Stare at the wall. That's right. You might as well smoke. I'll give you four minutes outside until the creeping feeling abates. What is that feeling in your throat, that insistent and itching heartbeat? Have you flipped over into alcohol dependence? How would you know? If you went to the doctor, the saga (or some saga) would begin. God knows where you would end up? You're too scared to go and get nicotine gum prescriptions for the same reason. Imagine going to those 'Cessation Classes'! What a nightmare. The drinking thing would be worse. It would have to be. You wouldn't be able to handle sitting in a ring with a bunch of red-faced, chainsmoking people, listening to their stories, waitning for the moment to spill your own. You might even have to hug them.
Good. Back from your smoke. Do you feel better? Or just not as bad? Does it make you think of Bob Dylan's line from his 80's epic Brownsville Girl: I feel pretty good but that ain't saying much/I could feel a whole lot better! ? It should. What's wrong with you? There's sweat dripping down your side, straight from your armpit. So much of it it doesn't even roll down your ribs. That must be the espresso. Or the cravings. Or the humidity. Or something.

What your doing is sick. And that's not just what I think. I've opened the issue out to other people. They think so too. All of them. It's clear to us. We didn't need to sit in a ring and explore our feelings about it. It was just there.

You can't collect peoples' suicide letters into a three-hundred-and-sixty-five-day diary and present them for publication. It's exploitative. It's grimy. You'll be villified by the press, by the people. And that'll be the liberals. Imagine how they'll deal with you from the Mail to the Star! Your life, launched career or not, will be dirt. They'll blame you for every suicide flashpoint in the country's history for the next five years. Imagine the dreams you'll have. If you're suffering morning guilts about all your past relationships now, imagine how this will come up on your screen! And for what?

And what happens if you collect three hundred and sixty-five of these things and discover that they're all saying, at bottom, the same thing? That won't work. Or it could, I suppose. But it'll just be boring. A boring failure which is still disgusting.