Conversations, Part I: The Highway Stranger

The man is brilliant, an expert in almost everything an aspiring writer could ever hope for in a mentor.

He's good-looking, sharply dressed, quick on his feet and honest – sometimes brutally so.

We're standing by a bank of palm trees beneath the U.S. 281 underpass near Broadway Street when he delivers me his news.

"I'm glad we talked, because last week, I wanted to kill myself."

I give him a hard look, not wanting to answer in the wrong way. I want to offer him comfort, solace, counsel. I want to tell him we've all been there before, we've all doubted ourselves and each other and feared that we live in a world without meaning or purpose. I don't ask why, or how he would do it, or how serious he's considered it. Instead, I speak a few words in a strong voice:

"I don't think you should do that."

Hearing the man's despair is confusing given all his success, and I'm faced with the perverse hope that my knowledge of existential dread and how destructive it can be will come off as authentic.

One of my favorite writers is French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. In one of his books, Seduction, he wrote about a need to be loved, but an ability to be seduced. He put this phenomenon into terms as the play of the butterfly collector, the gamer, and the hysteric. In Baudrillard's mind, the seducer is suspicious of seduction and tries to codify it:

"By making the rule into something sacred and obscene, by designating it as an end, that is to say, as a law, he traces an uncompromising defense: for it is the theater of the rule that gains ascendancy, as in hysteria the theater of the body." (pg. 127)

While I tend to be an independent spirit, I do think that life provides us with certain rules. While I believe existence precedes essence, I also think we have a choice in how to abide by these rules. We're given great gifts and the power of choice to stand by them or abandon them.

Baudrillard's theory that certain people turn seduction on its head by turning these rules into laws is intriguing. At what point, I wonder, do people become afraid or suspicious of the terms of their existence that they think about putting an end to it? And why does our confidence and despair seem to ebb and flow with all the frustrations of modern daily life?

Anyway, something about the man made me think of the philosopher's writing, and about how whenever I'm sad about things like this, I think of my mom, buying me new clothes to wear to school, taking me shopping, walking with me along the nature trails near the house where we grew up. So often, I don't want to do anything but hold her close.

I don't say anything else about the man's story – I just take it and hold it to my ear like a seashell, listening to his whole precious existence roaring within, and then it sounds as soft as the sea.

I guess I just want to be his friend.