Respect Authority

"Bitch don't act right? Well yeah, hell yeah, I'm gonna drop that ass."

Suicide jokes are surprisingly hard to craft without being patently offensive, revealing a uniquely sick sense of humor more than actually evoking laughter. It’s treacherous territory — veer too callous and a writer risks appealing to literally only those deranged subhuman wraiths that inhabit faraway Internet message boards/parents’ converted basements, the same slithering masses responsible for those fucking stupid “every time you masturbate God kills a kitten” images and pretty much every other overtired blog meme that was funny for only the first five seconds.

At the same time, other readers, who pride themselves on things like being a functioning member of society, seeing daylight from time to time, and not masturbating to amateurish drawings of cartoon cats, will bid you farewell with replies in the comments section to the tune of “wow you’re an awful human being… why don’t you just go kill yourself?”

This quandary occurred to me after seeing the news that a woman plunged to her death yesterday afternoon after jumping from a 39th floor window of the Empire State Building. More horrifying is the fact that the loose change falling from her pocket could have killed any number of innocent bystanders on the sidewalk below. Bah, suicide is just so selfish.

Early reports speculated that King Kong may have been responsible for dropping the woman from the astounding height, but, to his credit, Mr. Kong has since been cleared of any implication in her death.

The 54-year-old woman was working at North Bay Apparel clothing store when she went all R. Kelly and, mistakenly, believed she could fly. I have never heard of this North Bay Apparel, and imagine few others have either, considering it’s on the fucking 39th floor of the biggest tourist trap on the Eastern seaboard. Fighting through the hordes of oblivious Puma-clad Euros and the 15 minute elevator ride every day would be enough to… uh… put me over the top, so to speak.

And I’m sure the gift bag of foam Statue of Liberty hats and “I Love New York” shirts from the office will provide little consolation to her grief-stricken family.

Here’s hoping her Secret Santa this past Christmas didn’t get her a copy of Jumper for her blossoming Blu-ray collection or else he might feel like a real jerk… or perhaps a PROPHET… who, well, happens to be a jerk.

If only the guy in charge of cuing up the store’s music had been a Third Eye Blind fan.