Washington is one of the last states, aside from Delaware, I believe, to allow hanging as an option for the condemned and that’s what I chose, not wanting the populace to have the comfort of imagining I will be gently put to sleep like old Duke, the German Shepherd with severe hip dysplasia, for example. Not a dog I’m acquainted with, I hasten to add, but one who popped up in my head, barking enthusiastically, with the broad smile of that breed. Some dogs smile and some don’t. Cats hardly ever. A cat laughing is a truly unsettling sight. I won’t go into how I know that here. I have to fight against going off on tangents. I have the sense of multitudes milling around me even though I am alone here in my cell. Other realities threaten to break in upon me yet I press on.

I’d brought a large World Atlas and propped it on the center console next to the driver’s seat. I occasionally turned the pages and stared down at the interior of a country (Turkey, Paraguay, the Phillipines), wondering, as I had when I was a kid, what was going on in the towns whose names were written across the map (Bolu, Limpio, Antipolo). As the pages lifted and fell, I said goodbye to the people who lived in those black dots, people I’d never met in places I could have visited but now never would.

by Sam Rogers, copyright 2013

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

       The truth is that my life only began to improve after I decided to kill myself. Emerging from a morass of inertia and despair, I became energized at the prospect of finally taking some action. The irony, of course, was that I only achieved this power by directing my rage and frustration against myself but at least I finally had an outlet for it. I’d been trying to relieve my pain by reading the Emperor Marcus Aurelius who said in his Meditations: “The soul of man does violence to itself, first of all, when it becomes an abscess and, as it were, a tumor on the universe.” That seemed to sum up my situation pretty well. My brain, with its sick thoughts and imaginings, felt like a tumor and the only strategy I could come up with was to remove the offending organ.

From “The Suicide Diversion,” by Sam Rogers, copyright 2013, www.samrogersbooks.com

Chapter 1

Empty

July, 1972

Erica didn’t sleep all night. Instead, she sat up in bed, supported by pillows, listening to coyotes sing across the valley, memories flowing through the ragged sphere of her awareness. When dawn finally came, she went to her studio and began to work, as she had on twenty thousand other mornings.

Copyright 2017

“My current life (and death) situation is both ludicrous and dangerous, like the over-heated dream of a teenaged writer or a story in one of the horror comic books from the fifties (found in a cardboard box in the backyard shed, provenance unknown) that used to scare the hell out of me when I was a kid.”

Copyright 2015

“God is a word for the source of this enormous and complex collection of energy, matter, and events constituting the universe, set in an infinite span of time and space, yet only revealing itself in an endlessly changing moment.”

Copyright 2013