Considering possible escape routes

I was thinking of writing this post longhand on one of the paper tablets such as I’m currently using to write Outlaw’s Mind, but I decided I didn’t want to have to go through the rewriting process that comes with that, so I’m just going to write this here, directly on this site, and edit it here.  It’s not going to be anything fancy, so that should be fine.

I’ve more and more come to the conclusion, the acceptance, the recognition, that I’m almost certainly never going to see my children again.  I’m probably never going to so much as hear my son’s voice or get an email or a text message from him.  I guess he feels betrayed, not entirely without reason, by the mistakes I’ve made that wrecked my career and my life, and the fact that during their midst I was pretty much lost and confused, and felt I had nothing to offer him and his sister, had no place to live where they could see me, and felt shocked and stunned and utterly at a loss throughout the whole affair.

I also had a near-complete lack of understanding of people, and that was most of what led to my errors, which never included trying to do anything but ease suffering and relieve pain and take care of people who were in chronic pain, such as I was and am and have been for almost twenty years.  All that and, apparently, my neuro-divergence – as people like to call it – which I’ve only recently come to realize that I almost certainly have (or am, or however you want to put it…in other words, I almost certainly have the syndrome formerly known as Asperger’s) contributed mightily to my misunderstandings and mistakes.  I’m not good at managing interactions with humans.  So I was unable to recognize that some of them would think I was doing something culpable.

Anyway, it’s been eight years since I’ve seen either of my kids in person – it may be slightly longer, I’m not sure.  Once it goes beyond a week or so, it always feels eternal in any case.  And it’s the same amount of time since I’ve had any communication with my son, other than thanks for birthday presents passed along via his sister, who does text with me and who has called me once or twice (or answered my calls, I think).  There’s no reason to think any of that is going to change now that they are both full adults, aged 20 and 21, with no legal or ethical obligations to keep in contact with me.

Without them, the uses of this world seem profoundly weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable, to say the least.  I need to get off this planet, on which I’ve never really felt that I belong, anyway.  And since I don’t have access to any viable spaceship that could take me to any viable place, I see only one means by which to escape.  Unfortunately, there’s a very strong activation energy barrier for that undertaking – I have to get over the wall created by the evolved senses of fear, pain, and resistance to dying.  As far as I know, there’s no way to quantum tunnel through that barrier, avoiding the otherwise necessary tumult.  Or, at least, such tunneling for a macroscopic object such as I is so rare as to be unlikely to happen anywhere in the observable universe in its expected lifetime.  Or at least in my expected lifetime, which is the operative time frame.

So I have to think of/brainstorm ways to countermand or circumvent the activation energy barrier to leaving the planet.  I’ve been toying with ideas for it for some time, everything from immolation in front of the Palm Beach court house using lamp oil and lighter fluid and whatnot, which I have (thus making some kind of statement, but I’m not sure exactly what, and that would take serious chutzpah), to deliberately using way too much pain medication (OTC) or finding illicit sources of fentanyl (I hear in the media that it’s all over the place), which at least would have the advantage of relieving my chronic pain as I depart.  There’s also inert gases, such as helium or nitrogen, and a bag or (something I have purchased and know how to use, being a medical professional) a non-rebreather mask and tubing.  But that stuff takes up a lot of space, and though I have tanks of helium, I have no good place to use that exit fuel uninterrupted without being extremely rude to innocent people.

I mean, if I were okay with that, I could just use blades of one kind or another…I carry a utility knife for opening boxes and other packages, and have lots of razor-sharp replacement blades.  But that really requires forcefully overcoming the activation barrier.  Ditto for firearms, which I don’t have anymore, anyway.

I had thought about just swimming out into the Atlantic, eventually becoming exhausted, and relying on the Bermuda Triangle to carry me off this planet (so to speak).  But I don’t know if I have the courage to do that, because swimming is not my strongest area, psychologically.  In a similar vein, though, I could just start walking and walking and walking.  I’ve been recently doing it more to try to lose some of my disgusting fat weight, and I know that it can be harsh, and even punishing, after a while.  I wonder if I would have the mental endurance to keep doing it until I walked off the Earth.  It wouldn’t be a bad means of escape, and would be reasonably non-intrusive.  Other people could then sell and/or give away the tidbits of crap that I don’t take with me.  It won’t be much.  As  some old poet or other once said, “I have nothing, I owe much, the rest I leave to the poor.”

I haven’t decided yet how or even if I’m going to leave.  It’s SO hard to overcome the idiotic existence bias biology has built into us all, even for someone like me, who at least rationally recognizes that being here on this planet is not a net gain, and that the detriment appears to be increasing daily…sometime hourly.

I’m very tired.  I’ve been trying many things to make this world bearable, from medication (which continues) to therapy (which recently re-started but which has now had to be put on hold), to writing books, to learning and making music, to drawing and doing other forms of graphic arts, to reading (almost entirely non-fiction now, which is distressing in and of itself), but these really are just facades or illusions, or fictions in and of themselves.  And I’m not able to make new friends anymore or to keep in contact with those I used to have.  In any case, I fear I wouldn’t be a positive presence in anyone’s life, so I don’t really want to inflict myself upon anyone.  I’ve been cut off, either temporarily or permanently depending on the occasion, by pretty much everyone I’ve loved most, on more than one occasion.  I’m apparently not a very pleasant person to spend much time with.  If you can imagine that!  I guess it’s more of that neuro-divergence, at least partly.  I definitely fit the description, at least according to a few educated and highly knowledgeable people on the subject of such people, at my age, when they don’t have support.  I fit it almost perfectly.

Anyway, those are just some ideas.  The world isn’t becoming any more attractive over the course of the various news cycles, and there’s no sign that the trend is going to change.  In fact, the evidence is that it’s not likely enough to improve to make it a good gamble to try to wait out.  Likewise with the gamble that I might someday, somehow, see my kids.  Based on how other people have felt about me, it seems an awful lot to expect of them for them to want to seek me out, and I don’t want to try to coerce them or manipulate them.  That would be horrible.  They have their own lives to live, and they deserve to be unencumbered.

So, no decisions have been made yet, but I’m inching closer.  And in many ways, a long, long walk off the planet seems almost romantically appealing – not in a love-story “romantic” sense, but in a broader, older sense of the word.  Just to walk and to see how far I can go, to see if I have the courage and endurance and skill to escape from the bonds of this crummy mudball’s gravity, at least figuratively speaking.  It is a consummation devoutly to be desired, it seems to me.

I guess we’ll see.  But one thing is certain – I’m glad I didn’t write this out by hand first.