Inner converstaions with myself--between me and my dummy--and me and my committe--are often confusing to me.  They would be even more so to an observer.  But these are the converstaions that take place in that secret room where the hard work is done.  I want to speak from there.  Perhaps putting the conversations into a self-interview form will help:
 

    "What's the best meal you've ever eaten?"
    "Chicken broth and saltine crackers."
    "Come on, get serious."
    "I kid you not.  At a New Year's party about ten years ago, I drank most of a bottle of Greek brandy--at the same time that I was unknowingly incubating the worst case of influenza I've ever had.  By morning I had an O-God-help-me-help-me-and-I-won't-ever-do-it-again hangover simultaneously with the Hong Kong flu.  My head hurt so bad I moaned every time I moved.  I spent hours in the hsower throwing up and  throwing down.  My body ached so bad I cried.  For four days, I though I was going to die.  I welcomed death.
    "Late on the fifth night, I began to feel hungry.  At three o'clock in the morning, I coutiously risked a teaspoonful of hot chicken broth and one saltine cracker.  Yes.... OK! Suddenly, I knew my ordeal was over.  Anything going down was not coming back up.
    "So I had a whole potful of chicken broth and a whole box of crackers.  Nothing, nothing, ever tasted as good to me.  Best meal I ever ate."
    "The best feelings in your life come when you start feeling good after  you've been feeling just awful."
    "True for all crises--small and large."
    "Tell about a large one."
    "How about the time I tried committing suicide? Twently-five years ago.
    "A harsh time.  Everything on my plate seemed foul and rancid--job, marriage, career, friendships, family life, and future.
    "Ironic that I was a volunteer at the time on a twenty-four-hour answering service for a crisis center.  Desperate people called in the middle of the night and said they were considering suicide.  I resigned my post when I begin to think they were on the right track.  Getting dead began to seem like a good idea to me."
    "What did you do?"
    "One morning--one Mondy morning--I just ran away from home.  Got in my car, drove to t he airport, and caught the next plane leaving.  It was going to Texas, the last  place I had in mind, but since Texas was where I grew up, probably the place I unconsciously wanted to be--back to the beginning--to complete the circle or find where things stared going wrong--or something--I don't know..."
    "What did you do when you got there?"
    "Tried to buy a gun, but there was a waiting period if you were from out of s tate.  So shooting myself was out.  Which was OK with me because I didn't reall want to shoot myself and make a mess somebody else had to deal with."
    "What next?"
    "I looked for something to jump off of, but there wasn't anyplace high enough in that part of Texas, and then there was the mess factor again.
    "Two days had gone by.  While I was working out the technical problems of getting dead, I was driving around in a rented car looking at the scenery of my childhood.  If I told you what I was thinking, I'd be making it up.  Because I don't remember.  I was a dream in a way and a serious review of my past in another, but words don't apply--I was way down in the basement of my soul somewhere.

    "My plan jelled.  I bought a vacuum-cleaner hose and some wide masking tape.  That night I drove out in the plains for a couple of hundred mils, turned off on a dirt road, and drove farther, I parked.  Tried taping the hose to the exhaust pipe and then in through a wing window of the car."
    "What was going on in your mind then?"
    "If felt like a contest between three people.
    "One wanted to get it over with.  Another seemed to think it was funny, and the third was obsessed with the taping problems, never mind the consequences.  I remember the conversation, along the lines of--'Can't you hurry up,' 'He'll never do it,' and 'They only problelm is this tape you bought.'
    "The trouble was that the hose was round and the exhaust pipe was  oval, and I had to make the connection by using lots of tape to span the difference in shape.  When I ran the engine, the heat of the exhaust melted the adhesive on the tape, and the hose fell off.
    "I was funny.  How absurd.  Too dumb to do something so simple right.  I was protected from myself by my incompetence.  I began to laugh.  I couldn't even kill myself.  I laughed to the point of hysteria, which turned into sobbing grief, which turned into silence broken by rnewed laughter.  Mayber I could just sit there and die of stupidity.  I could see the had lines.  MAN MANAGES TO DUMB HIMSELF TO DEATH--SUCCUMBS TO EXHAUSTION BROUGHT ON BY TOO MANY FAILED ATTEMPTS TO DO AWAY WITH HIMSELF.
    "Man too dumb to live--that's me.
    "But what if I had succeeded?  I had this vision of my corpse witting up at the whell of this rented car out here in the bushes in the middle of nowhere--and the world going on without me--and it seemed like such a meaningless thing to do.
    "And I began to think of my ancestors--considering that I was alive now because a lot of men and women before me had been able to take whatever life threw at them and go on.  My genes had been through the dark Ages; through the Black Death, across oceans to an unknown land, through wars and bad marriages and bankruptcy and all kinds of defeats that made my problems seem like a picnic.  Toughness was permanently engraved on my genes.  How could I give up here?  How could I throw all that away?
    "I began to laugh again.  Death isn't what I wanted.  I wasn't less life I wanted, but more life--life with meaning.  And if I wanted something to laugh about, I had found that, all right: me, forever me--no bigger fool than I.
    "And I never felt better in my life than at that moment.  The best feeling in the world come when you start feeling good again after you've een feeling awful."

    "So then what happened?"

    "Returning home after running away to kill myself was really awkward.  For one thing, I was in a great, exuberant, life-affirming mood.  I felt like Lazarus after h is resurrection.
    "On the other hand, I had upseet my family and friends, and I expected a stormy scene with my wife.  Oddly enough, she was calm.  On reflection, I suspect she probably had wished at times that i would just disappear or drop dead.  When it seemed lik that's exactly what I'd done, she went through a reality check of her own.
    "Her response was a complete surprise.
    "She had bought me a glad-you-came-back-alive gift.
    "A canary.  A yellow, living, singing canary.
    "I'm not a pet person.  Yet here was this beautiful bird hangin in a brass wire cage in the window of my room--singing as though the joy itself were distilled in its song.  How absurd!  How wonderfully right.  I rememer shouting at it, 'SING, BIRD, SING!'

    "Within a year the marriage ended, and the bird escaped while its cage was being cleaned.  But I'll always love the mother of my children for the gift of my empathetic grace in the from of that canary, which still sings in the sunniest window of my soul and welcomes me home from my ongoing bullfights."

Robert Fulghum
Maybe(maybe not)
p99-p106
1993
 

...........(this continues, go buy the book if you wanna read on =b.. my fingers are too tired!) 1