Ironweed
Nauseated.
- Nov 9, 2019
- 320
Part I
I'm interested in reading first-hand accounts of what went through people's minds on their way to a completed suicide. Blogs, books, websites, format is unimportant. Just so long as it is the unfiltered thoughts of people with one foot out the door who went on to go through the door. Actual accounts, please, no fiction.
The three (well, two and a half...more on that in a bit) I've identified are:
Diary of a Suicide by Wallace E. Baker - (link is to gutenberg.org) This is the diary of a young man who killed himself over one hundred years ago, in 1913. Admittedly he dwells at tedious length on his failures with women, his failure as an engineer, and how annoying his mother is, but it is in its own way a very interesting read. Available to download in many formats. He drowned himself.
Suicide Note by Mitchell Heisman - (archive link) This is candidly an incoherent mess. Mitchell talks very little about himself but goes on and on at tedious length about a great many things, and at times borders on raving. (See The Seditious Genius of the Spiritual Penis of Jesus in the monograph for further details.) More an Oswald Spengler or Arnold Toynbee on crack than anything else. It was originally hosted by Heisman at a site he owned, http://www.suicidenote.info/, but that site is long gone. The archived copy is frustrating to read. A clean PDF copy is available on at least one pirate site, but I'm not sure I can link to it.
I'll be honest, I like very little about this work, or about Heisman personally. He ended his life with a bullet through his head on Yom Kippur, on the Harvard campus, in front of a group touring the campus. I swear I read something about how he was wearing a rented white tuxedo while he ended his life, to add to the shenanigans. Something about suicide as a public spectacle bugs me, and always has.
Edit at 11:14 AM 11/26/2020: And of course, two seconds after I post this mess, I find a full archive of Manley's site. Story of my life.
Here it is: http://q1m.net/martin/home_page.html End Edit
Martin Manley: My Life and Death - A former sportswriter who shot himself on his sixtieth birthday in 2013, most of the site where he documented why he was going to do what he ultimately did is lost to time. (Removed by Yahoo!)See above edit.All that remains (or all that I can find) seems to be an archived index page of dead links and some brief notes. There's a rabbit hole you can fall down that seems to lead to malware, so I've passed on looking at it, and I advise anyone else to take a pass on as well. Does not seem to have been picked up by any legitimate archival sites, alas. They also wiped his other site, that was an archive of articles he wrote, mostly about sports in the Kansas City area. And of course if somebody who's search-fu game is better than mine can find the rest of the site somewhere I'd appreciate it.
Curiously, the description of his site at the Wikipedia entry for suicide notes links to a different Martin Manley, one who is very much still alive. An academic in San Francisco and not a journalist in Kansas City. There is no entry on wikipedia for the Martin Manley I'm discussing here. If somebody has a Wikipedia account, might be nice to clean that up, removing the link. Every time I try to do something on Wikipedia it gets reverted immediately. So I don't bother any more.
So: Anyone know of any more cases like this?
For my purposes here I'm not all that interested in suicide notes themselves, at least not the typical ones. But if they go into an explanation as to why the suicide did what they did, what their thoughts were leading up to the act and so on, that would interest me. I'm also not interested in reading how psychiatrists, psychologists, etc, interpret such things. What I really want is people's own words. Will return to update this post if I find more.
Part II
I'm going back and forth about inflicting on the world a mountain of text vomit, doubtless every bit as unreadable as Heisman's and likely not as well sourced (Alas). You see, I recently finished a re-read of Jennifer Michael Hecht's Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It and was so annoyed with this book I'm pondering a detailed response, or as detailed a response as I can muster.
Assuming I do ever start work on such a thing, I need a place to host the work where it won't immediately be yanked down for violating the host's ToS, also preferably where I can put it up anonymously. Oh, and free is good. Not looking for much, am I?
Don't really care if it is indexed in searches, don't really care if it is virtually invisible. Just someplace where it can get put up and will stay up. If I ever do write it, I'd like it to be available to be read, though I suppose I can have no reasonable expectations along those lines.
Eh, sorry for the ramble. And thanks for your time. Any and all thoughts welcome.
I'm interested in reading first-hand accounts of what went through people's minds on their way to a completed suicide. Blogs, books, websites, format is unimportant. Just so long as it is the unfiltered thoughts of people with one foot out the door who went on to go through the door. Actual accounts, please, no fiction.
The three (well, two and a half...more on that in a bit) I've identified are:
Diary of a Suicide by Wallace E. Baker - (link is to gutenberg.org) This is the diary of a young man who killed himself over one hundred years ago, in 1913. Admittedly he dwells at tedious length on his failures with women, his failure as an engineer, and how annoying his mother is, but it is in its own way a very interesting read. Available to download in many formats. He drowned himself.
Suicide Note by Mitchell Heisman - (archive link) This is candidly an incoherent mess. Mitchell talks very little about himself but goes on and on at tedious length about a great many things, and at times borders on raving. (See The Seditious Genius of the Spiritual Penis of Jesus in the monograph for further details.) More an Oswald Spengler or Arnold Toynbee on crack than anything else. It was originally hosted by Heisman at a site he owned, http://www.suicidenote.info/, but that site is long gone. The archived copy is frustrating to read. A clean PDF copy is available on at least one pirate site, but I'm not sure I can link to it.
I'll be honest, I like very little about this work, or about Heisman personally. He ended his life with a bullet through his head on Yom Kippur, on the Harvard campus, in front of a group touring the campus. I swear I read something about how he was wearing a rented white tuxedo while he ended his life, to add to the shenanigans. Something about suicide as a public spectacle bugs me, and always has.
Edit at 11:14 AM 11/26/2020: And of course, two seconds after I post this mess, I find a full archive of Manley's site. Story of my life.
Here it is: http://q1m.net/martin/home_page.html End Edit
Martin Manley: My Life and Death - A former sportswriter who shot himself on his sixtieth birthday in 2013, most of the site where he documented why he was going to do what he ultimately did is lost to time. (Removed by Yahoo!)See above edit.
Curiously, the description of his site at the Wikipedia entry for suicide notes links to a different Martin Manley, one who is very much still alive. An academic in San Francisco and not a journalist in Kansas City. There is no entry on wikipedia for the Martin Manley I'm discussing here. If somebody has a Wikipedia account, might be nice to clean that up, removing the link. Every time I try to do something on Wikipedia it gets reverted immediately. So I don't bother any more.
So: Anyone know of any more cases like this?
For my purposes here I'm not all that interested in suicide notes themselves, at least not the typical ones. But if they go into an explanation as to why the suicide did what they did, what their thoughts were leading up to the act and so on, that would interest me. I'm also not interested in reading how psychiatrists, psychologists, etc, interpret such things. What I really want is people's own words. Will return to update this post if I find more.
Part II
I'm going back and forth about inflicting on the world a mountain of text vomit, doubtless every bit as unreadable as Heisman's and likely not as well sourced (Alas). You see, I recently finished a re-read of Jennifer Michael Hecht's Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It and was so annoyed with this book I'm pondering a detailed response, or as detailed a response as I can muster.
Assuming I do ever start work on such a thing, I need a place to host the work where it won't immediately be yanked down for violating the host's ToS, also preferably where I can put it up anonymously. Oh, and free is good. Not looking for much, am I?
Don't really care if it is indexed in searches, don't really care if it is virtually invisible. Just someplace where it can get put up and will stay up. If I ever do write it, I'd like it to be available to be read, though I suppose I can have no reasonable expectations along those lines.
Eh, sorry for the ramble. And thanks for your time. Any and all thoughts welcome.
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