Anyone who wants to be put to death should just die.

7 PM Saturday 8 September 2012 Nunhead Heights.

That guy was fighting to die in the UK – Tony Nicklinson – taking it all the way to the High Court for his right to have a doctor kill him. Then he up and dies proving that if you want something done right you do it yourself.

What a bore the dude was.

When I was a kid in New York in the 1960s I heard that Indian religious people could raise and lower their heart rates and their blood pressure through their own thoughts.

There was a debate in the medical establishment if this was true. It’s common knowledge now but in the 1960s many considered it unbelievable. The circulatory system was part of the “autonomic nervous system” – the involuntary part of your body. And it operated on it’s own – which is what they believed.

I have raging high blood pressure. Why? I’m an angry little man. My veins are popping under the pressure of my seething moods. Or maybe the muscles around my veins are angry? Either way.

I take pills to lower my blood pressure which has made me nearly impotent. I could take a deeper breaths and decide not to get so upset and it would work just as well. Probably better. I don’t cause I’m lazy.

We know how one’s thoughts and moods control one’s body. Or one’s body controls one’s thoughts and moods. Or that there isn’t a line between one’s body and one’s mind. We’ve all turned very Eastern.

Same thing with dying.

If Tony Nicklinson was really so unhappy living with ‘locked-in’ syndrome he would have just croaked. Closed his eyes and stopped breathing. Simple.

Like those enmeshed married couples: When one dies the other follows suit.

He wouldn’t have needed to stop eating or visit Dignitas in Switzerland or have a local doctor give him some poison. What a horrible position to put someone in – to make them murder you.

The State cannot stop someone from dying. If it could, I would sign up for that
Tony Nicklinson should have just died and been done with it.

Or just admit to himself that he was in a new phase of his life. Other people would do things for him and he would have to enjoy looking at the world. He should have just gotten used to it and put a smile on his face. Okay, he couldn’t smile on the outside.

Instead, he wasted his last years being chronic whinger and a boring litigant. Moaning. Suing. Moaning. Suing. Moaning. Suing.

And that is Tony Nicklinson’s legacy.

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