left behind, and the feeling that
the suicide note just didn’t cut it when I wrote:

Goodbye mum,
Goodbye dad,
Thanks for the good times that we had,
Thanks for the other times as well,
I hope you dig my Jamaican Farewell

Perhaps it’s more unsafe to generalise about suicides than about almost
any other subject, because ultimately we’ll never know what the individual
was thinking at the precise, decisive moment, but in the case of a healthy
young person deliberately taking his or her own life I think it’s fair
to say that it’s an essentially selfish act – in fact, the act
of an immature, self-centred, hormone-addled human being whose values are
temporarily skewed from the life-long average.
Society – and advertising – obviously play their parts, and it seems more
than possible that adolescents don’t exactly relish being the subject
of all that attention. Remember the days when juveniles went from short pants
to suits with nothing in between? The good thing then was there were no expectations,
especially from one’s peer group.
To wrap this rather morbid topic up, albeit prematurely and unsatisfactorily;
it’s paradoxical, (like the rest of life, really), that at the very
time we feel most bullet proof, we’re also at our most fragile – and
at most risk, not from stranger danger, or even from weird ol’ Uncle
Albert, but from ourselves.