Idea for a Murder - A Mental Note

I intend to kidnap a person, it doesn’t really matter who, and imprison him, stripped to the waist, hung upside down, tied to a cross, and cut open at the wrists.

Yes, I know. Again.

This time around, his restraints will act as makeshift tourniquets, slowing the bleeding during his imprisonment.

I intend to keep him completely motionless, powerless, head strapped back, eyes held open Clockwork Orange style, staring ever forward, unable to look away, unable even to blink as he stares.

And then, I will force him to watch the popular television series Hannibal, and as he watches over the course of hours I will, slowly, ever more slowly arrange that his restraints should be loosened, allowing him only slightly more freedom of movement should he choose but, the more he moves, the more he might cause his blood to flow...

He can, should he choose, attempt to free himself, but I suspect that he will remain where he is, both due to his fear at bleeding out and out of a desire to continue watching. Hannibal is, after all, a very good show.

If all goes according to plan, he’ll bleed out while watching the season finale, but before the big reveal.

In this way he’ll die fully invested in the program but never knowing how it ends, wondering as the life slips from him what he’s missing but never able to know for sure.

In this way the death he struggled so mightily to avoid will come, inescapable, his patience amounting in the end to nothing, his life amounting to the same, my victory over him, and the victory of quality television, in his death, finally complete…

This is my design.

My Truest Self

I took all my emotional pain, the suffering and the heartache, the self-loathing and the little cuts and bruises of the soul that a lifetime can inflict, and I swallowed them, pushing them down, way down, down as far as they would go, to the very bottom of me, all the way down to my feet.

And then I cut off my feet.

I did it as part of an elaborate performance art piece about the nature of human emotional suffering, as a statement about our tendency to avoid facing our troubles even when doing so was to our obvious detriment, about how we here in the twenty-first century are more willing to destroy ourselves utterly, to lose vital parts of our core being, than we are to face the fact that yes, life can be hard, and yes, it can hurt.

And it was a massive success.

 The night itself was sold out, and the reviews were uniformly excellent. “He left blood on the stage, and the crowd went wild…” read one particularly strong notice. I couldn’t have been more pleased. And, having no more emotional pain to taint my creative victories, I could finally properly enjoy my artistic success.

It was wonderful. And, for a brief period, I was happy.

Six months later, as a follow up piece, I cut my legs off at the knees. It was widely agreed that this was dull and derivative, and in hindsight it probably was. But it was all I could think to do. I’m not the artist I pretend to be, I suppose, and I couldn’t come up with anything genuinely new.

I had one meaningful moment, though. One statement worth making.

Maybe one day I’ll have another.

Or maybe I only ever had the one in me, and the rest of my life will be spent in slogging mediocrity, struggling in failed attempt after failed attempt to recapture my one long-passed moment of creative relevance.

There are moments when this notion haunts me, when it keeps me up at night, when it fills me with blind, helpless, hopeless panic that I fear will overwhelm me.

And when it does, I take that emotional pain, that suffering and heartache and self-loathing, and I swallowed it, pushing it down, way down, down as far as it can go, to the very bottom of me.

But, no longer having feet, I find I have nowhere to put it…