So I suppose i should tell you how I came to jump off the bridge — i keep not doing that.

My girlfriend, who lived in Ottawa, had unceremoniously dumped me — through a dear John letter, no less — and so i had decided to kill myself. (I know, right … get a life.) And by this point, I was a true Cornellian; so the proper way to kill myself was to jump off the bridge.

Typical of the early 1990s, i wasn’t confiding my difficulties in anyone … let alone actually seeking help. Nobody paid much attention to how i was doing, believe me — i gave them no reason to.

What might’ve been a clue is that i wrote a story for my Creative Writing class about a kid who jumped off a dock high dock at low tide in order to die, but it was the early 90s and a lot of the short stories were probably a little violent or gruesome. I probably should’ve just made a little more of an effort to talk to this Creative Writing teacher more — i was very attracted to her, but not confident enough to meet with her outside of class.

Ironically, i became a lot more confident after the whole jumping-off-the-bridge thing. And i purposely ran into that same teacher during a book signing in 2013 and joked with her about having a big crush on her as a student. She seemed very not-available in 1992, and even more-so in 2013 (with young kids) — and very successful, with more books and a teaching gig at Boston College.

There’s nothing significant in the details of a failed young romance. Happens all the time. Hey, at least it earned me mention in the Wikipedia article titled Cornell Gorge Suicides — the first survivor off of the main suicide bridge.

So here i am, still going.

I promised myself that i would put together a second book out of these blog entries, a sequel to anomaly (2001) that i was going to call Better Off.