This is a bummer of a post, where I speculate about a friend of mine who died early / recently / I'm guessing suicide. No need to say anything about it. Read it if you know someone who has killed themselves, or if you are suicidal yourself.
This is my friend.
There's a gallery here, if you'd like to see him.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B92qSr0h19L/
I'll actually share the gallery here so it's onchain:
Kay, maybe just this one:
It's like he's laughing at the fact that he's dead now.
that idea makes me feel a bit better.
.:.
This is what he looked like a few months before he TERMINATED CONSCIOUSNESS.
That's a public warrant arrest for a DUI I found online because he stopped talking to me for about the last 2 years without a clear understanding of why.
None of my friends are publicly saying the he killed himself, and the official statements released are only that he DIED WITHOUT FIXED ABODE:
https://www.newsbreak.com/california/santa-ana/news/0Ond90Cu/kriz-twenty-three-people-died-without-fixed-abode-in-oc-in-march-2020
Meaning homeless, in a motel at age 33, in the middle of a spiraling bout of depression and alcoholism.
Maybe he was really just doing fine, and accidentally tripped and fell on some concrete, and knocked himself unconscious, and then choked on his own drool.
Or maybe he had some kind of pre-existing heart condition, and was just meant to expire at age 33, like a heart defect nobody knew about, and he died in bed, in his sleep, actually, in peaceful slumber, just fated to expire at that particular date.
It's totally possible.
Here is his memorial:
https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/glendora-ca/tyler-gotch-9090127
Not much there -- just some good wishes, sort of like the kind that go to most dead people.
I don't actually know that he killed himself. I just suspect that he did, and another mutual friend and I murmured it back and forth between each other in an email.
Nobody else wants to talk about it. People don't want to collaborate on a memorial creative project. People don't want to talk about it.
Tyler was always deeply cynical.
We bonded over Sylvia Plath, and Bukowski, and Modest Mouse, and Cobain, and smoking cigarettes, and talking to one another. We had a very familial, unspoken bond for several years. We were pen pals for a while.
I have my suspicions for why he distanced himself from me. I offered friendship up until he died actually -- and creative collaboration, but he was not interested.
And that's fine.
This is not my friend:
This is a photo from a guy with his daughter, loving life, hanging out by some water.
Someone who posted on reddit get a portrait done of him and his daughter.
But he looks a lot like my friend.
And my friend also had a little kid.
Maybe like a few years younger than my friend.
And my friend used to smile and such.
The portrait sort of reminded me that some people are enjoying themselves -- and in contrast, to think about people who are not alive, because they chose not to be.
Being you must have sucked during that time period - Tyler.
Like maybe it was less painful to die, than it was to continue living.
Or maybe the world stopped being hopeful, like it didn't seem like it would get any better.
I don't have positive messages for people to promote anti-suicide.
It's a very permanent solution to a problem -- and there are other self-destructive and isolating, high risk pathways that you can investigate, if that's what you choose to do.
We both idolized hunter s thompson, and silvia plath, and cobain, and elliott smith, and david foster wallace, etc.
And for good reason.
.:.
I think about Tyler, pretty much every day these days. I would like not to, to some extent, because there is a finality to things. Like my story is still continuing, and his is done. And I wonder about what the point was in being his friend, and choosing to hang out with him over others -- I don't regret it, but I also look at the sort of potential that I saw in him, and I wonder about like why did he not see that same potential?
Or what was it that turned him off, and pre-empted the decision to exercise that potential?
I wish I would have spent more time with him, or gotten closer. But we had our period of being very close. He once described it as a sexless homosexuality. And then we most definitely drifted apart, and a bunch of heavy shit hit him over and over again.
And then he went off the radar, and didn't return my calls, and then he was dead.
Here is some David Foster Wallace:
.:.
Here is a Eulogy:
I will not share this with the people to whom it is most relevant, because they want to have glowy memories of when Tyler was handsome and in his mid twenties, and always had a good laugh and a drink and a cigarette and a thought provoking conversation, and a beautiful hipster woman with pixie haircuts and tattooed sleeves he was sleeping with, and a circle of friends that stayed up with him until 4 in the morning every weekend, talking drunkenly in a hot tub about their opinions on shitty movies.
I loved tyler,
Sad times.
Please no comments or condolences. Cause I don't really need them, or want them. But maybe this will be something interesting for you like a point of view on some difficult situation or maybe a way of helping to understand something a suicide in your own life, or if you're suicidal, then maybe seeing how it impacts other people?
Stuff like that.
These are some tragedies to some long form decision making trees. I think I'm mostly just trying to process some loss, and this is a platform where my old friends, who are not talking with me for their own reasons, are not located currently. So, it's a good vent.