Today happens to be my 30th birthday - in years gone by I always suggested the occasion would be a tipping point.
It has been a recurring theme in recent years that if, by the time I turned 30, at least some of my ambitions had not been fulfilled, I might as well end my life. If I'm not writing consistently, and not forcing people to sit up and take notice of what I have to say, then there is a negligible reason for continuing to exist.
When all I am capable of is writing badly, I might as well not be here at all. So goes the mind of the ambitious twenty-something, his creativity choked by the density of his own wishes. I can't write because I want to write too much, and end up doing nothing whatsoever.
I'd made my own death into a fine art. Like Sylvia Plath, I would commit myself to the gas cooker and let it ease me into sleep. I can't speak like you, but I can unravel myself in the same way. Plath's vast fire was extinguished by the pitiless squeezing exerted by a fist in full view of a cynical and delighted audience; my little light would be switched off with no fanfare at all.
The obvious hit me one night when I was coming home on the train after having had too much to drink: Plath died as she did in an act of vengeance towards her German father. He was taken away from her all too soon, so she succumbed like a Second World War Jew, in her own gas chamber. I too wanted to make an ironic statement: the one who seldom looked up to anybody would be taken away in the same manner as the woman I had idolised.
By now, though, it is blindingly obvious that I don't have the necessary resolve to take my own life: I'm either too much of a coward, or I've developed the (mistaken or not) conviction that there remains some Eben-inspired golden future that makes it worth hanging around for. If all gods and prophets were like Eben, humanity could consign suicide to a historical footnote.
This 30-year-old carries with him a string of failed relationships, each one a car-crash of a disaster. They lag behind me, obvious and irrefutable, like a giant prehensile tail which knocks the hope out of any future ones which might arise. I want to write about you, all of you, in eponymous blog titles, and I shall get around to doing so at some point. On my birthday, the day when I arranged to die yet continue to live, I reflect how culpable I am in the shattering of n relationships.
