Side Effects
Apr. 25th, 2011 09:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
perzephone
So, I've been taking the Celexa (well, generic citalopram, but whatever) for almost 2 weeks. It makes me sleepy. All the time. I have this list of goals (one of which I've almost accomplished - namely getting crap off my desk) but, fuck, I cannot stay awake.
I can honestly say that probably for the past 4 days I have not actively thought about suicide. It's strange. Suicide has been a constant mental companion for many months now, and there's this blank space in my thought process. I have to create thoughts about suicide instead of them just being there. I went from planning to just blank paper. I suppose it should be a relief, but it feels weird, like someone mind-wiped me.
Nevada is in America's 'Suicide Belt' (Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, New Mexico, South Dakota, Arizona, Oregon, Colorado and Idaho). We have a high suicide rate, steadily 3rd or 4th in the nation, with a minimum suicide rate of about 19% when the national average is around 10%. It's all part of our seedy glamor, I suppose. Desperate people come out here with the last of their savings, their last paycheck, they pawn their jewelry, and they hope to go home millionaires. Of course, they lose it all, and then they kill themselves. It happens, it isn't an exaggeration or an urban legend. I've worked on nights when people have jumped out of windows on high floors.
That very thing is part of why I determined that, when I did off myself, I wasn't going to do it at the hotel where I work. It would add a certain amount of humiliation to my act. We've got a tram, and what has happened in the past is that a person who decided to jump out their window would end up landing on that stupid tram track and then getting hit by a slow-moving people mover. I don't know why the jumpers all end up on that side of the building, either. No one jumps out the pool side, or the side with unencumbered access to the Strip itself. Always on the tram side. It makes me shake my head every time it happens. Inevitably, someone calls the front desk to tell us 'hey, there's a guy on the tram tracks', too. If they miss the tram tracks, it's only because they hit the small balcony that runs around the 8th floor. It's just sad and pathetic. I mean, if you've made up your mind to do it, make a swan dive onto the Strip itself. Interfere with traffic, make a scene.
At the downtown hotel where my late ex-brother-in-law worked, people always jumped off the top floor of the parking garage. I never understood that, either. For one, it's only 3 levels high. For two, they always chose the alley between it & the neighboring parking garage. Which is of course, where the bums pee. You can plainly tell what type of alley it is if you look down. Why leap to your death in what is basically a public toilet?
Of course, all the thoughts I was having lead me to realize that, even as an employee of the hotel, I do not have free-for-all access to the hotel rooms anyway. I could casually meander out to the front desk, find a vacant room on a high floor... and then have to check the room in on the system in order to make keys. I, in my front desk uniform, would be questioned by the security guards at the bottom of the room towers as to why I'd be going, without escort and alone, to a guest room, key or no key. So there would not only be a computer trail of my activity, but a security guard's log notation and of course, countless surveillance tapes. I'd have to rent a hotel room, which offers no more privacy. Everyone knows what I think of hotel rooms & bedbugs, so I'd get endless shit about why I'd even be renting a room in the first place. I'd have to rent another room at a different property, and then it might be a waste because... at our hotel, the security latches on the windows can be dismantled with a screw-driver. It wouldn't be a guaranteed thing any where else. It would involve an entirely cumbersome amount of hassle for what should be a quick and personal deed. I don't know much about what I want from this life, but I do know that I don't want to die at my job. It's just tacky.
I can honestly say that probably for the past 4 days I have not actively thought about suicide. It's strange. Suicide has been a constant mental companion for many months now, and there's this blank space in my thought process. I have to create thoughts about suicide instead of them just being there. I went from planning to just blank paper. I suppose it should be a relief, but it feels weird, like someone mind-wiped me.
Nevada is in America's 'Suicide Belt' (Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, New Mexico, South Dakota, Arizona, Oregon, Colorado and Idaho). We have a high suicide rate, steadily 3rd or 4th in the nation, with a minimum suicide rate of about 19% when the national average is around 10%. It's all part of our seedy glamor, I suppose. Desperate people come out here with the last of their savings, their last paycheck, they pawn their jewelry, and they hope to go home millionaires. Of course, they lose it all, and then they kill themselves. It happens, it isn't an exaggeration or an urban legend. I've worked on nights when people have jumped out of windows on high floors.
That very thing is part of why I determined that, when I did off myself, I wasn't going to do it at the hotel where I work. It would add a certain amount of humiliation to my act. We've got a tram, and what has happened in the past is that a person who decided to jump out their window would end up landing on that stupid tram track and then getting hit by a slow-moving people mover. I don't know why the jumpers all end up on that side of the building, either. No one jumps out the pool side, or the side with unencumbered access to the Strip itself. Always on the tram side. It makes me shake my head every time it happens. Inevitably, someone calls the front desk to tell us 'hey, there's a guy on the tram tracks', too. If they miss the tram tracks, it's only because they hit the small balcony that runs around the 8th floor. It's just sad and pathetic. I mean, if you've made up your mind to do it, make a swan dive onto the Strip itself. Interfere with traffic, make a scene.
At the downtown hotel where my late ex-brother-in-law worked, people always jumped off the top floor of the parking garage. I never understood that, either. For one, it's only 3 levels high. For two, they always chose the alley between it & the neighboring parking garage. Which is of course, where the bums pee. You can plainly tell what type of alley it is if you look down. Why leap to your death in what is basically a public toilet?
Of course, all the thoughts I was having lead me to realize that, even as an employee of the hotel, I do not have free-for-all access to the hotel rooms anyway. I could casually meander out to the front desk, find a vacant room on a high floor... and then have to check the room in on the system in order to make keys. I, in my front desk uniform, would be questioned by the security guards at the bottom of the room towers as to why I'd be going, without escort and alone, to a guest room, key or no key. So there would not only be a computer trail of my activity, but a security guard's log notation and of course, countless surveillance tapes. I'd have to rent a hotel room, which offers no more privacy. Everyone knows what I think of hotel rooms & bedbugs, so I'd get endless shit about why I'd even be renting a room in the first place. I'd have to rent another room at a different property, and then it might be a waste because... at our hotel, the security latches on the windows can be dismantled with a screw-driver. It wouldn't be a guaranteed thing any where else. It would involve an entirely cumbersome amount of hassle for what should be a quick and personal deed. I don't know much about what I want from this life, but I do know that I don't want to die at my job. It's just tacky.
