GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #64: ANOTHER MORBID CHILDHOOD MEMORY

The first time I ever learned about hanging someone to death was probably from an old western I'd read as a kid, but when I first SAW it, at least in fictional format, it had to be in a movie. But when I was a kid, they never showed hangings like they really were. They'd just show a guy on a stool with a noose around his neck, and they'd kick the stool out from under him. He'd fall maybe two inches, and then he'd strangle to death on the rope.


When I was a kid, that seemed kind of far fetched. By that point, I'd been so badly abused that I figured it would take a lot more than a rope constricting around my throat to kill me. I'd had hands around my neck, cutting off my gas, a few times by then. Being of a scientific mind, I decided to experiment a little.


Keep in mind, I was eight at the time. I wasn't familiar with the laws of gravity just yet.


Anyway, I took a jump rope to the playground when everyone was gone, and I tied one end to the top of the monkey bars. I tied the other end around my neck. I waited a moment, and then I let myself swing.


My first instinct was to grab the bar and pull myself up, but I had to stop myself because that wasn't a part of my scientific method. I let myself hang like that, and to be fair, it hurt a lot. After a mere five seconds (although it felt longer), I knew that if I did this long enough, I would die. So I stopped. I noted it in my psycho-child notebook and moved on. It wasn't until years later that I discovered that there was a certain drop to a hanging. By that point, I totally got it. I would never pull a scientific experiment like that, not even as a first grader.


Here's the fucked up thing, though: I did this in broad daylight, and while there was no one at the playground, there were at least five houses nearby, where if anyone looked out their front window, they would have seen me doing this. No one stopped me. Either I tried this in different times, when no one gave a shit if a kid died, so long as it was not their business, or my neighbors were okay with me perishing in such a stupid manner.


I must have been a shitty kid.