...
I have been expecting this. He has come off more and more and more unbalanced over the past ten years... to the point where I couldn't stand to listen to it anymore... so I don't think anybody needed to suicide him.
...
Lest ye doubt me here, there is some hard evidence after all. I have all kine experience with this inability to detach, this turning everything good and bad, especially bad, in on your heart and lungs and throat and eyes and nerves, and it's a killer. 86 is still hiding from it at the bottom of a vat of rum. It has claimed countless lives. You almost certainly will not believe me, but the whole problem is engaging with the feeling and blunting it. Even the agony that makes people drink themselves to death, or need to go take a time-out in the bin, or any manner of florid expressions of anger and frustration and pain and bottomless grief, all of it, blunted feeling.
The ancients teach you how to let it blow through, how to stop yourself from grabbing it so it can throttle you to death, and, again, you probably aren't going to believe me, and then is when you find out how intensely you really can feel. Everything feels waaay worse and waaay better. The difference is, it can't kill you anymore. You can handle it.
It's not about mildness. It's not about aloofness. It's not coldness.
It's more than you will do.
