“S-suicide paint (den) suicide rims (kill ’em)
Suicide loud, I got them suicide friends (stankin)
-Gucci Mane

By Brad Feuerhelm, ASX, June 2015

The smokestack the rumbles in Hemingway’s belly, a careless ode to the gin and cigars he consumes every morning before facing his typewriter. This is the same typewriter that will remind his family of the recoil of a shotgun every time they hear it. Words klicketty klacketty on the white, ever so white, blindingly white page, infringed upon with blue words, cerebral hematoma to the nourishment of the comma. Klack klack. Every sentence is seen ending with finality. The period, the exclamation point, all careless metaphors to the abrupt ending of lives, minds fecund with the possibilities of living, imaginations rife with rituals who finds pills, bullet shells, slipknots, and vein opening a more comforting speculation than the continuation of this life. Life cut short under depression’s merciless heel. It wasn’t the lack of progress or success for papa, nor the vainglorious sunlight of Spain watching the bull’s tirelessly run into the sun baked earth in a valiant effort to skewer and throttle the brazen matador, it was the pure ugly banality of life between the exclamation points and the glasses of gin that caressed his foul mouth.

Every sentence is seen ending with finality. The period, the exclamation point, all careless metaphors to the abrupt ending of lives, minds fecund with the possibilities of living, imaginations rife with rituals who finds pills, bullet shells, slipknots, and vein opening a more comforting speculation than the continuation of this life.

Belly rotund, liver exceptionally emboldened by years of hard tack, he was a man’s man by audience. His family, and a spate of followers gleaned much from his corpse, acting like carrion after he pulled the well-oiled trigger blowing his literary brains all over the foyer of his Ketchum home. His worries of taxes, ectopic pregnancies, and lost manuscripts left rendered in crimson beads all over the banister and the stairs leading outside into a nowhere…his legacy rent in ink and tragedy. Papa was never alone in his search for Sisyphus’ myth. Legions before and after who penned ink to paper would wade in, sometimes neck deep into that abysmal arcade of self-killing. His act, was a footstep in the building of the great American gothic, the shroud so vast and seemingly hidden that it re-integrates within the fiber of a nation, itself combustible and self-immolating, while denying itself the possibility of flame.

The point being, confronted with this idea of suicide, can you ever ask how the Sun also rises the same way twice with the aforementioned knowledge of …the call of the wild? When fear and loathing confides itself to the confederacy of dunces, can you keep your sanity in the bell jar or will the raven send you to the big sleep in an infinite jest?

Aaron Krach’s book, The Author of This Book Committed Suicide, is something of a meditation on the matter of suicide. During 2012, the author (reportedly to kill himself after one more review like this) went to the New York Public Library and checked out as many volumes of books by as many suicide authors as possible…the list a sheer joy to read… gasps of “fuck, I didn’t realize him/her too” the insipid perversity of narcissistic self-governance through life self-taking leaving awe and horror in one go upon the audience of this tract…. he took these tome’s of negligent joy and simply stamped upon each “The author of this book committed suicide” one act of defiance for the object of a finality of grotesque misdemeanor by its creator and another, a prerogative act of violence on the memory of these great people who shape our collective “culture” by pointing out the nefarious end in which they sought to distinguish themselves. The point being, confronted with this idea of suicide, can you ever ask how the Sun also rises the same way twice with the aforementioned knowledge of the call of the wild? When fear and loathing confides itself to the confederacy of dunces, can you keep your sanity in the bell jar or will the raven send you to the big sleep in an infinite jest?