Dying To Be Heard

There was a fascinating story in the Washington Post Magazine recently about a 66-year-old American, living in Japan, who e-mailed an array of journalists all over the globe, announcing his imminent suicide. He despaired of the fact that the world had ignored his blog and his self-published books, and decided he’d rather die than live on in what he felt was unmerited obscurity.

He followed through, too. Although some of the journalists to whom he’d written tried their best to thread together clues and stop him from carrying out his planned self-elimination—the Post reporter, interestingly, did not do so, feeling equal parts emotionally blackmailed, powerless, and suspicious of a hoax—the man made good on his promise. He jumped off a building. ("Take splat, cruel world!" Sorry.)

The deceased’s name is/was Dennis Williams. The irony, of course, is that he’s far more famous now than he ever was in life. The article made clear that Williams hoped the publicity surrounding his demise would call posthumous, appreciative attention to this writings. Which seems quite unlikely, given people’s short attention spans (the suicide already is old news), the vast competition for readers, and the fact that, in the Post reporter’s estimation, Williams’ obscurity was well-deserved.

Here’s how reporter Cynthia McCabe summed up Williams’ writing—and the weighty ideas about which he felt people should sit up and take notice—after having scrolled through a number of his blog entries: “Winding tomes about philosophy and nature and his view of the world that were articulate but uninteresting. He aimed for thought-provoking but clunkily landed just short of eye-roll-inducing.”

I’ve made no attempt to seek out any of Williams’ writings. I already know what articulate but uninteresting, and lamely “deep,” looks and sounds like. I’ve produced plenty of such material myself. In fact, one of the lesser reasons I want my octogenarian parents to downsize from their two-story suburban home—the biggest being because my brother and I don’t want to have to sift through 40-plus years of accumulated crap—is that there still may be, in various boxes, sheets of poetry I wrote in my teens. Which was a time of my life when apparently, given the melodrama of those lines, I was a young girl who was an acolyte of Sylvia Plath (speaking of suicides).

In this blog, I’ve seldom striven for “thought-provoking,” choosing instead to focus on subjects that interest me more and require fewer trips to the thesaurus—such as serial killers, celebrity deaths, annoying manifestations of pop culture, and my love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with technology. (Pause for an aside: Every time I prepare to post something to Lassitude Come Home, I fear that my host site will have “advanced” its procedures beyond my dim understanding. Honestly, the only thing I know how to do is flow unadorned text into a template. Nobody else is that self-limiting anymore. Yet this is the way that I live my life. The other week a colleague pointed at the old-school, transistor radio-sized tape recorder I had plugged into my land line to record a telephone interview and asked, “Really? They still make those?” Well, yes, the last time I looked on Amazon. At which time I stockpiled a few of them, just to be on the safe side.)

Where was I? Oh, I was noting that I, unlike Dennis Williams, don’t kid myself that I have anything profound to tell the world. Still, I must admire his industry. Sure, it’s easier to amass a library of writings when you love your own insights as much as Williams apparently loved his. Still, though, it takes considerable dedication and time. I don’t remember if the article mentioned it, but Williams presumably had a job and other daily obligations to attend to. He was married to a Japanese woman for many years. He may well have had hobbies beyond grandiosity and self-absorption. And the man had to eat. Maybe he rolled his own sushi. That strikes me as labor-intensive. I am not nearly so dedicated to my writing.

In fact, this is my first blog post since last November. It now is late January. The gap of two-plus months suggests a few things—some of them good, some of them bad.

Taking the bad first—I’m a glass half-empty kinda guy—the long hiatus suggests a lack of discipline on my part, an enduring inability to address this space as a place for fun rather than work, and possibly a certain lack of imagination.

On the other hand, though (and yes, I know I don’t have another hand; that gag never gets old for me), my long writing silences the past few years also establish me as sort of an anti-Dennis Williams—not to pile on the man—in the sense that I clearly don’t believe the world would benefit in some meaningful way from more-frequent musings from me. I’m also the un-Williams in that no one ever need worry about getting a suicide e-mail from me. It’s not like I have a huge body of work that’s being ignored by the masses. I’ve written zero books, self-published or otherwise. Yes, it does irk me that the other, younger, Eric Ries—the startups-guru hotshot out in California, about whom I’ve griped before—renders me un-findable on Google because he hogs all of “our” search results. But hey, you can’t win if you don’t play. California Eric Ries hustles and gets himself Out There. I’m seldom even In Here, writing this obscure blog.

In short, while I’m just as overlooked, if not more so, than Dennis Williams, I haven’t tried nearly as hard as he did to be viewed in the first place. He clearly was bitter and frustrated by the lack of attention. If I’m at all bitter or frustrated, it’s only insofar as no one has magically plucked me from obscurity and handed me a fun and/or lucrative writing gig—like working for the Onion or writing a memoir over the generous course of, say, 10 years—without my having to do anything other than be willing to be plucked from obscurity. (My dream scenario is that one of my dozen readers will forward one of my better posts to someone influential and/or with deep pockets, who will exclaim, “Good Lord, we simply must have him!”)

So, anyway, I think we’ve established that I’m not a suicide risk. Not for any literary reason, anyway. (I do reserve the right to off myself if I’m suffering from a horribly painful disease, or if yet another Bush becomes president of the United States.) Still, I find this whole question of the push-and-pull of self-expression and fame very interesting. How often do we write about things organically—when it’s like eating or breathing? Is the motivation always, on some level, to be read and appreciated?

I mean, Williams insisted that it wasn’t about him, it was about his ideas. But how do you divorce the two? He certainly couldn’t. He equated indifference toward his ideas with rejection of him. Which, in turn, precipitated his suicide. (At least that's the way the article presents things. Williams had prostate cancer when he died—a seemingly important detail that nevertheless is made to seem irrelevant.)

There was a great quote in the Washington Post piece by Ron Charles, the newspaper’s book editor. I read it aloud to Lynn because it struck me as so nicely-stated and succinctly true.

“There are more people writing than ever who are desperate for attention, and we just don’t have that much attention to give,” Charles wrote. “No matter how rich or educated we become, we have only the 24 hours for each of us. And with everybody promoting themselves on every possible social network, all of us so desperate for eyeballs, myself included, with all of us living and dying by our click history, [Williams’ suicide] is kind of an extreme and terrifying example of ‘Why aren’t you looking at me?’”

There’s so much to chew on in that one paragraph. I find exhausting the cacophony of voices that scream out from our ever-growing multitude of platforms—even as I refuse to engage in Facebook or Twitter, for fear that doing so would devour my last minute of free time, and possibly my last ounce of sanity. Yet I, too, crave attention. I want to be read. I want to be heard. I want to be complimented. Perhaps not to quite the extent that some people—many people—do. Certainly less than Dennis Williams did.

Part of that is simply human nature. But part of it, I think, is fueled by the breadth and volume of the voices now vying for our attention. Quantity doesn’t equal quality. The more voices there are in cyberspace, the more certain we are that our own voice is smarter, funnier, better modulated. And surely it is, within the context of many voice-to-voice comparisons. It’s frustrating that these inferior voices are being heard while we are not. But it all gets back to what Ron Charles said: There’s only so much time in the day, so much bandwidth that any of us can access.

I mean to post material to this blog more often that I have been. A lot of things interest me enough to riff on, as my daily electronic correspondence tends to attest. But I seldom take the time or effort to translate those observations into blog posts. It needn’t and shouldn’t be that hard to do. I hope to be better about that in (the rest of) 2015.

In the meantime, though, I do have one gift to offer the journalists of the world: No moral quandary about how to handle my suicide note.