My initial reaction to Jonghyun's suicide may have been typical and normative, but those weren't the first thoughts I had about it. He died in the evening. Taiwan is an hour behind Korea, so I read the news after I got home for the evening, very soon after it broke in Korea. My first independent thought was a sadness-tinged, "He won't be going to sleep in his own bed tonight".

As news broke and sent shockwaves through the K-pop world in Korea and beyond, he was probably already lying in a hospital morgue covered with a sheet, not yet cold, rigor mortis yet to set in. No, he wouldn't be climbing into his own bed tonight with whatever he did and accomplished that day, with whatever demons he carried, with tomorrow's schedules and responsibilities still a night's sleep away.

He won't be going to sleep in his own bed tonight, like I will.

There's this word that has a common meaning, but my exposure to it is in the psychiatric field as, I think, a term of art. Ideation. All it means is the creation of an idea, really just a fancy, fairly useless word for thinking, but in regard to suicide it signifies a whole envisioning and fulfillment of the act. Ideation is a necessary step towards suicide.

A fundamental flaw in my ideation is that there isn't any not crawling into bed at night. Getting to bed every night has been an unconscious existential ordeal in its own way for I don't know how long. It only appears as such when I look hard at it. Every day the conveyor belt of getting from day to day culminates in going to sleep in my own bed every night.

The conveyor belt is a list of useless things I'll plan to do any day, blocks of time when I'll uselessly go where to uselessly do what, rinse and repeat, ultimately with the ideation of my bed at the end of the day. It doesn't serve committing suicide very well, does it? It just perpetuates uselessness.

I need to get rid of the idea of the conveyor belt even as I'm carried along on it. No idea how, that was reasonably zen. I have to get it out of my mind that crawling into my own bed as an ideated goal is necessarily desirable. At the root of the problem is being a creature of habit as long as things aren't going wrong. Doing the same things day after day because they're tried, true and safe. That's complacency. There is no value in that. I'm stuck in it.