So you're thinking about committing suicide.

That is, I figure you probably are if you're reading this, judging by the e-mail I get every day.

I obviously can't change your mind about this and you'd have no reason to listen to me even if I tried, BUT a person can screw up a suicide just like anything else and so I offer this guide on how to do it right. Yes, it does matter. This is the act that everyone will remember about you forever and ever. So, before you go rushing into it...

The following is a true story. I knew a girl in High School named Skyler. One day, not long after her 17th birthday, she got fed up with life and swallowed a whole bottle of pills. I would go into why, but we never knew why. All she left behind was a squiggly suicide note, scrawled in a tearful rage on the back of an Arby's receipt.

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To make things worse, the devastating last line of her note, "I'M FINISHED WITH YOUR SHIT" was put down so sloppily that her family read it as, "I'M FAMISHED FOR MORE SHIT."

The family thus were led to believe that Skyler suffered from Coprophilia, or a fetish for eating human feces. And since death is no time to judge a person, Skyler's mother and father and three brothers openly embraced what they believed to be their beloved's love affair with poo. Who knows, maybe it was her shame over this unusual habit that pushed her over the edge. So they went public with the note, outing their poop-loving daughter to the community as to shed light on those still persecuted.

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Skyler's classmates rallied around her memory, condemning the fecalphobes who they figured had taunted her as she took repeated trips to life's turd buffet. A memorial service was held in our school gym two days later and first up to the podium was little Kim Wittaker (a teammate on Skyler's dance team), who read this poem dedicated to her memory:

Skyler,

with your newfound wings,

you can fly high-ler

you'll have the poop pile of kings

and a golden poop piler

wherever you're at,

you have phat scat sat near the fat scat vat

we miss you

At this point, Principal Clark unveiled an airbrush painting by award-winning art student Cody Gunderson, which would honor Skyler's memory by forever hanging in the main entranceway of the school.

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Do you get the point? Skyler didn't plan to fail. She just failed to plan. So before you get down to business, here's three things you need to think through. It won't take long:

1. Where Do You Go From Here?

I had a friend who worked as a cook at Denny's and hated it. On his feet and tossing salads all day. So he decides to rob the place, figuring he can take the money and start a new life. Instead he gets caught and goes to prison, where he winds up doing kitchen duty all day and tossing salads all night.

What I'm trying to say is that depending on where you end up, you could find yourself in the exact same bullshit you're in now. Most of us sit around the campfire late at night and talk about the afterlife as a distant, vague thing but you, if you do the suicide you're actually going to be there in a few minutes. So we have to stop talking about the afterworld as a shadowy hypothetical and start talking in terms of an actual place where you'll actually be before your next Birthday.

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There are really only two popular views on the afterlife, the religious view and the nonreligious one. Now I don't know what you believe and I don't particularly care, so we'll just examine each possibility equally.

Afterlife Possibility A: Hell or something like it

If Christians are right, you can expect Hell. The best picture of Hell we have is from Italian author Dante Alighieri, who 700 years ago took a trip through Hell and then wrote an unreadable book about it.

His picture of Hell is about what you'd expect, in that there are different levels of hellness depending on what kind of an asshole you were. If you're surprised that suicides wind up in Hell at all, you have to understand that the bitch about suicide is that under the Christian scheme, it qualifies as murder. Dante's Hell has the suicide cases living in a suburb of murdererville.