Two-page article about Columbine from the UK’s “Real Crime”-magazine, which I happened to stumble upon accidentally while I was in London not too long ago.

Do you think Dylan was lost? I mean he was away from reality? He eyes were so empty…

Dylan chose to commit suicide at age seventeen, but also elected to participate in a plan that could have leveled a part of his school to the ground and should have killed dozens of people. The fragmented pieces we have acquired of his behaviour that day speak of elation, release, joy, and letting go. There is wonder in some people’s words at how much Dylan seemed to enjoy himself during the massacre. There is a shock in the description of the never-seen basement tapes, where “Klebold is monstrous”, that inadvertently counters the gospel on Columbine. There is horror amid the quiet love declarations in his journal, where it can perhaps be argued that his greatest flirtation was never with the living but always with the concept of Death and After-Life.

I think that these final moments, these final years, speak of loss more than they do anything else. It’s not a loss that is too far removed from reality. It’s not the kind of loss that is solely represented by emptiness, though the sense of longing he acutely vocalises is always tinged with an awareness of not being “full”.. or of being “full” in all the wrong ways. Dylan denies himself the physicality of reality through certain acts. One of them is stopping himself from masturbating. Another is closing off all roads that lead away from NBK.

NBK itself is a complicated act. Many of the things being said and written about it are about the physicality of the act that portrays the reality of having two young guys shoot up their school and laughing about it as they go along. Blood seeping onto the floor and brains smearing the place of study, blaring fire alarms that just won’t shut up, smoke that curls into your nostrils and lands in your memory as a permanent marker for survival, countless bangs and pops and oh-the-screams.. isn’t that just what they try to say when they say ‘Columbine’? There’s a psychological component to the terror they waged on it that is harder to describe by far. It’s that fear-laden basis that Dylan operated on. He found a dark part of himself that day.

I am maybe wrong in saying it like this, but I feel that anyone who creates a reality where fear and elation walk hand-in-hand and crashlands an entire generation and the ones that come after into a pre- and post-understanding of the world is by definition lost and found at the same time. Lost to himself and his loved ones. Found in what he left behind.

Shooter Harris’ father walks straight and narrow path | TheCabin.net

Not the most stellar first description lines, but it offers up a pretty cool description of Wayne Harris’s career and helps explain why the family moved around so much in Eric’s early years. =) Short article, worth the read!

Shooter Harris’ father walks straight and narrow path | TheCabin.net