I received news today that an aquaintance committed suicide a couple of weeks back. He bought a ticket from Australia to America, backpacked to San Francisco and leapt off the Golden Gate bridge.No one knew about the meticulous planning which went into this ultimate trip until someone uncovered his blog. It contains a spiffy page called 'FAQ About Stephen's Suicide". Through the tried and tested FAQ format he explains very clearly and calmly about his careful planning, his long-term suicidal tendencies and about how he wants his worldy goods divided.

I'm going to discuss this with people tomorrow and post the site if people feel like its OK. Anyhoo, this guy lived practically all his life in his own private trance - he says he's wanted to die, practically from the time he was first aware of being alive. He never really lived with a clear head. He never learned to care about love, or emotion, or anything because he was just obsessed with his personal film-script and his desire to die young and leave a good looking corpse.

What with Easter being just a day away and the air being full of the strange, pre-holiday angst of trip-planning, trying to sneak off a day early, anticipating many, many hours in bad traffic cooped up with people you both love and hate in equal measure, I've been thinking about human beings and the trances we live in.

It all started with this morning's traffic jam and the insane auto-ballet which left little shiny, tinkly bits of wreckage all along my route. Lee and I agreed that there was something very unpleasant about the day and promptly cancelled a whole set of plans to do with singers and auditions and a lot of other stuff. He drove home to hide in the air conditioning and noodle on the electric, I sauntered into the office, slid quietly into my cubby and kept my pretty head low, lest any low-flying angst chop my head off. What we wanted was to make sure we were both going to be awake, alive and not potential victims of someone else's crazy trance-state.

A few streets away, in her office, the Teen Groove Goddess had carefully dressed in vacant-slut-chic for a lunch date with a bunch of freshmen from the Arts School. But alas she was ditched, big time because one of the boy's girlfriends had just been told she wouldn't be able to have children (she's 16 for heaven's sake - who CARES at 16?) and everyone was in the thrall of depressed, teenage-angst trance. TGG herself is occasionally prone to teen-crazy, but even she could see that this was some kind of weird mass-wank-off on the borrowed pseudo-misery of someone else.

Back in my office, three (count 'em) people quit today out of sheer frustration and disgust with our managers. Several others threatened to shoot people, shoot themselves or commit acts of terrorism - also out of disgust with the management. I slumped yet lower in my chair and watched the dark clouds floating over the rest of the crew and logged onto the net to catch up with the latest score in the Schiavo case.

When I last looked it was the bottom of the seventh and the bases were loaded against Teri's Mom and Pop. On this side of the world we're very carefully avoiding talking to each other about this. From here the issues seems pretty clear. The poor woman isn't going to get any better. Families are at odds, partly out of sentiment, partly about money - but the issue has been hijacked by people who need it to be about morality.

We think its wrong to starve and dehydrate a person to death, but have very little issue with placing her in an induced coma to prevent her suffering and allowing her to die with dignity. But a whole LOT of people completely uninvolved in Mrs Schiavo's life are weeping and wailing and feudin' an' fightin' about something which has nothing to do with them. Mass hysteria and mass trance.

At the same time, the civilian death toll in Iraq reached 100,000 this week. It was also the first week that an ordinary Iraqi shop owner and his family became the first people to open fire on a posse of masked gunmen to prevent themselves becoming statistics in the cross-fire of a terror-attack. One man stepped out of his trance and suddenly the world became different.

I've gotta say, 100,000 dead civilians seems a whole lot more important to me than one woman's sadly approaching death. Funny how the column inches stack up though - the Schiavo case is on every front page on the planet, and on every TV bulletin and in an awful lot of blogs - the dead Iraqi civilians seem to have passed most folks by.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Prince Rainier of Monaco is dying, Pope John Paul is dying, and a strange Spaniard who is regarded by Spanish Catholics as THE Pope just died. Once upon a time people would have expected comets and dragons and stars in the heavens if so many heavy-hitters died in the same week. But we're just fixated on our Terri Schiavo trance and late-night lawmaking on-the-fly.
(In charity, I guess there is ONE thing to be said for this Schiavo thing. It means that a big percentage of the world's population is all thinking, fretting and deciding things about the same issue at the same time. Its a bit like the entire globe taking a dose of moral Metamucil.)

One of the most important things I ever learned was that most people spend practically their whole lives in one trance or another. Think about the average person's day. The alarm goes off, they stagger from bed, shower, eat and go through all the rituals of getting out of the house. They do the same thing every day, unthinking. Then its the driving trance (closely related to the rush hour trance and the traffic jam trance). Then its the work-trance, the lunch trance, the trip-home trance, the dinner and TV and bed trances, then sleep.

Now, tell the truth, have you ever gone through all or part of a work day on auto-pilot? You turned up where you were supposed to, did what they paid you to do and left again, and you weren't really there for any of it? Think about the drive to and from work. How far can you drive without actually being aware of where you are and what you're doing? See - you're in a trance.

This morning, around 10:30 I thought I'd run downstairs to the local coffee place, grab a cup of joe and go straight back to the desk. But as I paid and picked up the styrofoam cup I realised I wasn't really paying attention. I stopped, I asked for a proper cup and saucer, I took my coffee out into the garden in front of the building and I sat down.

For 15 minutes I chose to be alive. I listened to the birds and the wind in the trees. I looked at the faces of people in the street. I read the signs on buildings. I watched folks in the nearby high-rise apartments going about their morning rituals - eating breakfast, putting washing on the clothes-horse, watering the balcony plants, zipping in and out of doors in their underwear because they thought nobody could see them. I was awake and alert and fully, fully alive.

I'll bet Stephen had a moment of LIFE when he climbed over the low rail on the Golden Gate and stood there looking down at the water. I bet he felt the breeze, squinted against the sunlight bouncing off the sea, felt the shake and rumble of the bridge-cable as the traffic thundered past. I'll bet he was 100% awake and alive as he stepped into the clear air and had his last conscious thoughts on earth. The only thing I can hope is that those final thoughts were something like," Yes! THIS is what life is like...."