Suicide at Cosmopolitan

You are sick Tony.

Way back in 1973, I had a 3rd floor apartment facing a downtown city street. After eating dinner, myself and 2 friends were each sitting on individual window ledges watching people below. One of my friends was dropping stick matches to watch them light when they hit the sidewalk. All of a sudden, he was in the air. He slipped off the ledge. Power lines were very close to the front of the building, and his flailing arms hit them, causing him to land on the sidewalk on his back, sorta leading in with his head. He bounced high enough with a twist to come to rest face down on the sidewalk. The fall killed my friend. Watching it happen was very traumatic.

Prior to that, I had thought that a falling human body contacting a hard surface would be a splat. It isn't.....and it really isn't anything to joke about.

I've seen my share of dead bodies and I use humor (albeit a tad sick) to deal with it.

Part of my abuse of alcohol has to be attributed to those dead bodies just staring at me. You deal with it in your manner and I'll deal with it in mine. (sans the alcohol, finally)

Read my first posting in this thread, yea I used humor but I also expressed my sadness. Throwing ones self off a building is no way to solve problems.

Well Chef, we've all, Im afraid, seen our share of bodies. Each of us has to deal with the demons in our own way. I choose not to make light of anyone's death. I have walked among many dead, and many who were dying. Women and children and babies too. Life is precious and I feel especially badly for someone who believes that taking their own life is a way out of their problems. I hope they find peace. And to everyone else, thank God you were spared the agony that drove another to take their own life.

I'm thinking that if he had the price of admission to the strat tower he might have had enough of a stake to win back the losses that caused the suicide in the first place.

Wait a second.....he was dropping matches to watch them light when they hit the sidewalk. How does that work?

I don't know but I'll assume it's true and not try myself.

They must have been white-tips---not safety matches.

As a Christian I am simply amazed that so many people committee suicide thinking that their ending it all, when in fact their death is just the beginning of eternity., Everyone will experience physical death., but when a person experiences spiritual death, IT"S HELL!

There are other places in the world where suicide is a real major problem:

Suicide Prevention in Japan

I caught an interesting commercial the other day, which showed a series of concerned people looking into the camera's point-of-view, saying compassionate things like, "You seem tired these days, are you okay?" At the end was a message: "Your noticing the pain of others can save a life. Please pay attention to the people around you and help them know they're not alone." It was a commercial for suicide prevention, part of a recent campaign by the Japanese government to help reduce the tragically high number of Japanese who opt to catch the (neko) bus, and I think it's great to have the problem being handled directly. Two decades of economic hardship coupled with social stigmas against taking medicine regularly and way too much stress have brought the suicide rate in Japan to a very high level, the 5th highest in the world per capita.

From j-list side blog

Strike anywhere stick matches. I got pretty good at lighting them just by flicking my thumbnail across the top. Top heavy, when dropped from a distance, the match head hit a hard surface (concrete) and lit.