The Bad Idea Man's Suicide Note, Part 1

When I was twenty I tried skateboarding with my eyes closed, and I fell down the flight of concrete stairs that leads up to the entrance of the quad. I blacked out and they took me to the hospital, and, since I was unconscious, the doctors figured out my name by rummaging through my wallet. Unfortunately for me, I did not have my driver's license in my wallet at the time. Instead, I had a fake ID. The doctors took the name the ID had on it - not my own - and, viewing hospital records, determined that I was someone who I was not. By some terrible twist of fate, this someone was not allergic to ketamine, a common anesthesia that I am actually extremely allergic to. I have a medical bracelet for it, in fact, but I never wear it.

I don't know whether it was my body's reaction to the allergen or the surgery they performed on me or all of the alcohol I consumed at the party I went to an hour after I was released from the hospital on the grounds that I would get plenty of bed rest, but something inside me was changed. That night my roommate woke me, telling me I had been talking in my sleep.

"What was I saying?" I asked him.

"I dunno, man," he said, looking bewildered. "I thought I heard you say something about skydiving during a lightning storm."

The next two nights the same thing happened. I would open my eyes and he would be standing over me, telling me I had been muttering about juggling cats. It was at this point that it occurred to me he might have been playing a joke. The next evening I tape-recorded my sleep, and discovered, to my surprise, that I was not being lied to. I was chattering all night long about all sorts of nonsense: "wear sweatpants to a funeral," I said; or, "play russian roulette with a semi-automatic." Every night I kept talking, and every night I would suggest the same sort of things:

Bad ideas.