Decisions, Decisions

I’ve been pondering the following shit for a while. It takes a bit of an introduction, though, so if you’re at all up to date on my posts, then you know about my brothers situation and can skip to the second paragraph. But, I’ll do a quick breakdown for people wandering in during the halftime show anyway… my brother attempted suicide by making cyanide in his dorm room on February 1st 2009. He spent about a month in the hospital getting physically better and being psychologically examined. The school obviously didn’t want him back after having turned his room into a goddamn chemical lab during the super bowl (it got them, and him, a lot of bad publicity), so he had to move back in with the parents, where he continued therapy and basically did nothing with himself for 6 months. After that he and I moved to Lincoln so he could be closer to his friends, got jobs, and a sweet apartment… until he decided to try again on November 4th. Or he at least had everything he needed to try again… he didn’t actually try that we know of, but he checked himself into the mental help center up here and is now back in KC near the parents receiving ECT (electro-convulsive therapy).

It has obviously been pretty hard on the whole family and all of his friends. This whole year has been one long existential crisis for basically everyone involved… which isn’t unusual for me; having majored in Philosophy and carrying a minor in Religion, I spent all four years of college in a continually snowballing existential crisis that I found out doesn’t end when you’re handed a diploma. If anything, a diploma makes you feel more insecure for not having figured it all out by then. Anyway, since most of my family is religious, its been rough on them in a totally different way than it has been for me. They question a deities master plan, their faith’s religion/tradition, how the spiritual world is effecting the physical one.

I,  however, settled on some sort of “gleeful nihilism” around the time of my graduation (and also the name of my comic). The best way I can describe it is a sort of hybrid philosophy made up of the ones I find the most useful/awesome (absurdism/existentialism, nihilism, and bits of “post” modernism, mostly), and I tried to marry them in as cohesive a theory as possible. Since existentialism is such a big part of it, this whole psychological ordeal my brother is going through seems much more trivial than it does to those around me. They can blame the disease for his actions, the disease for his selfishness, the disease for the pain he’s caused… and that works in their worldviews. But to me, its just bullshit they’re hoping is true so they can take the responsibility of his actions off of him and onto something they can actually be mad at, stay mad at, and fix as if it were any other sickness. For them, underneath all this, is my brother. For me, its always been him.

Why? Because if there is no creator, then existence has to precede essence. And if this concrete world is all that we can know, all there is, and therefore all that matters, then we cannot blame a human nature, we cannot blame psychological diseases, we cannot blame social constructs or family traits or genetic misfortunes; we are condemned to be free. And with freedom comes responsibility for our actions and decisions; all of them.

That means that the biggest philosophical problem is that of suicide (and our relationship with the absurd). My brother has decided that life is too hard, too rough, to unfair and that it is not worth living. Most of my friends and family have made the same decision, but gone the route of philosophical suicide by turning to religious institutions, personal faiths, fairytale-like stories, and creators to hold their hand and tell them everything is okay and that all they just need to do if things get rough is do x, y, and z to make it all better. I,  however, have chosen to stare down the absurd and live my life in its face. It leaves a lot of questions unanswered, and means that there is a lot of uncertainty when it comes to different things, but if life were meant to be easy, it would be.

I’ve said all that to basically show you the question I keep mulling over in my head day in and day out (or for me, night in and night out): can there really be scientific exceptions to the rules or is my little brother really just a selfish, ignorant little pussy who would rather give up than make even the tiniest efforts to make his life worthwhile?

Right now I’ve sort of settled on the fence, deciding that its a little of both, but that the latter keeps him from overcoming the former. He’s always been so smart that he never really had to try in school. When he didn’t like sports or the effort involved, he would just quit. When videogames had too steep of a learning curve, and when consoles got more complex, he quit playing them and stuck to replaying games he already knew. And whenever he did have to try in college, he would take the course pass/fail. All that makes it really easy to just say “he’s a lazy, impatient asshole” and decide its the latter. But he was also a very sweet, naive little kid who had life throw a ton of shit at him in middle school that no kid should ever have to face at that age (he was young for his class and skipped a grade). And all that could account for a lot of the psychological issues he’s now struggling with.

The more immediate problem i face in all of this is how I interact with him over the upcoming holidays. I’ve let all his phone calls ring through to voicemail since the latest attempt but I won’t be able to avoid him or all of this once I’m under the same roof as him again. I’d like to just sit him down, tell him to fucking grab his nuts, man-up, and face life like a goddamn adult… but if he’s either of the above things I think he is, that won’t help at all.

I would honestly rather spend the holidays completely alone than go home and have to see him right now. I feel like, in the past year, I have lost my little brother, bestfriend, and roomie one after another. When I look at him I don’t even see my brother anymore. It’s honestly like I don’t even know him; like he’s a zombie or a ghost of someone I remember. Then again, maybe he’s never been the person I thought I knew.