_ I am bothered by the fact that news organizations refuse to print anything about suicide, so I would like to give some space, and some of my life for that matter, to the topic. The purpose of this blog entry is to help me formalize a plan to create an arts endowment, or a trust of some kind for suicide prevention. But first, an explanation.

This past March, on of my closest friends, Jonathan Wheby, took his own life. The effect he had on me and many of his friends in life was so deep that my wife, Courtney, and I considered him to be blood. Family. As did many of his friends. He shared his love, learning, emotions and angst with all of us in a way that made the people close to him acutely aware of their own need to grow. His constant questioning of societal standards gave him an ability to justify breaking rules while holding others accountable to what he believed to be an acceptable standard.

And now, in death, his influence on my life is still as strong, or perhaps even stronger than it was when he was a part of my living family. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about Wheby; where he is, what he did or why he did it.

The following paragraphs are a eulogy of sorts that I wrote for the celebration of Jonathan’s life that his custom built family held for him last March. I have deemed the “thank you for coming” part unnecessary, and therefore omitted the opening paragraphs. Skip the eulogy if you just want to find out what my hopes are for the trust.

Celebration of the Life of Jonathan Wheby

Jonathan left us all with a palpable amount of uncertainty. We are all questioning why he would leave us as he did, and whether or not there was anything we could do to help. Whenever anyone we love leaves this world, we want to hold ourselves responsible for not saying the right thing at the right time; not doing enough to help; not diagnosing a problem correctly or quickly enough or a host of other feelings we wish we could have projected or communicated to that person.  And when a friend, a friend with so much love as Jonathan, makes a conscious decision to depart from the physical world, these feelings are even stronger.

I address this foremost today because we all need to share our love together and know in our hearts that though Jonathan believed he was no longer necessary in our lives, we all did all we could to let him know that we loved him, needed him and wanted him in our worlds. We are human in our selfish need for answers to the question why, and our strange need for closure, though we can become selfless in sharing this need with each other, and combining our intellectual power to overcome these feelings of guilt. It is love that makes us human, and misguided love that drove Jonathan to his belief that he was a burden instead of a blessing.

Wheby truly was a blessing. As infuriating as he could be in his stubbornness, no person here can say that he didn’t do more with his huge smile as he would defiantly bounce forward and push the big, red INDEPENDENT THINKING button repeatedly than anyone who followed the rules with a blank stare.

Wheby, in fact, had such a unique way of working, loving and sharing, that the name Wheby became a verb with a more than a few definitions.

To Wheby while building something meant to overbuild it to the point that it either had to be totally destroyed to be rebuilt, or the plan completely altered to accommodate the Whebyed design. The Wheby Construction plan was to measure once, cut twice, begin swearing, buy a new piece of wood, measure again, cut again, smile, swear some more, glue it, nail it, then screw it together. Repeat until bomb-proof.

To Wheby in love, meant something different to each one of us. Sometimes To Wheby love hurt so much that forgiveness seemed unobtainable. Yet, somehow he would Wheby his way back into the broken heart using the glue, nail, screw method to leave a permanent scar, but mended beautifully. To me, Wheby Love meant that I never had to ask for help, never had to ask for understanding and never had to wonder, until now, if he would be there. In fact, many of us know that when Wheby adopted you as family, knocking on the door or ringing the doorbell became unnecessary. And why should he knock, he was a part of the family, right?

The negative definition of To Wheby is the one that even Jonathan had to use more than once, and one that endured him to our hearts through proof of his human faults.  He understood it as we all understand it. His cabin in the desert was the perfect example of Whebying something the wrong way. It stands today as a thing of beauty. Glued, screwed and nailed to perfection… 50 feet off the wrong side of the property line. To Wheby was to do something so well, so beautifully, so lasting and so… 50 feet off, that even he couldn’t help but laugh at the Whebyness of it.

 

The Idea

 

The last paragraph of the eulogy is the beginning of the plan for my idea. This is still in the planning stages, and there is plenty of room to alter or enhance the plan, so please respond if you have ideas or wish to help.

A little background in necessary first. Wheby purchased just under 50 acres in the desert outside Masadona, Colorado in the early 2000s. The land is in a valley called Skull Creek and lies about 20 miles east of Dinosaur National Monument. He constructed a cabin (on his neighbor’s property) as a sanctuary for him and his friends. He intended it as a communal cabin for inspiration, health, exploration and a getaway from the daily grind. One of the driving forces behind Wheby’s suicide was that he constructed his getaway on someone else’s property; someone who became unwilling to work with him in correcting this problem. He lost his sanctuary shortly after losing much more than he had been willing to lose. That is another story altogether, and I will write that story in book form in the very near future.

Before Wheby walked off into the desert to take his own life, he signed his property over to me. I have been trying to come up with a way to honor Wheby through this gift ever since Courtney and I received the quit claim deed in the mail last March. A plan has surfaced this week and now the process of making it a reality begins.

I would like to create an artist retreat in Wheby’s name on Wheby’s property that benefits suicide prevention and the families and friends who have lost loved ones to suicide. I would then like to put this land and structure in a trust for future generations to enjoy.

I choose to believe that Wheby left me the land because he knew I would fulfill his vision of a community asset, and I believe this to be the very best way to provide a testament to Jonathan’s love of art and life. And he did have a zest for life that was ever apparent to all whose lives he touched, and this is just one of the things that makes suicide so unpredictable and painful to those of us who have either attempted, thought seriously about, or survived someone who followed through with the act.

Please enjoy this poem, The Spiral, which Jonathan loved, and even quoted in his suicide note. I wrote it in a time when I was feeling a little suicidal but had a great group of friends and family to help me through the rough spots.

 Here I begin the critical task of reviewing a five movie series based on a four book series of novels that I have never read, nor that I plan on reading. I have watched three of the four movies that have been released, and plan on watching the fourth and fifth, but not if I actually have to forfeit any of my hard earned money to view this abomination. The premise of the series alone is enough to make me puke, and now I will explain why.

The Twilight Saga.

I first learned about the novels when I was flying to Michigan to visit my in-laws. Sky Magazine printed an interview with the author that actually piqued my interest in the books for about as long as it took me read the interview. My wife and I read the article together, discussed our opinions on how the books may read, and decided that a Mormon woman imposing Mormon morals in writing about a vampire love story may be scary. My wife, much braver than I, read the entire series in less time than it took her to read the last Harry Potter novel. It was settled, we would watch the movies as they came available on DVD.

The comedy for me began just about as quickly as all of the characters were introduced in the first movie. My feelings from the interview in Sky Magazine were amplified and I began to laugh as the serious nature of the relationship between the feminist nightmare of a teenage victim, Bella, and the panty moistening girl-dream of an immortal, sparkling, day-walking, faux vampire named Edward materialized. I began to understand. This was a comedy.

First of all, since when can a vampire walk in sunlight? Really? Sparkling golden pasty skinned honkey vampires who can cruise at top speed through forests and leap over giant redwoods in a single bound? I know I’m bringing too much of the literal world into play here, but UV rays are not entirely filtered out by the clouds, and therefore, those little sparkles would be present under any UV A or UV B lighting. Clouds included.

Second, having lived in the Pacific Northwest for the better part of a decade, I can state with conviction that the amount of sunlight is greatly underrated. There may be an unusually high number of days with clouds, but not enough for a sun-scared sparkly bloodsucker to make it school enough days to maintain a grade point average high enough not to get booted into the alternative school, or kicked out altogether.

This is just scraping the tip of the iceberg of my disgust with the treatment of honest vampires in literature throughout the ages. Shall I start a list? You bet!

Vampires cannot walk in daylight, clouds or no.

Vampires are not sparkly, pretty creatures. Though they may be good looking and permanently youthful, their power comes from persuasion, not from being all athletic, sparkly and hot.

Vampires are pasty, white, vein ridden night dwellers who manipulate the living. They are cold because they are dead.

Vampires kill people for food. They require blood from humans to survive because, as I said before, they’re dead.

Vampires have superhuman strength. Maybe someone could take an artistic license and give them super fast speed powers, or jumping powers, but in my time, vampires turned into bats.

Let me repeat that fact: Vampires turn into bats. Creepy, scary bats. They don’t just materialize in your bedroom to have some hot, teenage make-out session while waiting for marriage for the sex part; they fly into your room as a bat to suck your blood and kill you, virgin or not. Just saying.

Vampires do not have morals. They kill. They do not, and I repeat again, DO NOT wait for marriage to have sex. Vampires have sex with other vampires, if they have sex at all.

This brings us to the most tragic aspect of the entire series: birth. Let’s just review this one simple fact, the fact that vampires are dead. The only way to create a new vampire is to feed from the living and then feed the victim vampire blood. No amount of dead vampire semen can produce spawn. Period.

Coupled with this fact is the fact that vampires do not age. How then, could a vampire baby grow? Even if the vampire was able to cause a mortal woman to conceive, how would the half-breed grow if half of its genetics were flawed to the point of death? Remember the part where vampires are dead? Maybe this is explained in the fourth movie that I haven’t seen yet, but I’m sure the explanation, if there is one, is far from adequate.

Okay, I could go on about this for a while longer, but instead, I will change topics and talk about Bella, and how her pining for the dead is a disgrace to women of all ages. Let’s start with the “Oh Edward, I can’t live without you,” statement. You are correct, Bella, he will kill you. When you become a vampire, you will be the living dead.

Then let’s give the old “But I love you more” statement an overview. Why are you mackin’ on a werewolf, slut? Do you want to be dog food or undead food? Decide. I’d pick the dog if I were you; dogs are warm and loyal, vampires are cold, dead killers. Stay away. You are taking a large stride backwards in the equality movement by playing the indecisive victim of love.

This is all moot, really. I didn’t touch nearly as deeply as I had wished on the Bella/feminist issue, but this review is becoming a lot longer than I had intended. My biggest problem is with the abuse of artistic license by inflicting morals on a literary icon as deeply ingrained in our culture as the vampire.

I’ll give the series to date a rating of ½ stars out of five, though the camp value is worth at least four to me.

_  I had to do it. I knew damn good and well that it was high time to start blogging, so here it is:

 

It’s 10 o’clock and I’m tired. I must be getting old.

 

Are you satisfied? I’m not. In fact, I feel a little let down. I had planned on spewing something profound, but no. I’ll get back here in no time with a tasty little review of the Twilight movies. I definitely have something to say about them, and trust me, it won’t please those who love that trash.