#1. You Will Fuck Up - In the best case scenario, you puke before you manage to absorb enough of Mom’s sissy-tranqs to get brain damage. In the worst case, the phone rings just as you’re chucking the shotgun under your chin and you wind up spending the rest of your life in restraints with five-sevenths of your face gone, being spoon-fed by the people you hate most. Killing someone face to face in cold blood is incredibly difficult - ask anyone you know in the military - and there are serious logistical problems involved in amateur do-it-yourself endeavors of any sort. Think about it: people who wouldn’t dream of giving themselves a haircut for fear of the consequences will set about murdering themselves with total confidence. If you can’t rally your resources enough to make rational sense of the things that are making you wishful of death, you are in no condition to try and kill someone on your own.

#2. Your Methods Will Prove Unsound - No plan is foolproof, and things that one imagines would kill anyone but Rasputin and Mighty Mouse may in fact prove non-lethal. I know a man who jacked enough heroin once to nod out Oklahoma, slashed his wrists and hopped into a hot bath knowing oblivion was just around the corner. He woke up in a lukewarm tub of Kool Aid-colored water, feeling not too refreshed but quite alive. Calculating a lethal dose that your body will not flag and expel is a job for a trained pharmacist, even a .44 up your nose can leave you brain-damaged but alive and aware, and ropes and razors are notoriously unreliable. The Japanese, who made an art form of suicide, required that practitioners have a backup man at ready, whose services were nearly always employed. It works, but if you can talk your best friend into helping you kill yourself, there is clearly a more obvious solution to your troubles than suicide.

#3. Death Sucks Shit-Caked Warthog Cocks - Death is the enemy. Life may tuck your arm up between your shoulder blades and fuck you twice daily, but it affords you opportunities to fuck back if you are there to grab them. Not so Death. Death is the ultimate totalitarian. All the grumpy pallor-fetishists in head to toe black you see at shows may wear death-cult symbols and complain constantly, but note that they are still alive, presumably by choice. This is not hypocrisy, this is embracing life by alternative means. Celebrating life by denying the existence of death is the strained, primary-colors-only pseudo-joy of golfers and guidance counselors. Celebrating life while unflinchingly facing death’s inevitability and omnipresence is glory itself.