helpful suggestions for the mortally depressed

i've been profoundly moved by the tragedy in westford this week, even more so (if that's even possible) from several other recent local tragedies in which (supposed) loved ones were murdered as part of a troubled relationship. words cannot express the shame i feel as a human being that such things remain possible in this world, and i know of no way to understand it, let alone stop it from ever happening again. my advice to myself and to everyone else is to hug our children, and remember that love is the answer. remember what it is to love, and be loved. and try to find our way back. try. please. try. all of us. and maybe some time later this week i'll stop feeling like every minute i'm going to start crying all over again. (it's that close to the surface--the tears are in my eyes all day long).

and then the heartache and sorrow turns just a little bit to righteous rage for lives cut all too short, and i'm compelled to want to offer some helpful suggestions for the mortally depressed.

perhaps a useful discussion will be to talk about the reports from ayer yesterday, where a guy in a pickup truck tried (unsuccessfully) to kill himself by running himself into a slow-moving freight train. (we can only hope he took the advice to not be shooting innocent family members before attempting his auto-denouement, observing that such is supremely cowardly among many other reprehensible things). but, seriously, this guy has turned himself into a poster boy for the benefits of not paying better attention in physics class, and it's hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

first of all, lets all remember that force = mass x acceleration. granted, a freight train is aces in the mass department, but even all that doesn't overcome a slow pace and the solid frame of what was a very substantial truck (did you see the picture? hysterical) when it's not anchored to anything more substantial than a few rubber tires. more effective for larger truck drivers might be the old aspirating wendy's chili technique, though one has to also be careful not to strike a house in the meantime and dislodge the tracheal obstruction.

have we all gone mad?

so here's my helpful suggestion to the mortally depressed: take your beef to washington. pack a .45 (at least) so as to be reasonably assured of the force necessary to blow your own head off, then wander over to capitol hill with a note explaining that "it's JOBS, you assholes", and off yourself on the steps. you're just as dead as with the family tragedy angle, but maybe after a few of you do what you're going to do anyway where it can actually do some good, then the rest of us will get their attention away from dreaming up all the pork-barrel ways they can sink this country even deeper into the fiscal swamp, and we'll all be better off, and then fewer of us can feel compelled to be shooting ourselves.

seems like it would make as much sense as the rest of the world this morning...

liv, rest in peace.