Tonight I fell back into the gaping pit of despair and insanity. It was like the other night, but louder, with more door-slamming and flinging my body about. I was gripped by a desire to kill myself so strong it was as if some sort of gremlin had hopped up onto my chest and was poised with a coathanger ready to tear out my throat.

I seemed to be dying already, drowning in unbreatheable air, hopelessness and despair coming in my nostrils, filling my lungs, killing me, slowly but certainly killing me. I was inert, then. I could not move.

From this inertia, I thought, perhaps, before plunging the knife into my throat, that making a list of reasons to live might be useful. It was difficult to reach out of the apathy of dyingness to extend my energy in the direction of life-oriented pursuits, but Andre helped. She sat me up, helped me turn on my computer and get going. I made the following list of 150 reasons I might like to keep living. It was spread out over a couple of hours and I've posted it here across a few pages.

It really did cheer me up and turn around my real and true desire to turn myself in. Even though lots of my reasons for living seemed a little shallow or insubstantial to me. It's okay. Better a shallow, insubstantial reason to live than no reason to live at all, don't you think?

This experiment was so wildly successful for me, I do think I’d recommend it to just about anyone else. If you’ve hit the bottom and your jaw is hard against the cold concrete before you take the pills or slash the wrist or throat or load your head full of bullets, just take a minute and write down or type up or say out loud as many things as you can think of that make you happy, that seem worth living for. No matter how big or small.

Anyway, here are the first fifty things that kept me alive tonight:

1. Potato latkes

2. Paris, France – and the fact that I’ve never been there and I’ve always wanted to go there

3. Ice cream and sherbet and gelato

4. July 26 (my birthday)

5. Mangoes

6. Cunnilingus

7. Katharine Hepburn movies

8. Buffy the Vampire Slayer

9. Star Trek: Nemesis –which hasn’t come out yet (If I don't keep living, I won't get to see it.)

10. New Year’s in Copacabana

11. Ani Difranco concerts

12. Sweet Honey in the Rock Concerts

13. Rent, the musical

14. Young Forest

15. The Yuba River

16. Canoeing

17. Babies

18. Christmas day

19. The Lord of the Rings (the movie—last year’s and the one that hasn’t come out yet)

20. Bonfires

21. Singing with other people

22. Outings with my sweet love

23. Tales of the City

24. Really good poems

25. My godfather

26. My grandmother

27. My younger cousins

28. Hot humid nights

29. Warm ocean water

30. San Francisco, California

31. Berkeley, California

32. The Lake Merritt area of Oakland, CA

33. Burlington, Vermont

34. Seattle, Washington

35. Chicago, Illinois

36. New York City

37. Broadway

38. Central Park

39. Apple cider

40. Fuyu persimmons

41. Pictures with my girlfriend where we’re kissing

42. Kittens

43. Nonviolent Communication

44. The Theatre

45. All of Lloyd Alexander’s books

46. Harry Potter

47. Philip Pullman’s Golden Compass trilogy

48. The X-Men

49. Big wide open stretches of sky

50. Dancing