Whenever anything falls unassisted off a shelf or a countertop in our house, Tevye or I will announce, “Inanimate suicide!”
In our upstairs library I keep an old stuffed monkey I’ve had since I was a boy; his name is Monkey, and he sits on a shelf with my Emily Kimbrough hardcovers. And Monkey is the single most suicidal object in our house.
He looks pretty happy.
I’m not sure what Monkey has to be so unhappy about, but he throws himself off that bookshelf about once a month. I’ve never actually seen him do it, but I often find him splayed, facedown, on the library floor. “Goodbye, cruel worrrrrrrld!” I always imagine him shrieking, jungle-like, as he plummets.
Apparently, he is not.
Tevye has a theory about why Monkey is so deep in the depths of despair. “I think it’s because he was manufactured in Ohio,” he always says.
Thing I Hate Today: Emily Kimbrough is forgotten
I Love Everything 
THIS is my favorite post ever.
also i want to wallow in your books
I’m imaging a chalk outline around him for the CSI folks.
I meant to write imagining. My wireless keyboard sometimes skips a letter or two.
I bet it is the spirits of the real monkeys that used to live in that room in the 90s when those creepy tweeker people owned the house. They are most likely knocking him off the shelf because he has a nicer life then they did and they’re jealous.
Wow, Kim. I never thought about that — funny theory. That’s the very room where the former owners of the house kept the many live monkeys who lived here.
I remember Emily Kimbrough! I have a shelf similar to yours; I believe you contributed a couple of volumes, for which I am still grateful.
I love you.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzz…
I do remember Emily Kimbrough, because my high school did the stage version of Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, but I did not know until I read this that she wrote so many books. (Because I was in college before I realized that the existence of a play based on a book often indicates the existence of multiple books one could read.)
Lou was also manufactured in Ohio. This explains his disposition. Nice post.
Your spouse introduced me to the concept when we were in college. We witnessed many suicides of intimate objects together…
Get all paranormal and set up some of that fancy stuff with temperature gauges and night vision and record it until you note activity.
Then put it on Youtube.