The lulziness of Columbine

I NEVER HAVE, DO NOT, and NEVER WILL condone ANY of Eric and/or Dylan's actions on 4/20.

You know, I think what draws me to Columbine is the idea that two smart kids said, "Hey, wouldn't it be neat if we blew up our high school, and shot everyone who tried to escape?" ... and then had the balls to try to do it.

When it comes down to it, the ultimate feeling that I sense in Eric and Dylan is boredom - a deep, abiding boredom with the world, with themselves, not only with their lives but with the very idea of living. They thought the world was shitty and fucked up and they weren't able to do anything about it, so they said, "Fuck it - let's off ourselves and see how many assholes we can take with us." Theirs was a nihilistic boredom that is not nearly as uncommon as we might like to believe.

There are lots of ways to deal with boredom. Throughout my life, one of my ways has been to eat food and drink soda. (Yeah, I've had weight issues.) Another is to play little mind games - to look at numbers and words and ideas and switch them around and do things with them. I do that, as well.

Yet another way is to, say, torture small animals. I don't do that. I do enjoy stomping on cockroaches, and grinding them apart with my shoe. I am a homicidal maniac when it comes to cockroaches. But I don't, say, grab birds and tear their wings off, or shoot cats with BB guns. (Sadly, the same cannot be said of some of the neighbors I've had over the years.) There are people who do torture small animals, and then move on to bigger (and worse) things.

I don't know if either Eric and/or Dylan tortured small animals, but I do know that, at some point, whatever mindgate that keeps normal people from saying, "Hey, let me see what that guy's brains look like when I shoot him in the head" got opened, and they walked through it. Don't ask me how, or why, but somehow "Hey, wouldn't it be neat..." became, "Hey, let's do it!"

Part of me gets off on this sick shit. Part of me wants to see all of the grisly pictures of the dead kids lying in the library. Part of me wants to hear the whole 911 call, so I can hear Eric and Dylan taunting and murdering their schoolmates, some of whom call out for their mothers right before their innards get splattered all over the floor. Part of me wishes that I'd been there, huddled in a corner, watching the whole nasty business go down, filming it with an HD camera.

And part of me is disgusted by all of it.

Which part is stronger? Well ... there have been times when I've been very apprehensive about clicking on a particular link, but I've never decided not to look at something. For better or for worse, I want to see and hear and know as much as I can. Sometimes I wish I had a close-up shot of Eric's head, so I can see just how much of his skull was left after he pulled the trigger. Sometimes I look at detailed high-resolution pictures of the heads other guys who've blown their brains out, and I wonder, "Is that how Eric's head looked when they found him?"

Why are we drawn to death? Because it's real.

Love is not real, because when you love someone you never really know if that person loves you back, or if that person loved you once but loves you no longer. (Sex, on the other hand, is fairly real - at least, you know whether you've got your rocks off.) Money is more real than love - you can hold it in your hand - but it goes so fast.

But death ... it's real. When you're dead, you're dead. That's it. There's no room for ambiguity or uncertainty. (Yes, sometimes they can bring you back from being, quote, "dead," but you know what I mean.) Maybe your soul is in heaven or hell, but what's left of your body is still on earth, and you'd better believe that it will rot and stink to high heaven if someone doesn't dig a deep hole and dump you inside. There's something comforting about knowing that Generalissimo Francisco Franco (among others) was dead yesterday, is dead today, and will be dead tomorrow.

I blame Eric and Dylan for killing 13 people. I blame them for killing themselves. But I don't blame them for wanting to die, or for wanting others to die, or even for taking pleasure in the act of making others die. I don't know what it's like to want others to die, but I do know what it's like not to feel good. There are times when I'd do almost anything - even hurting those who I love the most - to get what I want and feel the way I want to feel. I can't blame other people for feeling the same way. Thoughts are not the same as actions.

When I look at what Eric and Dylan did, I don't say, "Fuck yeah!" But, when they say, "Fuck this!" - "this" being life and the world and everything in it - I say, "Yeah, I know how you feel."

This post is a mess. But life is a mess, too, isn't it? You wander around, doing some shit that you like and some shit that you hate. After a while, you die of a heart attack, or a stroke, or cancer, or a car wreck, or a self-inflicted gunshot wound, or a non-self-inflicting slitting of your throat. And then that's it, at least as far as we know.

The world is a shithole. It always has been one and always will be one. How we cope with that fact is up to us. Hopefully none of us will choose the same path that they did.

I would agree that boredom probably played a major role in the situation. I think boredom is probably the cause for a lot of crimes. People just get so sick of life and its motions, and they want to actually feel alive. I think Eric wrote about how he would feel more alive than anyone ever has when he went NBK, but I can't find the exact quote.

Also, Morbid curiosity is a very human thing. Death is mysterious and uncommon, and people have always been fascinated by it. It's part of the reason why horror movies are so popular. When we see macabre stuff in real life though, I think it gives us more of a thrill and makes us feel even more alive. It could explain why someone who is deeply bored with life would start to get interested in morbid stuff. People shouldn't feel bad for being morbidly curious, It's just human nature.

That's an important post, brave too.

I wouldn't say boredom was the key thing, rather "dissatisfaction" is the word I'd choose.

LPorter101 wrote:

When I look at what Eric and Dylan did, I don't say, "Fuck yeah!" But, when they say, "Fuck this!" - "this" being life and the world and everything in it - I say, "Yeah, I know how you feel."

This post is a mess. But life is a mess, too, isn't it? You wander around, doing some shit that you like and some shit that you hate. After a while, you die of a heart attack, or a stroke, or cancer, or a car wreck, or a self-inflicted gunshot wound, or a non-self-inflicting slitting of your throat. And then that's it, at least as far as we know.

The world is a shithole. It always has been one and always will be one. How we cope with that fact is up to us. Hopefully none of us will choose the same path that they did.

That's what I see in you post as well. Dissatisfaction, not boredom. Yours seems to be aimed more at the pointlessness of life if I read you correctly, Eric's was aimed at society, Dylan's at his failure to engage in the sort of romantic and emotional life he wanted.


This brings us to a big question, which I think a lot of people here on such a forum ask. What separates you from E&D? Why they "walked out", while you are still here with us?

I agree on everything you have written ,really ,my feelings and thoughts  about this are the same it is like you copy/pasted my mind .

Sabratha wrote:

That's an important post, brave too.

I wouldn't say boredom was the key thing, rather "dissatisfaction" is the word I'd choose.

LPorter101 wrote:

When I look at what Eric and Dylan did, I don't say, "Fuck yeah!" But, when they say, "Fuck this!" - "this" being life and the world and everything in it - I say, "Yeah, I know how you feel."

This post is a mess. But life is a mess, too, isn't it? You wander around, doing some shit that you like and some shit that you hate. After a while, you die of a heart attack, or a stroke, or cancer, or a car wreck, or a self-inflicted gunshot wound, or a non-self-inflicting slitting of your throat. And then that's it, at least as far as we know.

The world is a shithole. It always has been one and always will be one. How we cope with that fact is up to us. Hopefully none of us will choose the same path that they did.

That's what I see in you post as well. Dissatisfaction, not boredom. Yours seems to be aimed more at the pointlessness of life if I read you correctly, Eric's was aimed at society, Dylan's at his failure to engage in the sort of romantic and emotional life he wanted.


This brings us to a big question, which I think a lot of people here on such a forum ask. What separates you from E&D? Why they "walked out", while you are still here with us?

I'm neither homicidal nor suicidal ... that's a big one right there.

I'm the only child of a single mother, so I never had a big brother or a father with whom to compete. I've talked a lot over the years about my rocky relationship with my mother - she was smothering and controlling and prone to Mommie Dearest-type outbursts. No one at school was nearly as nasty to me as she was. To this day, no one has ever said crueler things to me than she has. (The opposite is true, as well - of all the people I've known, I've treated her the worst.)

When I talk about my family, I refer exclusively to my mother's side. My father suffers from debilitating schizophrenia and is long gone from my life. I only met him a few times when I was growing up.

I'm a lot more forgiving than Eric and Dylan - the fact that most people are assholes doesn't bother me. I'm something of an asshole myself.

My mother never let me go anywhere, except to school, and she didn't give me any privacy. I never bothered trying to keep any secrets from her - she knew everything. She had lots of health problems and only worked sporadically during those years, so she was around the house almost all of the time. There was no getting away from her, and no getting away with anything.

But she wasn't strict, per se. I didn't have any assigned chores, and if she asked me to do something I didn't want to do, I usually flat-out refused. She would beg and cajole and threaten, and after a while I might give in, but it wasn't as if I snapped to attention when she told me to do this or do that. She never bothered to spare my feelings, so I never bothered to spare hers - if I felt like snapping at her or cursing her out, I did so. (I still do.) It wasn't as if I was afraid of making her angrier than she would be otherwise - she blew up over anything and everything. One second, she would be sweet as pie; the next, she would be carrying on like Kathy Bates in Misery. And it wasn't as if I respected her. For many years, I feared her temper; after the fear went away, I developed a persistent, low-level contempt for her. I do love her - she's my mother - but I don't especially like her.

She was surprisingly tolerant about some things. Even when I was a small kid, she let me watch all kinds of movies that most parents wouldn't even let their teenagers watch. She knew that I watched porn. She even knew that I watched gay porn - she didn't care. She never said anything to me about the birds and the bees. (Years later, when I asked her why she never tried to teach me anything, she said, "Didn't they go over that stuff in school?")

I've always been a loner, so I never had anyone to drag me into things that I shouldn't have been doing.

I did spend a lot of time at my grandmother's house - she lived right near my high school, so I could walk to her house after school. I spent almost all of my weekends and holidays there. My grandfather left her lots of money, so her house was a lot nicer than my mother's, and she always bought all the snacks that my mother never could afford to buy. She, too, never let me go anywhere, but she left me alone more than my mother did. She was very indulgent in some ways, and tended to take my side when I argued with my mother, but over time I came to dislike being around her - she was emotionally rigid.

My mother, like my grandfather, is pretty smart, but my grandmother is dumb. Her IQ is probably somewhere in the 90s.

My mother's IQ is at least in the 110s, maybe a little higher; my father's, despite his mental illness, is higher than that. (In high school, he was a state chess champion.) I had severe behavioral difficulties as a small child - I was literally almost expelled from kindergarten for being such an unruly, disruptive kid - and was placed in a special program for gifted but emotionally-disturbed children. My IQ was tested several times over the years, the last time being when I was about 17. It is well past the supposed genius-level mark.

She's increasingly senile now, but even when she was relatively normal she was prone to saying the stupidest things. She had no intellectual curiosity and seemed to revel in her ignorance. And I could never call her on it - she always thought she was right, no matter how wrong she was. My mother was (and is) aggressive, but my grandmother was (and is) passive-aggressive - if she didn't like what you were saying, she would ignore you until you changed the subject. Over time, I came to feel that my mother, for all her faults, was a lot easier to be around - I could be totally open and honest with her. I always had to lie to my grandmother and pretend to be happy, even when I was miserable.

Eric and Dylan were both skinny in high school ... I was one of the fatter kids in the school. But I was fairly tall and literally big-boned - I have a big ribcage, a long torso, and broad shoulders - so I never felt physically intimidated. I wasn't taunted or bullied.

I also suffered from horrible acne - my face looked bad enough, but the whole upper part of my back was totally covered with huge pus- and blood-spewing boils. Eventually I ended up having to take Accutane. (It was a Godsend for me - the boils went away, and I never had any suicidal thoughts.)

My clothes were nice enough, if not overly trendy - my grandmother always got me expensive stuff for Christmas and my birthday - but whatever pretensions toward fashion I had were ruined by the biggest, ugliest, brown-tinted aviator glasses you've ever seen. Like I said, my mother was controlling, so I ended up wearing the types of clothes that she wanted me to wear - it never occurred to me to rebel.

To this day, I don't give a shit about how I dress - most of my clothes are worn and torn, and I don't care how they make me look.

So my lack of success with the opposite sex was not exactly a great mystery to me - I didn't waste much time wondering why I wasn't the school's regular Casanova. I didn't ask girls for dates. I didn't even think about going to the prom. I took most of my sexual energy and directed it into my hobbies and intellectual interests.

Let me know if you'd like me to go on...

Thanks for sharing LPorter. If you don't feel like talking about it naymore, or would prefer to do it via Pm, let me know.

I obviously had a very different life and experiences, never walked in your shoes or even similar shoes.

Sabratha wrote:

Thanks for sharing LPorter. If you don't feel like talking about it naymore, or would prefer to do it via Pm, let me know.

I obviously had a very different life and experiences, never walked in your shoes or even similar shoes.

I don't mind talking about it ... but right now I'm all talked out. Let me know if there's anything else you'd like to ask...

I bump, therefore I am.

LPorter101 wrote:

You know, I think what draws me to Columbine is the idea that two smart kids said, "Hey, wouldn't it be neat if we blew up our high school, and shot everyone who tried to escape?" ... and then had the balls to try to do it.

When it comes down to it, the ultimate feeling that I sense in Eric and Dylan is boredom - a deep, abiding boredom with the world, with themselves, not only with their lives but with the very idea of living. They thought the world was shitty and fucked up and they weren't able to do anything about it, so they said, "Fuck it - let's off ourselves and see how many assholes we can take with us." Theirs was a nihilistic boredom that is not nearly as uncommon as we might like to believe.

I have to admit that it amazes me that these 2 kids pulled off a stunt like this. I'm not saying I condone it or admire it....I'm just saying that the whole thing is just mind blowing....how they tricked everyone.....how they planned it and executed their plan and continued even after the bombs failed.  But I attribute this to their mental illness more so than courage or bravado.  They were ready to die that day.  It's odd to see such young people with such nihilistic views of life and humanity. I didn't become a nihilist until I was well into my 20's.  I think that both Eric and Dylan were highly intelligent individuals....more so than their peers. I wonder if there's any evidence of what their IQ's were.

I have the same kinds of mixed feelings about it. I feel terrible for the people who were hurt and everything. But just the idea of doing something so crazy, I think it's the kind of event to introduce the strongest realization that nothing else matters in your life at that point. I believe Dylan especially wanted to induce that feeling, that kind of feeling puts you into a state of disassociation from life, it was easy to end his life and get a thrill out of it at the same time, while not having to live with the guilt afterwards. I imagine the bliss of having no weight on your shoulders for months, years, because you know that nothing matters now. Sure you might feel bad about killing, but it hasn't happened yet.

I don't think Eric or Dylan would have been the type of person to want to harm an animal. They probably both had emotions like normal people. The difference was they viewed their classmates differently from most people. To most they were defenseless children, but the fact is any emotional perception of something can be warped, sometimes to an extreme. The fact is people used to enslave other people for thousands of years, make them work 16 hour days, they didn't give a damn about them.

I don't know about you guys but I'd reather be shot at columbine than be a slave my whole life.

I'm glad I'm not the only person who is curious to see the pictures of dead people in the library.

Two things stand out to me. One is the feeling of knowing you're going to be dead in a few weeks, like Eric said, and two, the feeling they must of had walking up to that school, after Eric yelled "Go, GO!",  and fired the first shot. The point of no return. It was most definitely a ballsy thing to pull off. The restlessness alone would of tore me apart, but then again I'm not a psychopath

I don't know about boredom so much as the sense that they were part of this minuscule world where they were essentially just ants working all day with the rest of us. Eric even pointed this out that he felt he was a higher being then everybody else. We all go to school and work to become good people but for what? Just to live and reproduce and repeat the cycle? I think he felt trapped within that cycle and wanted a way out.