The moviemakers of “I’m Not Ashamed” have an awfully odd interpretation of the shooters being ten to twenty feet away from Rachel Scott and Richard Castaldo, don’t they? It’s more like ten to twenty millimetres..
How about crying with laughter, which is usually the appropriate response to some wild notion from the Americans that kinda makes you want to curl up in despair? 😉 (No offense, US natives, but sometimes all I can do is stare and go “wtf?!”.. like now. I’m sure you feel the same way about the Dutch though, haha.)
He is truly the gift that keeps on giving. (Mostly because people keep returning him to where he came from while going “this isn’t what I wanted”, haha.) If only his author credibility took as big a nosedive as the rest of him..
Can someone please inform Dave that some things should stay between himself and that poor tent (did anybody decontaminate that yet?), as we unfortunately cannot unsee the damage that’s done by his continued presence on the internet? Horrifying. Just look at those tags. YES DAVE IT’S #TORTURE YOU GOT THAT RIGHT
*shrugs* I didn’t ask that far ahead, I know that a writing process can sometimes suck beyond the sucking of it (looking at you, Dylan-opinion-piece-from-hell that I’ve been promising my followers for ages now!) so I always take a writer’s set deadline with twenty grains of salt anyway. ^^ Timezones confuse this thing even more for me, haha, because I would’ve just sat there and gone “your Saturday morning or mine?”. =D
Let’s exercise the lovely art of patience for the time being. I’m not too fussed about it. It’d be worse if the article hit and we were all being quoted out of context, right? I think I’d rather prefer there to be no article instead of more Cullen-inspired baloney anyway.. 😉
It might take a while for her to put it all together and for VICE to place it. From what I saw, there were quite a few of us being interviewed. It was also a piece that was intended for a new section, as far as I was told, so perhaps it’ll go live only when they’re fully prepped to launch that one. Let’s hold on to our judgmental horses a little while longer, all right?
(Even if it was a troll attempt, I refuse to get down about that. Any excuse to talk about the boys and the case is a good one for me. I’m not very interested in other people’s motives in speaking with me about this.. They’re welcome to ask anything they like and they’ll get an honest reply. The only thing I’d personally take up issue with is public misrepresentation of something I expressed. As long as that doesn’t happen, I don’t care if someone’s a journalist or a writer or a new researcher or the biggest SJW around.. I’ll just talk about Columbine with whoever wants to broach the subject with me. ^^)
For personal reasons, I’m studying giftedness in children. As I read “Giftedness 101″ by Linda Silverman, I’m continually struck by how well it describes Dylan, who was early identified as gifted and spent years in a gifted program.
“From preschool on, gifted children often feel flawed… There are gifted children who withdraw into books, fantasy, video games – solitary pursuits to avoid the slings and arrows of their tormentors. Some fight back and develop behavior problems. A few appear to adapt, but suffer depression, school phobia, suicidal ideation, psychosomatic ailments, or chronic anxiety.”
I have always firmly believed that it describes Dylan in virtually every possible way. A lot of his issues and ways of expression/thinking can be traced back to the giftedness. I did a brief exploration of it within this opinion piece on Dylan, as I also recognised myself and the kids I used to work with in him and felt it to be an appropriate explanation of his character.
It’s very cool to see that you’re studying the same thing, @idontfangirlmuch, and see it relate back to Dylan the way I did – if there’s anything you want to know about the subject, feel free to shoot me an IM or something!
Surviving high school is one thing, but that doesn’t mean he could automatically survive himself. There were deep-seated issues in Eric that he (partially) recognised and sought professional help for. There is a chance that the therapy he received would work out fine, but there is also a chance that he would not learn the right set of coping skills and tools with which to handle himself. In that latter case, we are not looking at a very happy or fulfilling life. He would try to make it as normal as possible – live up to the good ol’ Harris family standards, as it were – but there would be an unerring sense of failure and of just not getting much of anything right.
That Eric that I see at age 34/35 would’ve done his utmost best to conform to both society and family expectations. He would keep pushing himself into that cookie cutter form that wasn’t really what he wanted, but was exactly what was expected. He wouldn’t even know what he wanted outside of, well, kinda just being angry at the world for being the way it was. He would live it passively (if you don’t push for change, it won’t come – and Eric didn’t know how to push in a non-aggressive manner) and he would live it emotionally. He could hold down a job no problem, even if it was just another dead-end job leading nowhere. But he would also still lash out, store his anger, and explode out at the most devastating times.
There’s a chance, of course, that he’d get together with a girl who’d tolerate his excesses in the name of love and good will. They’d maybe marry and have kids – because that’s just what people do, right? And he’d think that maybe that would make him happy, that he just needed to get with that program, that maybe the world could be good if she wanted to stay. But there’d come a time not long after that rushed wedding when they would be strangers fighting each other out of the house. Eric at 34, almost 35, would be calling his ex-wife “the hag from hell” and worse – to her face, in front of the kids, and it’d be enough for her to file for a custody arrangement that would leave him stranded on his own in some jackass old town working his ass off just to pay that child support. It’d make him even more bitter. Hell, it’d make him angry. And I don’t know what he’d do with that, but it wouldn’t be good for anybody.
That’s the worst case scenario. That’s the if-likely-maybe that would come from no proper helping hands, no therapy worth a damn, no sense of introspection and no tools to help him cope. Eric needed all of that in order to begin to function – he knew it, I know it, we have all seen it in him at one point – and an Eric who didn’t receive that would be exactly as described above. But there’s light at the end of that harrowing tunnel vision for the future: the if-likely-maybe portion of actually having gotten the help he needed after all. And that.. well.. that would look something like this in my brain, and please forgive me the long-ass fic-writing I just did but I was feeling the moment here and I have spun my wheels on this for a long time:
He’s standing in his psychiatrist’s office about a year after graduation from Columbine. He’s just dropped the bottle of pills onto their desk while claiming that none of that stuff helped kill the confusion and one-track-mind going on inside his head. He’s stranding in his studies at the community college because somehow, somewhere, he’s built up what Dylan jokingly calls “the Reb Resistance against medication” but is really something that leaves him an insomniac for days and makes him feel like he can see noises. He exploded out during class and socked the guy in front of him straight in the jaw – enough grounds to be removed from that course, enough grounds for people to start giving him a wide
berth – and he’s not so sure that he actually feels sorry about it but he’s made to feel sorry when he gets the disappointed “expected-better-from-you-but-you-are-one-teacup-short-of-a-set”-call from home. It’s enough to make him want to try and seek help again. He’s not sure what propels the psychiatrist to do a cross-state referral, but hell he’s not gonna make college work after all and his job working shitty shifts at yet another food-providing place has left him with a bit of money to make do. Might as well try it.
So he moves and doesn’t leave a forwarding address. His family knows where he is, of
course, because there is no way he can resist sharing when his mother calls him in tears because the last thing she sent him came back with a return stamp on it. But his new therapist seems to think that family distance works out well for him, and he calls her crazy at first but when there are no family visits looming over his head he actually feels
liberated enough to drive by a fucking antique store (and a frilly cooking shop he knows Dylan would laugh about for days) en-route to his tiny rental place and buy all the stuff he likes for once. He tells his therapist it makes him feel like he’s a goddamn housewife as
well as the provider of income through two new jobs (one is, again, food-related; the other is an I-can-fix-anything job – and he kinda knows which one he loves more but is too scared to say he can fix just about anything) and she laughs for about five minutes straight before telling him he can feel like anything he wants as long as he learns to
curb the rage.
That doesn’t come easy, at first. Things come to a head when he spots his good-for-nothing neighbour kicking his dog out on the street in broad daylight – Eric contemplates chucking the TV out of the first-story window onto the guy, but he’s kinda worried that it’s gonna hit the dog and so he heads out to jump between the two. He means to strike the asshole – of course he fucking wanted to murder him, he scoffs to his therapist later – but somehow the dog’s whimper breaks the rush of blood to the head he’s come to associate with the red zone of overpowering anger and he turns to find it looking up at him with something he only barely identifies as trust. And, well, he’s left with that dog after his neighbour tells him “have fun with the crazy pooch” and that leads to another ranting session at his therapist’s office because there is no way – no fucking way – that Eric’s ever gonna be able to provide for anything. She just tells him to give it a shot and
that she’ll see him next week.
Somewhere down the line of giving it a shot, he ends up with two other dogs (one was a stray; one was about to be killed at that fucking shelter in the next town over) and a parakeet. He comes to realise that you don’t have to be in the possession of a lot of mice to get cats to come to your doorstep after he finds a nest of kittens just under the porch with mama cat nowhere to be seen. He keeps two and gives the rest away to people he knows, people he’s seen around town a million times and who’re actually decent with animals. He finds himself volunteering at the local animal clinic once a week at first, which quickly jumps to more hours as he finds he actually likes the work plenty. He barely notices that his therapy hours keep getting cut back until he only sees her once a month – for the bare necessities of checking in, she tells him one day, and he finds himself strangely capable of going without. The only time he loses his cool is when they can’t save a pet or when someone’s had the luminous idea to put a hamster in a microwave – he files a police report for that last bit despite the fact that the serving officer is kinda laughing in his face at first, and is satisfied when he sees the officer’s smile fall when his superior tells him that animal killings can be a precursor to murder and that filing a report for that was exactly what they needed.
Eric’s not quite sure how he becomes “that animal guy” in town and outside of town, but that’s what he is after a while. He finally takes on a course in emergency aid for animals (and does just about enough coursework afterward to make him overqualified as hell for a small-town animal clinic) and drives around his own state and small parts of the states bordering it to provide that kind of help. His situation at home has escalated into a zoo after he brought in an alpaca – he had no idea how to care for that but he was quite sure that the people feeding it popcorn were doing worse than he ever could, so there – and he manages to move to his own place with enough room to house several ponies if he really has to. (He doesn’t quite get the hang of ponies, though, and thinks he would like sheep a lot better if they didn’t fucking bleat under his window at 2am.) Everybody seems to know him these days and the call of “go see Harris” when an animal’s injured now seems to be as common as the wildflowers that grow all over the place.
One night, he gets a young lady rattling at the just-closed clinic’s door in a panic after she ran a dog over. She tells him that a guy down the street told her to “go see Harris” and that she’s praying he can help. She’s crying up a storm and he’s focusing on helping the dog first, but he still finds himself leaning over awkwardly to pat her hand and give her a box of tissues. (He’s never been good with crying women, as they make him feel very unsure of himself, and he’s quite sure that he almost fucks up the dog’s bandage because he’s stressing out that she’s gonna cry again but she tells him he did brilliantly.) She ends up coming over to check up on the dog a hundred times since that night, but somehow “checking up on the dog” becomes a cat-and-mouse game of “will you go out with me?” that he refuses but finally loses when she brings food over during a mercifully quiet day at the clinic and calls it a first date.
It’s been a little over a year or so since that date and she hasn’t left yet, but now his parents are coming over and there is that same old worry that they might just not approve of whatever the hell he’s doing. (Kevin already came over a few times since he first moved here and seems to love the alpaca more than Eric ever did, but that’s his brother for you and that’s not quite the same as his parents.) He voices that concern to her one night and she just tells him to call his therapist (he’d confessed to having needed one, after a particularly bad fight one time) and they would sort it out from there. He finally calls about an hour before his folks are set to come over, but is told he knows more than he thinks and that familial approval is nice but doesn’t matter for as long as he is happy. And he thinks he’s happy, sure, and when he finally sees his folks he tries to make them feel at home. (His dad eyes the alpaca somewhat warily, but his mother takes to the cats and that’s just about that.)
He’s not sure how it happened, but somehow his dad goes out on a walk around town the day after their arrival and comes back with a new light in his eyes. (He is later told that his dad was subjected to two instances of “just call Harris, he’ll know what to do with the dog” and one hero-worshipping moment of “are you Mr Harris’s dad? he is amazing!” of the tiny 5-year-old he just saved the chihuahua of two days ago.) They’re standing out on the porch just before dinner when his dad claps him on the back and says “not bad, son, not bad at all” and somehow he finds himself crying over that the way he hasn’t cried since he was in high school and feeling so alone he could die. His girl starts crying too when she hears him speak with his dad and he vaguely hears her shrug off that outburst with “that’s just hormones” and before he knows it he’s being roped into a wedding with a kid on the way. (He can’t fight his mother on anything once she’s made her mind up, and his new wife-to-be doesn’t seem to mind.) He finally manages to fight some non-traditional changes into the wedding structure – he’s not sure why people jump over broomsticks sometimes at a wedding, but he’s quite sure it’ll make his dad’s toes curl and make Kevin laugh the way they laughed when they were kids and so he puts that part in – and invites Dylan one night while talking over the phone because Dylan’s the only one he still talks to from back then and that kinda makes him the expert choice for a best man.
He silently thinks to himself that the moment his first daughter is born surpasses all the times that he delivered puppies or kittens, though he’s disturbed at the loud wailing that she subjects them to at night. Babies aren’t meant to sound like alarm systems, or so he grumbles to his wife when they’re both awake at 3am. A few years on, he still thinks that babies aren’t meant to make noises that loud – and he’s been subjected to another instance since that first time – and is not sure how he landed himself in a house full of women before their doctor expresses during an ultrasound that the third will certainly be a boy. He’s looking forward to his 35th birthday because, well, the entire family and Dylan’s family are coming over to celebrate.. but he ends up calling everybody in a panic because his wife ended up delivering their son that night, and he is sure to appreciate the irony of a birthday share sometime in the future but he can’t quite muster it right now because labour still scares the shit out of him. His wife jokingly calls him a pussy for getting that overly sentimental over a newborn baby, but he can’t help that he sits out on the porch the day after surrounded by his dogs and a stray goat and cries because he’s so happy to be alive. He can’t help it, either, that Dylan needs to scrape him off that same porch hours later and that they somehow weave their way into a bar to drink and end up talking about that one time they almost planned to bomb their old high school, but he comes home that night only to find that his therapist was right all along. He sends her a card saying nothing but “thank you”, after, which he knows she’ll hang on the wall amid all her other cards to look back on sometime. Things are good the way they are.
Username is @catsbooksdresses and the slant of their article is primarily those of us who take a romantic sort of interest in the boys, although I was told it has become clear that not all of us adhere to that attraction-based blogging. We are a more diverse crowd than this. I firmly believe that the one thing that ties us all together is that kinship with Eric and Dylan, regardless of how that sense of understanding presents itself.
From what I have seen on my dash, I’m not the only person who was contacted by a writer for VICE magazine concerning our interest in Columbine. I’ve had a brief conversation about the nature of my interest, the way I feel about Eric and Dylan, and some other things relating in to the case late last evening my time. It didn’t feel to me as a judgmental type of conversation at all. It is not the first time VICE has broached us and Columbine as a topic – you can read associated articles right here. The way I see it, it’s not a lot different from answering any type of ask about your interest in the case.. It’s just going to hit a broader audience than usual. 😉
Of course, if you feel uncomfortable with it in any way, you’re not obliged to participate or answer any type of question. But the fact that we are being asked at all leads me to think that we can exercise a modicum of control over how we’re being presented to the general audience through the way we choose to speak about something near and dear to all of us, which can be worth a lot in light of the negative rep this community sometimes gets. I did sidenote that if Eric and Dylan continue to be as misrepresented in the media as they are, our interest in them as human beings might seem quite strange. (Adding that, well, quite a few of us would have some choice words to say about that particular representation of the boys.. ;))
“I don’t think there are enough words to tell you how much John meant to
me. The biggest impact John had on me was how much he cared about me,
how he would do anything to make me smile and make me happy,” said the
dark-haired Oetter, breaking into sobs.
(..)
Although some in the congregation admitted that feelings of anger are
beginning to come through their grief, John Francis Tomlin, the slain
boy’s father, said he and his family were not among them.
“For the
families of the children who did this, we will be praying for them and
feel no hatred. We will pray for all of them,” said Tomlin, after the
service. Beside him sat his wife, Doreen, and their two surviving
children, son Pat, 14, and daughter Ashley, 11, who nervously clutched a
teddy bear.
(..)
John’s mother said that the last seven months with Michelle had made her
son extremely happy. After high school, he intended to join the
military in the Special Forces,“ she said after the memorial service.
John may have been shy, but he was quick to laugh, she recalled. "He had
such a sense of humor. He was always making goofy faces,” she said,
smiling.
What always strikes me about Corey DePooter is how calm he was during the ordeal in the library. I have often wondered how this reflected onto law enforcement later on as they learned of the faith Corey had put in them during the massacre – did they feel any regret at not acting sooner, at not living up to a young man’s expectations of them? Here Corey was, offering the advice to stay under the tables and that the cops would come to save them. As we now know, that saving party didn’t make it into the library until hours after the shooting initially began.
What strikes me is this courage that went virtually unanswered. What also strikes me is the kindness he displayed amid the danger they were in, reaching out to people and keeping everyone as safe as possible. We know that the tables in the library created sitting ducks out of everyone in hiding and that Corey unfortunately immediately lost his life as the gun was loosely aimed and fired under his table. But it’s that kindness before death that spoke to me as I first learned of it, which is something that can be treasured and carried forward by us in our own lifetimes just as much as Rachel’s compassion or Daniel Mauser’s thoughtful intelligence can.
Corey’s best friend Austin Eubanks sums his character up perfectly, here. “He just knew how to handle himself, how to
talk… He was respectful to everyone, never looked down on people. He
gave everyone a chance.”
I don’t even have to guess here, as Eric’s coming at you live and kickin’ from the basement tapes just to share how much he hates people who laugh too much:
“Shut the fuck up, Nick, you laugh too much! And those two girls sitting next to you, they probably want you to shut the fuck up, too! Jesus! Rachel and Jen … and … whatever.”
Dylan did seem to agree with Eric there, so I get the sense that they both really felt like people who laughed too much needed to sit down and shut up. I personally have a sense of distrust toward people who laugh all the time – a lot of sunshine doesn’t mean there’s no shade – and my previous social anxiety always kinda made me feel like people might be laughing at me. I could see both the boys have that sense of paranoia about it too, couldn’t you? ^^
But in the performance of the two on the day itself was no stage
fright, no horror at the things they got to see, no shame, no awe that
they were somewhere nobody had been before – it was as if they were
visiting a brand new amusement park that was better than expected. They
walked around elatedly and their fun, witnesses agree, seemed genuine.
Maybe
that fun was a way of not having to see the evil in what they were
doing. Or it was a case of the giggles over the incomprehensible madness
of it all. Or it was something that helped them maintain their attitude
toward their victims and toward each other.
Maybe it was
disappointment-fun. “This is great”; “this is what we’ve been waiting
for all our lives”; “this is the best thing we’ve ever done”, they
yelled, but it wasn’t at all what they had always wanted to do – they
had wanted to blow up at least half the school, create hundreds of
casualties, hugely outdo Oklahoma, become the greatest mass murderers in
the history of the United States. But their bombs hadn’t worked, and
now they had to convince themselves that this poor and pathetic heap of
killing that remained with the shooting was exactly the thing they had
so looked forward to.
Maybe that disappointment was one of
the reasons as to why they had such few victims; this too is one of the
riddles of Columbine. They had wanted to break all records, right? Then
why stop at thirteen? After that final murder, about a quarter of an
hour after the first, they roamed the school for another half hour
without trying to enter any of the classrooms where, as they could see
through the windows in the doors, dozens of people were still trapped.
They didn’t hit anyone anymore. And even when they were still killing,
in the library – if they had gone to work systematically, they could’ve
killed thirty to forty people.. or everyone. They had plenty of ammo.
But they wasted their time playing God, toppling a bookcase over,
bullying, exchanging gunfire with the cops. They must have thought they
had killed more than thirteen people – but if it was originally
intended to be a couple of hundred, then thirty was just as bad a
failure as thirteen!
Maybe, when they had to improvise
because the bombs hadn’t detonated, the true nature of NBK came forward:
vandalism. For Dylan, who’d already killed more than he could count,
there was something he’d “always wanted to do” upon leaving the library
– smash a chair onto the computer on the library counter.
They
probably stopped shooting people because the bombs in the cafeteria
remained the main target. Like Eric said, when Dylan kept pushing him to
kill Bree Pasquale: “nah, we’re going to blow the school up anyway”. He
was the leader, and it was a military operation to him. Maybe he didn’t
want to detonate those bombs in order to get even more victims or
collapse the school, but because a real Marine never loses sight of his
operation target.
When they caused that fireball in the
commons, there may have been a thought that he would succeed after all.
But a quarter of an hour later, upon their arrival back in the
cafeteria, the fire had already been mostly put out by the sprinklers,
the pillars were still standing, the library hadn’t crashed. The bombs
had failed for sure – time for suicide. Maybe Eric wanted to go to the
library because that was his chance to die in a firefight. But that,
too, didn’t happen. He must have killed himself with the thought that
everything had failed.
– excerpt from We Are But We Aren’t Psycho (Wij Zijn Maar Wij Zijn Niet Geschift), by Tim Krabbé.
I don’t think you’re reading into something that isn’t there, although I have to be honest and say that I didn’t quite get that angle from it until your ask prompted me to contemplate it.
My initial thought was that the idea of tricking a girl into his room fits in perfectly with Eric’s fantasy of wanting to be the man in charge. Having full control over her comings and goings (take that as literally as you want) and sweeping her off her feet the minute she’s in that room. His fantasy is all about overpowering her but yet pleasing her at the same time. Tricking her into entering his room could very well be part of that powerplay fantasy the same way that tying someone to your bed can be part of that. The line of tricking her into his room is written in there so fluidly that it becomes a part of the scene’s wallpaper and is easy to envision as having been part of the fantasy itself.
However, now that you mention it, given Eric’s own admitted insecurity with women and particularly his statement that he had no self-esteem concerning girls.. yes, it’s likely that he also felt that he would practically have to resort to such crude means in order to get a girl to spend time with him. I don’t think he saw his own value. I think he secretly believed that he wasn’t worth spending time with. Girls would just find him weird and not cool, so what was the point? He’d have to trick her into spending time with him, right, because there’s no way anyone would want to just be with Eric.. or so he thought.
Columbine 