don't knock it till you try it: the death drive

"You know how when you're on the freeway, and you suddenly have that overwhelming urge to just yank the steering wheel to the left and crash across the median into oncoming traffic?"

My classmate stared at me. "No, I don't," she said.

This was in high school, and we'd been discussing something innocuous like our after-school jobs. Mine was at a coffee shop in south Minneapolis, and I had to drive super fast on crosstown in order to get there in time for my daily 4 p.m. shift. It was during these often-reckless drives that I started to notice my death-and-destruction fantasies. The most common one had to do with "crashing through New Jersey barriers" (I swear the fantasy preceded that Magnetic Fields song). Other times, a tire would blow as I went through a turn, sending me spiraling into a ditch. Once in awhile I'd be victimized by an idiot in a pickup truck who would cut my off, screeching to a stop in front of me, and as my car slammed into his my steering column would magnificently crash through my ribcage. (My Ford Probe didn't have an airbag.)

Maybe "fantasy" isn't the right word for these daydreams. But whatever you want to call them, they didn't seem so unusual to me. I certainly didn't think they might point to "deeper issues" (Was I secretly suicidal? Did I have a martyr complex?). On the contrary, they seemed relatively normal to me, and were oddly sort of comforting.

And as the years have passed, the fantasies have only become richer. For example, I was recently biking home in the dark on a busy street. The city had just laid down a bunch of loose gravel, so the route was a little treacherous. I could see it so clearly: my tires catching unfortunately on the gravel, sending me tipping over into traffic. My shoulder bashing into the street. A cell phone-talking blond driving her Malibu right over my neck...

Or this: I am on my lunch hour at my job, walking around a suburban lake (which of course has a highway running alongside it). As I trudge along, obsessing about the life choices (or lack thereof) that have brought me here, a passing Cadillac Escalade goes out of control, flying off the road and right into me, knocking me out of my shoes.

After all, we're all going to die someday, right?

No matter how emotionally stable I think I am at any given time, all it takes is a few moments of "mindfulness" about my thought patterns to make me realize that, more often than not, I'm actually plotting out my next horrific accident (hot tar burns and a severed Achilles tendon probably not being enough for one life). What I've been trying to figure out is--is that so bad?

The reaction of my high school classmate would indicate that it probably is. So for years I have largely kept these thoughts to myself. Then I read Foreskin's Lament by Shalom Auslander, and he described a very similar thing. The death fantasies I remember from his book primarily revolved around other people, but were very similar in tone. For example, he described being stuck in traffic when an ambulance went racing past him, off into the distance. Suddenly he was overcome with the knowledge that the ambulance was for his pregnant wife, who had just been involved in a horrible accident just up around the corner--the good life he thought he had, suddenly shattered for all time...

Reading this made me feel much better about things. After all, Shalom Auslander wrote a really great and funny book about self-loathing and death obsession--that girl from high school is probably assistant-managing a temp agency or something right now, totally feeling at ease with herself.