PHOENIX– Ethan Sexson, a 16-year-old self-described “failure of a human being” who prides himself on his individuality, is planning to commit suicide as soon as he can work out an original way to carry it out.
“I really consider myself my own man—I don't just accept things the way they are because everyone else does,” he explains. “And I'm not going to kill myself like everyone else does.”
After years of self-loathing, shortcomings in his social and academic lives, and “the revelation that nothing in the end matters, as we are but a purposeless blip in the grand course of existence,” Sexson decided three weeks ago that he is going to commit suicide, but only once a unique vision of the process is reached.
“I've thought about some pretty unusual stuff,” he recalls. “I thought maybe I'd go down to the Grand Canyon and just drive into it at top speed. But someone's probably done that already. Then I started combining methods—I could shoot myself in the head just before I fly into the Canyon, for example.”
Sexson, though, soon realized the inherent trespassing of his principles such a plan would incur.
“But I'd just be rehashing old ways of suicide, and making them look new. I'm not into ‘sampling’—I want to be innovative.”
The ambitious teen has, perhaps tragically, begun to believe compromise may be the only means of arriving at an acceptable suicide plot.
"If that f*cking kid doesn't turn his act around right now, I swear to God he's going to military school."
“Everything's been done, basically,” he explains. “I mean, guns, slitting wrists, overdosing, hanging—all of it's out of the question. So, I'm just going to have to kill myself in a pedestrian way, but put a new twist on it. Sort of like paying homage to a classic while still progressing toward new ideas.”
Sexson has narrowed his decision down to a handful of candidates.
“At the top of my list right now is a pretty expensive one, but I'll be dead, so what do I care?” he says. “I'm going to drive to the coast with an explosive device, rent a boat, drive it out into the middle of the ocean, and blow myself up. So I'll just vanish. Pretty clever, I think. And I'll have my stereo set to start blasting ‘I Disappear’ by Metallica like a week after I'm gone. Confounding, fresh, decidedly not mainstream.”
“They say genius is rarely understood,” said Sexson's one friend, a fellow classmate. “Ethan's sticking with it, though. He's about his principles, his pursuit challenging ideas and rejection of pop culture cookie cutter bullshit. When he's gone, we'll all say, ‘Now that dude killed himself.’”
