Kurt Cobain

I just found out Owen Wilson is in the hospital after attempting suicide this past weekend. It's not only weird since he's the last person I would expect to do something like this, but because I spent the weekend thinking of suicide.

The pain that has encumbered my body in the past 3 weeks has left me with a new insight as to why people kill themselves "to stop the pain". Such a cliché, no? "Stop the pain". Yet, this past week the pain has been so brutal that I found myself breaking down and sobbing for hours the other day.

It's hard enough to deal with the fact that once I past 40, I am official "old". It is harder to contend with the possibility of spending my old age inside an achy, ill and broken down old body.

So I thought a lot about Kurt Cobain. Not that I would ever pull a Kurt Cobain. Yet I hear that Kurt suffered from Chron's disease. That disease is supposed to be so horrible and debilitating that it was not a shock to a lot people to know Kurt had pulled the trigger. And all weekend, I spent thinking that if Kurt's pain was worst than what I am experiencing now, then I can completely understand why he did it.

I have that feeling again. I told my mum last night that I was running away to join the circus. I think I was only half-joking. I'm in the midst of trying to sort out a life that, once again, is not making sense. Call it a mid-life crisis. Call it a sense that everything is spinning out of control and I can only hang on for dear life.

Five years ago, I left Ithaca on a mad flight across the country. It's still not clear to me, 60 months later, what I was doing. The thing I remember from that time was the overwhelming urge to run, to leave--really, to flee--a life over which I felt I had lost all control. It wasn't that my life was without meaning--on the contrary, I would say there was too much meaning, too many things going on--and it was as if my brain short-circuited and the primal urge of fight or flight hijacked my brainwaves.
I had just left my marriage of 12 years, had just conquered an addiction to opiates that had enslaved me in a cycle of chronic pain and narced-out bliss, had decided to "become" a writer, and had just had my disability benefits run out. In short, my life was simultaneously chaos and re-birth, and being stuck in a tiny town in the middle of rural New York was not where I wanted to be.