The World's Longest Suicide Note (Part 1) 5/3/2010

 [Here I prove the fallibility of memory: I thought this came earlier in my pretrial detention journal. Not finding it earlier, I concluded it was lost. Here it is. I am breaking this into parts. It is too long to drop in one post. Bear with me, please. sch 10/17/22.]

That was my intent when I began this series of writings back in April. My plan was to write and then kill myself. Why? Suicide had been my plan for the better part of a year in varying degrees of urgency, only work and clients and a certain broken leg modulated the urgency. That plan got sidetracked also got sidetracked by laughter and rapt attention during the female curling championship. Unfortunately for all concerned, that night was only the calm before the storm and not a new beginning. So, it was back to the old plan.

I hoped friends would put what I wrote into a blog, create a readership, and then bound these notes up in book form with the hope of generating funds for the ex-wife. That turned out no better than my personal suicide pact. That it failed might not have been a bad thing. I learned one of my stepsons threatened to kill himself over my arrest. I was shocked and hurt. I never thought he would be negatively affected - he seemed most happy about the separation of his mother and myself. I have written an apology to him and to his mother, but I have no idea if it has been published or not. [This must be in the missing papers; it is not in what I have had to type. sch 10/17/22.] I asked myself if my arrest troubled him so much, what would my suicide do to him and his little brother?

Now, not bent on suicide, I began to think again. A friend added an idea for me to chew over - I was here for a purpose.

I also learned that some people (some who should have known better) thought since I had pictures, that was attacking children. I had never done so, never had any interest in doing so. If I had, what I had seen would have killed any such interest. Let me put it this way: The captain of the Canadian women's Olympic curling team is to my taste, not what I saw online or had on my computer.

So why did I have it? At first, when I ran into it, I got rid of the stuff. Shocked, but not interested. Then I met people who were trading teenage pics just as I was looking for bondage stuff for people I was chatting with. One was a woman from Columbus, OH who I thought I might inveigle into meeting me. Then it was fun trading for the sake of breaking taboos. It got easy to rationalize what I was doing as trading in pixels and not people. Videos made rationalization impossible, but that was when I went from Yahoo to Giga-Tribe. The people on Yahoo did not have videos. Did I spend time in front of the office computer viewing this material, getting myself stimulated? No, but it did confirm my self-opinion that I was a bad person. By this time, I knew that getting caught with this crap would leave me no alternative other than suicide.

I did have another way: getting caught in a Muncie crack house. Death had already motivated me in that direction. Simply put, I was hell-bent on self-destruction for the last half of 2009. Looking back, I do have two wishes: 1) I had sought mental health care; or 2) if I was going to get busted, that it had been on state charges - a state court would have released me on bail and I would have gone home and put the car in the garage and I would have been in that car long enough for the carbon monoxide to do its business.

Well, `that gives you two of the three big themes of what I have been writing here. The first theme explains why mental healthcare is a Good Thing, and what will happen if you do not take care of these problems. Secondly, I wanted to better explain what happens under federal law to people who commit the crimes I committed with the hope they will stop. Last, but actually interwoven throughout my writing here, is an atonement to my friends and family and community for the shock and damage done. I certainly could not have atoned if I were dead. Although, I did think - do think - suicide would have been a form of atonement. I decided complete honesty was both possible and desirable. Having been stripped bare publicly, I had nothing about myself to conceal. Embarrassing others is a different matter. And about them, I have tried to be discreet. I have tried to be accurate without being gratuitously offensive

[To be continued.]

sch