John Lacey
Over My Shoulder
I watched a man kill himself tonight.
Or rather, I watched a video containing such events.
I found myself on Snopes.com, looking for inspiration for an upcoming video project, and stumbled upon a section in their photograph gallery titled, “Gruesome.”
It is a genuinely surreal thing to behold. And the accompanying text is so eloquently and thoughtfully expressed. It is so removed from the Hollywood gore I’ve come to know (and less spectacularly so) that at first you sort of sit there wondering what exactly happened.
A man, taken into an interrogation room, is presented with a bottle of water. The officer leaves the room, the suspect pulls a gun from inside his pants, puts it to his head and that, as ‘they’ say, was that.
I guess the most engrossing thing for me was how casually, how nonchalantly, he did it. He wasn’t worried. He didn’t seem distressed at all. He didn’t even seem to think about it. It was just grab, position and click.
It has become very apparent to me in recent times that none of us really have any insight into anybody else’s heads.
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