I’ve been thinking of suicide lately. Not actually performing the act, but the reason for the act itself and what it means to everyone involved.

What does it take for someone to get to the point where they take their own life? And what kind of courage (we’ll get to the cowardice later) does it take to make one go through with the performance?

Sure, my life is in the shithole right now. I can’t really think of any one facet that’s any kind of a positive. Am I going to kill myself? No. Like most things in my life, I’m too much of a pussy to really act on anything, to bring it to fruition.

One of the Netflix discs I have now is of 80s New Wave videos, which has arrived to me unplanned at this time. I don’t even remember putting this in my queue and it doesn’t have any hard-to-find videos on it so I’m at a loss to why I added it. Regardless, it’s here. But while watching it I realize there are actually some music videos that I’ve never seen.

One is Soft Cell’s Tainted Love, which I was surprised to know there was even a video for. I remember driving around in my old 1973 rusty Vega listening to this song, Charlene singing along in her beautiful alto. I remember this so definitely her singing this and at the time thinking “Hey, I really like this song”, because of that moment.

Afterwards on the DVD Big Country’s In A Big Country comes on, a song that was (surprisingly) always a favorite of my brother’s. I recall that Big Country’s lead singer, Stuart Adamson, had also killed himself. The Wiki shows a desperate attempt to locate him in his final days. I tend to think Char was in a similar state, if not physically but emotionally. And while she was not directly in front of me, I wonder if I still could have found her.

Was the mishap of me & Dana being left behind by Char and her husband during our 2002 reunion, and the ensuing arguing and distancing of our friendship playing over in her head? Was this another loose thread in her life that finally unraveled her? Was she thinking of our high schools days, dancing to 45s of these video bands and disillusioned with the future that actually came to be, disappointed by the promise of those videos, the ones I’m watching right now? These are some of the questions running through my head. One thing, one thing leads to another.