Anyway, I missed a local news item from yesterday, the suicide of a local teen. I'm sure the suicide itself isn't too notable. The kid was sixteen, and that age group has always been trouble. As I remember, my years between 15 and 19 were a constant state of near-suicidal depression, just like everyone else. People that actually complete teenagedom just don't have the guts to go through with self-homicide, the poor spineless bastards. Or, you know, maybe they enjoyed high school--if so I want them dead anyway.

But this was a public suicide, the cool kind, the newsworthy kind. The kid, David Smith of Falls Church High School, was driving here in Northern Virginia and started ramming his car into a guardrail. He then got frustrated and dove headfirst off an overpass onto the highway below. Wow. That's got a certain sense of style about it. The gradual progression from aggravated road rage to a full-blown suicide is very powerful. I wonder if the kid took any art classes; maybe I can snatch up a painting or two; never appreciated in one's own lifetime, as they say.

The primary question when hearing about suicide, if you'll overlook the socially compulsory humanitarian posturing, is "what's in it for me?" First of all, suicide is completely defensible, perhaps obligatory, considering the planet has just surpassed 6 billion people. Each death should be trumpeted as a dear sacrificial measure toward curbing resource depletion for years to come. But planet be damned, what are the suicide's more immediate effects on my life? Should I be moved, irate, thankful, condescending? Should I capitalize on it by writing a journalistic expose? To answer these questions, we must perform a brief analysis.

There are many ways to go about a suicide. I'll bisect the options into public and private for the purposes of this article. Private methods are undoubtedly the most popular--your sleeping pill overdoses, your radios in the bathtub, and the old gun in the mouth. It makes sense--I really don't like leaving the house, and I'd hate to make a fuss. But a public death is not without appeal: there's a certain argument for Doing It Right, since you only get one good shot at death. (Maybe more chances if you screw up, but then people watch you like hawks and won't even trust you with safety scissors.)

So your bridge/building jumping makes a certain amount of sense. The jump gives you a public appearance that puts you into the hearts and minds of the populace, coupled with a quick, painless, irretractable step into the void. But it's getting a bit outmoded. The jump seems to originate from a simpler time, a world of sparser traffic. It was a time when the pressures of the workaday world allowed for little diversions like crowding around a barricade to see if the nutjob could be talked off the ledge. So I think a short examination of the phenomenon could help young up-and-comers plan these things properly, in order to leave the world with at least as much dignity as they had when they entered.

1. Get right to the point. Brevity is not only the soul of wit, it's my primary method for judging the merits of others. Just appear within my field of vision, say your piece, and let me get back to thinking about Beast Wars. There's nothing worse than someone that threatens a public suicide and doesn't follow through, especially in traffic ravaged metropoli such as my home town, Washington, D.C. I remember a few months ago when some thorazine jockey was threatening to jump from the American Legion Bridge for most of rush hour. The guy effectively shut down half the traffic in this city. I'm pretty sure he was eventually talked down, too, which is the icing on the idiot cake. It's really a matter of common courtesy in my opinion. I'm a thinking, feeling, human being; I'm supposed to be affected by your ultimate sacrifice. Don't make me wish for your death!

   As a general rule of thumb, if I'm in traffic for five minutes, or watching the situation play out on the news for fifteen minutes, I just want it to be over. It could end in a blood-splattering jump, an arrest, a counseling session. As long as it's a quick ending. (Remember that those news vans can't move in traffic either, so if you're trying to get on TV, jump as soon as you see helicopters.)

   
   

2. Timing is everything. This is really an extension of my previous statement, but these suicides should stay away from the rush hours. 6 AM to 10 AM are right out. (If you're up by 6 AM, why are you killing yourself? You've got the gumption to become a perfect worker drone, so keep it up, champ!) 3:00 to 7:00 are likewise officially off-limits. Take a best-case scenario, where the suicidal victim-to-be pulls his car safely to the side of, say, a bridge, then jumps without ceremony. The police will still end up blocking traffic to do things like investigate the scene, recover the body, etc. During non-peak hours, 10 to 3, and after 7:00, the authorities have plenty of leisure time with which to talk a person down from these situations. People shouldn't be allowed to monopolize rush hour by moping around pondering Descartes while we bake in our cars, smoking truck exhaust. Of course I'm not recommending threatening the victim, but couldn't he be restrained? Can no one work a firing grappling hook anymore? I've personally seen Batman avert hundreds of these falling-to-the death situations, so don't argue unfeasibility.

   
   

3. Target area ought to be considered as well. I haven't heard of jumps from buildings for a while. [Such jumps typically occur after stock market crashes, due to the grand height of most Wall Street buildings. Expect a few jumpers in the next year, what with the overvaluation of tech stocks. -ed.] But building jumpers have got to be the worst, with the remains on the sidewalk looking like Rorschach cards made of vegetable soup. Then again, jumping off of an overpass onto a highway has the potential to really cause some traffic problems… Which is worse? It comes down to aesthetics versus expediency. I'm not comfortable making that call. The best possible scenario is definitely an over-water bridge, which might allow for an open casket funeral, if the crayfish don't get you before the police nets.

   
   

4. Style is also a category, despite the inherent difficulties involved with quantifying this. But some kind of catchall ought to be included to pick out the pedestrian deaths from those that really stick in the national gullet. So far this article has held the importance of unimpeded traffic flowage above all else, but I make an exception where there's rubbernecking potential. This is, of course, a traffic slowdown caused not by blocked roadways but by motorists slowing to observe J.G. Ballard-esque orgies of blood on the shoulders of America's highways and byways. I ogle; not egregiously, not significantly slower than the traffic around me, but enough to stop and smell the flowers, as it were. The point of a road trip isn't just the inherent endorphin release from the sensation of movement, it's the spectacle of our random world, of observing all the things that can happen in our 260 million motorist system. If a truly superb suicide slows down traffic, then we're not going away empty handed. We return home with bushels full of dinnertime conversation. Yes, this will harm the traffic flow, but if we, as urban denizens, don't desensitize ourselves to roadside spectacle sooner or later, then we're no better than the backwoods rubes we ridicule.

   
   

Based on the above criteria, the work of one David Lee Smith scores quite favorably. His time of death was 2:35 AM, cutting things close to be sure (he probably had school later in the morning). Most importantly, the roads were open for traffic before 5:00. Reports seem to say that, after stopping his car, the boy dove straight off, showing no trepidation. Also, I've got to respect the headfirst dive, assuring lethality from the 20-foot drop and, frankly, showing a can-do attitude that might have done him well. His target was the Capitol Beltway (I-495), a major artery, but he hit the far right lane (of four or five), and was never struck by traffic. Most of the tie-up was from rubbernecking. Radio witnesses described the mangled corpse as "quite a sight." So all in all, a quality suicide, successful on many levels other than it's basic lethality. Bravo! I'm left almost wishing this talented young man was still alive.

Copyright (C) 2000, Post-Collegiate Malaise.