How I Want To Die

Buy enough Pringles to fill a kiddie pool. Fill a kiddie pool with Pringles. Get into a bathing suit, as if one were to wade inside a kiddie pool. Get inside the kiddie pool face-first and begin chewing. I think you know where this is going.

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A possible journey, in forty easy steps.

  1. Quit job with $12,000 dollars in checking account.
  2. Go to BevMo and buy five bottles of 16 year Lagavulin single malt scotch, the logic here being that I will be dead in approximately five weeks, and the allocation of a 750 ml bottle a week seems more than reasonable, unreasonably.
  3. Start taking Celexa to see if I feel any differently, just in case.
  4. Get conceptual tattoo of a mole on my back that no one will notice.
  5. Begin seeing myself as an Asian emasculated version of Drake — suffering from sexual ahnedonia, body dysmorphia, and hypochondria — who has similar taste in Hennessy, misogyny, but cannot rhyme as well.
  6. Spend $1,000 on a Girl Friend Experience (GFE) with high-class escort. I would even take her out to brunch the next morning as a complicated obliquely co-dependent tip. For those who are confused, a GFE often requires staying over the entire night.
  7. Tweet only dumb palindromes (e.g. lol, poop, boob) until I have 0 followers.
  8. Go to Morton’s Steakhouse for an 18 oz. dry-aged Kobe Beef Filet Mignon with a $120 dollar bottle of Cabernet. I would be alone, as this theatrical suicide does not, realistically, include a girlfriend or even female who’d want to have red meat with me, which further depresses me and informs my conviction.
  9. Watch Al Pacino’s entire late-career œuvre where he ends up shouting an irrational monolog at the film’s climax: Scent of a Woman, City Hall, The Devil’s Advocate, Any Given Sunday, The Recruit, each one accompanied by a pint of Ben and Jerry’s.
  10. Read T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men and try to relate, possibly tear, to the line “[…] not with a bang but a whimper,” but ultimately feel alienated by the high modernism.
  11. Buy enough Pringles to fill a kiddie pool. Fill a kiddie pool with Pringles. Get into a bathing suit, as if one were to wade inside a kiddie pool. Get inside the kiddie pool face-first and begin chewing. I think you know where this is going.
  12. Go to Chatroulette and finally jack off to strangers.
  13. Stand on freeway overpass and finally jack off to strangers.
  14. Put ad out on Craigslist and hire a starving cellist student to play 21th century avant-garde minimalist “white noise” to accompany me to sleep.
  15. Ask all my friends who have cats to lend me their cats until I’m gone. I love cats. They will be fluffy and precious and cute and rub against my shins and purr their wet noses to mine when I’m in bed. I will not need to remember their names. My friends can take them back when I’m gone, along with novels on the shelves, and anything in my freezer.
  16. Watch Lost in Translation over and over again until I’m asexual and in the mood for Shabu-shabu.
  17. Fly to edgy reburgeoning European city known for its expatriate class and write a collection of love poems titled Notes From a Gelding, to be published posthumously by a small Midwestern University press, its editor and sole blurber a demure lanky woman with stringy hair, too many sweaters, self-inflicted and perennially exposed scabs, who, believing — she is schizophrenic, or something — such poems are about her, masturbates to them with Sarah McLachlan in the background, her sticky right-index and -middle finger(s) gluing a pacifist peace sign shut.
  18. Apply Juggalo makeup on my face and post a 17:21 min YouTube clip of me talking about the effects of Sudafed, Mike’s Hard Lemonade, and being dropped on the head as an infant.
  19. Write a letter of rejection to The New Yorker‘s subscription department saying “Thank you, I’ve received your subscription renewal notice. While its succinct rhetoric shows vigor, I feel like I’m moving in another direction.”
  20. Invite the entire cast of Jackass over to my condominium to drink cow semen and gauge the accuracy of my homosexuality proposed by my therapist by my, if any at all, level of arousal.
  21. Walk into an MFA Creative Writing seminar and recite the entire lyrics of Weezer, in reverse chronological order, mildly air drumming, until the T.A. tells me I’m in the wrong room.
  22. Play death metal at a volume appropriate for a man in his mid-thirties who lives in an 800 sq. ft. condominium with thin walls under the jurisdiction of a Home Owners Association (HOA) who have already clarified, via ominous letterheads slipped under the door, the regulations concerning appropriate decibel levels.
  23. Somehow get a 19 – 22 year old girl not on her period to “ride” my face for the first two episodes of a TBS Cosby Show marathon while I employ the Bill Huxtable face technique.
  24. Finish watching marathon with her. I’d order three medium sausage pizzas and two liters of Coke as well.
  25. Go to the beach and read To the Lighthouse. Imagine every woman as Virginia Woolf and consider dating again.
  26. Eat enough pot muffins starting at 7:03 p.m. until “7:54,” as it appears on a time signifying device such as my mobile phone, seems shockingly profound in its transition from “7:53.”
  27. Punch Chris Brown and Miley Cyrus in the face, which is the least realistic thing here, but the dying can dream.
  28. Delete OkCupid account.
  29. Delete Match.com account.
  30. Delete Facebook account.
  31. Sign up for a LinkedIn account, leaving behind a one-line resume: This page is intended to be blank.
  32. Snap MacBook Air in two at its spine, sigh for a lost world.
  33. Call up friends using landline and invite them to park. Bring artisan cheese, charcuterie meats, bread and wine. Enjoy an afternoon with light talk of who is in a relationship with who, who said what confrontational thing about that one article they read, and who in the internet commented on that, and who in real life responded to that comment, and who got what lateral promotion or married because it was about time, or who moved to what city with similar demographics, oh and check out this instagram of someone’s lunch, who later broke their leg skiing, who’s at the hospital now looking at the window, reluctant to look out it, only at it, because to look out it would remind them of a world they are missing. Stop daydreaming and pick up the phone.
  34. Take mother out to Sunday brunch. Order a Bellini, her favorite drink — because she can never remember what it’s called, and always lights up when her only son orders it for her, a curved smile meeting the Prosecco and peach puree so young she feels at these times, as if I, like my father so long ago, loved her simply, in ways immune to this world’s tendency to corrode love into angrier things.
  35. Play “Asleep” by The Smiths on repeat at barely perceptible volume.
  36. Adjust the horizontal blinds so that the moon splays a neat line of blue swords on the floor, with which I commit figurative Seppuku, my viscera spilling out in twisted smiles.
  37. Open a box of NyQuil gel caps and try to swallow all of them, but have extreme difficulty with the hard aluminum packaging. Eventually release four and swallow them.
  38. Fall asleep.
  39. See a bright light. Wonder if a text has woken up my phone, or if it’s God.
  40. Wake up the next morning, determined this is now hell, yet notice how palpable and realistic this world remains, and how provincial, almost cute, my feelings had been. Wonder if feelings exist, or are simply orphans of the mind, granted more attention because they seem lost. Realize the sadness around my skin was kind this entire time, waiting patiently for me. Determine this is not hell, but simply life’s at times convincing version of it. Try to be happy. Keep breathing. Repeat. Thought Catalog Logo Mark