Is life really worth living?

Staying alive means the bullshit will inevitably get better at some point. Being dead is more of a permanent situation.

people in prisons have a lot of very good reasons to commit suicide and some of them do :(

everyone else clenches their fists, takes a deep breath and gets on with it. It's very hard on the lads when one of their mates goes on the wing but they get acclimatised to it - eveyone gets damaged though - staff and prisoners alike.

doing suicide awareness training i was shocked at how easy it is to hang yourself. i always thought you needed a high beam and a chair to kick away - not so.

which takes us off the point - the uk prison strapline which goes on all their posters on the landings says: 'suicide - a permanent solution to a temporary problem'.

Every problem is.

xpost

You're right. I'll go do it. It's simpler that way.

some of these dudes are into astral planing - it just shows you what you can achieve in the worst circumstances...

all the bullshit goes away, yes, but you are no longer there to enjoy its absence. so honestly you're better off dealing with the bullshit.

except philosophical terms, presumably.

-- Marcello Carlin (marcellocarlin@hot

Heed Marcello's wise words.

When I am low in mood of a weekend and don't have too much else to do, I am known to embark on long, random bus journeys to various outlying areas of this city. But this weekend was different. It came at the end of a truly horrendous week - in terms of work and virtually everything else - which drained me in every possible sense. I needed to find somewhere where I could be truly alone, even if only for a brief period in my life.

I disembarked at a huge, old church, far to the northwest. I walked up one long road, then turned left into another - and suddenly I encountered this huge and completely unexpected area of countryside; too big to be called a park, but with misty hills rolling hither and thither and not a person or an animal in sight. No dog walkers, no fliers of kites.

I walked through the fields and felt a strange sense of, not so much contentment, but a nearly indescribable peace, as in: well this is the end of the line old boy, but you're on your own here - no one can reach you or harm you.

I looked southwest and gained a vast view of the northwest of the city; the uncompleted behemoths of buildings, the motorway corridor leading towards my old home. I briefly hallucinated and fancied I could see the cooling towers of ******, but that would of course have been impossible from this aspect. I thought how often I had unknowingly viewed these hills thousands of times from the opposite perspective; possibly only on the ******** have I felt such an enveloping silence, such a comprehensive loneness.

The means were to hand, and briefly I thought: to hell with it, let me just drift off here, in this early autumnal sunshine, let me just sleep and not have to awaken to coldness ever again.

No sooner had the thought, the determination, entered my mind than the lightning struck. The forecast had been for thundery showers, but I had not expected these until much later on. I beat a hasty retreat through the machinegunning rain, back to the path and the bus stop, and thence back into the city.

Of course I am naturally cynical about supernature. I am loath to believe in "signs" from either above or below. But I had no wish to disappear in a muddy, storm-sodden pasture under grey skies. Was this a signal, violently warning me not to take that final step?

I rang the Samaritans later that day and they thought it indicated a reluctance; the storms had, after all, been predicted. It was perhaps just as well the thought hadn't occurred to me a week earlier.