Another day, another dollar? Forget it

One of the things that I have in common with Eric and Dylan - both of them - is that I don’t want to live my life according to society’s rules. They said “Fuck you” to the notion that there is a correct way to live one’s life, and so do I.

Nobody enjoys the mundane slog of daily existence, but for whatever reason some folks *really* don’t want to sign on for the so-called American Dream: “Work your ass off for the privilege of making hefty monthly payments on a big fat mortgage. Get a job, get married, have kids, and eventually die.”

One day, when I was in my early twenties, an older guy was telling me that I had to get a job, so I could get a car, and an apartment, and a girlfriend, and start down the road to becoming a responsible, self-sufficient adult. And he was right, of course, but he was also wrong. Because he never answered the question that kept popping into my head: “Why bother?”

Some people don’t even ask that question, but I do. Why do I need to become a productive member of society? Why can’t I just leech off of others indefinitely? The typical answer is, “If we allow you to do that, then everyone else will want to do it, too, and then civilization as we know it will collapse. People need to know that it is not acceptable to be non-productive. He who does not work shall not eat.”

There is much merit in that argument, but I don’t really buy into it. I’m not on welfare or disability. My mother gives me room and board. I do odd jobs every now and then. I have a few friends who help me out. I’m getting by.

One day my mother will die, and I will have to think about supporting myself. It is inevitable. But that day is not today. For the moment, I can muddle through.

Most people have a switch in their heads that forces them to do the “right” thing. They may not want to get up in the morning to go to work, but they do it. That switch is missing from my head. And it was missing from E&D’s heads, as well.

The roots of their pathology lie in their unwillingness and/or inability to conform to social expectations. That was the seed that, once fertilized with hatred, allowed the Columbine to bloom.

LPORTER I have enjoyed your very descriptive stories about your life and Mother...for years...I used to be (networkinggear) and have always thought you could write an incredible book(any book would be fantastic)...Anyway I am always a fan and wish you the very best, Sincerely David

So who is that in your profile pic? It's not Dolph Lundgren (now THERE'S an alpha male--the good kind!) that's for sure!

Lunkhead McGrath wrote:

So who is that in your profile pic?  It's not Dolph Lundgren (now THERE'S an alpha male--the good kind!) that's for sure!

It’s me.

This was me in high school:
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A lot more pics of me (scroll down for the full collection):
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I may or may not be alpha, but I do have the balls to post unflattering pictures of myself.

There was a time when I refused to show myself online. But now I no longer give a shit. If people are inclined to think less of me based on the way I look, fuck ‘em.

Lately I have been all about honesty. I’m tired of playing games with people. I know what I want, I know what I need, and I don’t particularly care whether anyone has a problem with it.

You know, Eric and Dylan really didn't look all that bad. Yes, they had body-image issues, but compared to lots of kids they were fairly attractive. They were skinny, yes, but sometimes it's better to be skinny than fat.

Not to be redundant - I've already posted these pictures in the other thread - but let me show you a couple of shots from my sophomore year of high school. My face was bloated and swollen:
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So, yeah, I wasn't especially happy to be alive in those days. (I never attempted suicide, however.)

As bad as my facial acne was, my bacne was ten times worse. My back was totally covered with huge boils that spewed pus and blood all the time. Accutane took care of the active flareups, but the scars never healed.

Of course, the funny thing is that I was not bullied to any great degree. Yes, there were kids who said nasty things to me on occasion, but I never had to cope with the kind of unrelenting, systematic teasing and abuse (emotional and physical) that so many students must endure. One factor that worked in my favor is that I was a big guy. Very fat, to be sure, but big.

Here is a shot of my ass taken on New Year's Eve of my junior year. My mother dragged me to a party at her favorite restaurant and insisted that I dance with this lady I didn't even know. This was the extent of my high-school social life:
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I was fairly big even as a freshman. This picture was taken on Monday, August 16, 1999 - the same day that Columbine students returned to the school for the first time since the massacre. Incidentally, it was exactly two days after I turned 14, and exactly two weeks before I started high school. At my mother's insistence, I was wearing heavy makeup to hide my acne:
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I had a noticeable acne problem as early as the age of 12:
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Lunkhead McGrath wrote:

So who is that in your profile pic?  It's not Dolph Lundgren (now THERE'S an alpha male--the good kind!) that's for sure!

Not to keep beating a dead horse, but here’s a less flattering selfie, taken not in the dim glow of a Denny’s bathroom but in the harsh glare of the afternoon sun:
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My hair still has some blond highlights, even after all these years. I was pretty light as a kid:
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You look like lester from grand theft auto 5.

I think about society too a lot. I have so many thoughts about society. Especially jobs ever since I left school I have to find a job. For me the main motivation is that I know my parent will not live forever.

I think society is just a system it is just a system LP Porter. It is not good or evil per se it just means like a cog in machine each part has to do something to keep it running.

They tell people to get married and have kids so there will be more people to buy their corporate crap products and be workers. They tell people not to commit suicide even if they have a crappy life because they need workers.



However thing are starting to change the system is coming down to pieces and will not last. The wave of change is automation. What I mean is robots will start to take over human jobs.

Many people will lose their jobs and many Americans have access to guns there will be more columbine behavior, I am staying indoors where its safe.

James411 wrote:

You look like lester from grand theft auto 5.

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Hmm...

LPorter101 wrote:

Of course, the funny thing is that I was not bullied to any great degree. Yes, there were kids who said nasty things to me on occasion, but I never had to cope with the kind of unrelenting, systematic teasing and abuse (emotional and physical) that so many students must endure. One factor that worked in my favor is that I was a big guy. Very fat, to be sure, but big.

Were you the kind of guy that would grab one of those bullying pieces of excrement - excuse my language - by the neck and make 'm think twice or were you more laid back? Like, whatever, you do you, I'll do me. You look pretty chill, but looks can be deceiving.

SandraSmit19 wrote:

LPorter101 wrote:

Of course, the funny thing is that I was not bullied to any great degree. Yes, there were kids who said nasty things to me on occasion, but I never had to cope with the kind of unrelenting, systematic teasing and abuse (emotional and physical) that so many students must endure. One factor that worked in my favor is that I was a big guy. Very fat, to be sure, but big.

Were you the kind of guy that would grab one of those bullying pieces of excrement - excuse my language - by the neck and make 'm think twice or were you more laid back? Like, whatever, you do you, I'll do me. You look pretty chill, but looks can be deceiving.

Laid back. I was (and still am) kind of a loner.

I was a very active participant in class discussions - always had my hand up, always had a question or a comment or an opinion. The teachers had to ask me *not* to participate: "You talk so much and you're so aggressive about it that the other kids are intimidated by you." But I didn't have any real friends. During lunch period, I usually grabbed a slice of pizza and a can of Coke from one of the lunch carts scattered around the school and then I went to the library to read the daily newspapers.

One day, I was sitting in creative-writing class, listening to kids read their stories out loud. After each story, everyone was supposed to give feedback - it was part of our grade. That day, I was in a really bad mood and didn't feel like talking. But this one girl I knew looked at me and said, "Aren't you going to say *anything*? I feel like the discussion isn't over until you say *something*. Is my story so bad that you can't think of anything to say about it?" I had to reassure her that, no, it wasn't that bad.

LPorter101 wrote:

SandraSmit19 wrote:

LPorter101 wrote:

Of course, the funny thing is that I was not bullied to any great degree. Yes, there were kids who said nasty things to me on occasion, but I never had to cope with the kind of unrelenting, systematic teasing and abuse (emotional and physical) that so many students must endure. One factor that worked in my favor is that I was a big guy. Very fat, to be sure, but big.

Were you the kind of guy that would grab one of those bullying pieces of excrement - excuse my language - by the neck and make 'm think twice or were you more laid back? Like, whatever, you do you, I'll do me. You look pretty chill, but looks can be deceiving.

Laid back. I was (and still am) kind of a loner.

I was a very active participant in class discussions - always had my hand up, always had a question or a comment or an opinion. The teachers had to ask me *not* to participate: "You talk so much and you're so aggressive about it that the other kids are intimidated by you." But I didn't have any real friends. During lunch period, I usually grabbed a slice of pizza and a can of Coke from one of the lunch carts scattered around the school and then I went to the library to read the daily newspapers.

The cafeteria food at my school was such barf that I did the same thing, just ate a slice of (bad) pizza for lunch.

That's a good anecdote about how you were discouraged from class discussion because, boo hoo, you were making the other kids feel stupid. Reminds me of Election, which was released in theaters about two weeks after NBK happened.

It's also a good anecdote because it supports my pet theory that American high schools are basically day care centers (in my case, a day care center for jocks) that increasingly border on decrepitude in terms of educational quality. I myself was nearly SENT TO THE OFFICE for discussing an argument about the Vietnam War. God forbid we actually get into depth about the subject matter! Got to get those worksheets finished and then get back to football crap!

Whether or not you would have been told to shut up at Columbine, had you been there, is another subject for discussion--for all the jock bullying and cliquey crap it was supposed to be a really good school educationally (Larkin said that people moved their families to Jeffco just to send their kids to Columbine.)

Quote :

The cafeteria food at my school was such barf that I did the same thing, just ate a slice of (bad) pizza for lunch.

The pizza was from Pizza Hut. They charged $1.50 for a (small) slice and 50 cents for a can of soda. (My daily lunch budget was exactly $2, so that's usually what I ate.)

For about the same price, you could buy a six-inch turkey sub from Subway.

My school was insanely overcrowded, so most of the kids who ate in the cafeteria were the ones who qualified for free or reduced-price lunch. In addition to the lunch carts, there were "roach coaches" - the food trucks you see at construction sites - parked in the back near the basketball courts.

Quote :

Whether or not you would have been told to shut up at Columbine, had you been there, is another subject for discussion--for all the jock bullying and cliquey crap it was supposed to be a really good school educationally (Larkin said that people moved their families to Jeffco just to send their kids to Columbine.)

My high school was considered one of the top public schools in my county. Athletics were important, but academics were strongly emphasized. Being overtly stupid was not a path to social success.

One major difference between my school and Columbine was that, at the former, evangelical Christians were few and far between. Most of the kids I knew were either Jewish or Catholic. (Even today, a good percentage of my acquaintances are Jewish.)

Quote :

It's also a good anecdote because it supports my pet theory that American high schools are basically day care centers (in my case, a day care center for jocks) that increasingly border on decrepitude in terms of educational quality.

Physically, my high school was more than a little decrepit - it opened in the late '50s and was definitely showing its age by the early 2000s. It was actually a "campus" of sorts, with a cluster of buildings centered around open courtyards. The buildings were connected by a series of covered walkways. Due to the overcrowding, these walkways became virtual mosh pits when it rained.

One day, when it was pouring, it took me a good four-and-a-half minutes to get past the worst bottleneck - a distance of perhaps 100 feet. Once inside the building, I hauled my fat ass - all 300 pounds of it - as fast as I could in a desperate attempt to reach class in time. I *ran* up the stairs. (My room was near the top of the staircase.)

As I neared the top, I heard the bell start to ring. I literally leapt up the last couple of steps ... and collided head-on with a hulking jock who was accompanied by his pretty blonde girlfriend. I weighed more than him, but he was in better shape than I was, so it was a toss-up as to which one of us felt it more. Together, we tumbled to the floor.

"Watch where you're going, you fucking piece of shit!" he screamed, and punched me - hard - in the stomach. It hurt, but I was so pumped full of adrenaline that I barely felt it. The bell was ringing so loudly that my ears were practically bleeding.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" I screamed as I scrambled to my feet. I raced over to the door, flung it open, jumped into the room, and slid into my chair just as the bell stopped ringing.

Again, I was a real lardass, so this must have been quite a spectacle. Everyone was staring at me. I was sweating and panting like crazy.

"Nice of you to join us," the teacher said with a smirk.

"I made it here on time, but not without getting punched in the stomach," I said between labored breaths.

The teacher laughed and then began taking attendance.

Fortunately, the jock never came after me.

Despite its deteriorating condition, my school was located in an upper-middle-class area. Most of the nearby houses (including my grandmother's) were valued in the high six figures or the low seven figures. (One of the crappiest homes in the area - an abandoned dump with a rotting roof - sold for over $500,000. This was before the real-estate bubble, mind you.)

As for the social dynamics, yes, there were lots of "rich kids" who wore the latest overpriced crap from Abercrombie & Fitch, drove to school in their brand-new cars, and consumed generous quantities of illicit (and illegal) substances on the weekends. But there were also lots of poor kids who rode the bus from the "ghetto" areas to the south. The rich kids didn't talk to the poor kids, and vice versa.

As I once said in another thread, I was floored when a poor kid once told me that, from his perspective, I was a "rich" kid. I never thought of myself as privileged in any way, shape, or form. Keep in mind that, physically, I was probably one of the ugliest kids in the school. I didn't have a car, I never so much as set foot inside the local Abercrombie & Fitch store, and I never snorted even a single line of coke. Most of the kids I considered "rich" never deigned to acknowledge my existence. But this guy called me a spoiled brat.

Like Eric and Dylan, I was lucky compared to many kids, and like them, I didn't appreciate the things I had.

Quote :

That's a good anecdote about how you were discouraged from class discussion because, boo hoo, you were making the other kids feel stupid.

In one class, we had an extensive series of debates and had to write extensive reviews of each kid's performance. One girl once told me, "When I read your review, I had to use a thesaurus just to find out you were saying I sucked!"

The teachers really didn't mind the fact that I participated so much. One told me, "You've done B work this semester, but given your amazing level of class participation I can't justify giving you anything less than an A." (In other words, he liked me, so he gave me a break. That's how it works.) He later nominated me for the senior English award.

This same teacher accidentally came out of the closet one day when he referred to his "boyfriend" in front of everyone. He then tried to recover by saying, "Uh, my friend, I mean." No one held it against him, but people did talk about it. At Columbine, things would have been worse for him.

Naturally, I was absent that day. I skipped *a lot* of school during my senior year. But I completed all of my assignments and I graduated in the top ten percent of my class.

One time, a teacher ran into me at the supermarket when I was supposed to be deathly ill in bed. She rolled her eyes when she saw me, but she still marked my absence as Excused. As I said, when the teachers like you, they make excuses for you.

I always got along very well with teachers. I was a very good student, and I was an even better suck-up. Ingratiating myself with the adults was my way of coping for my lack of social status. "My ostensible peers don't give a shit whether I live or die, but at least the grown-ups like me."

Even the principal always said "Hi" to me, even though she always got my name wrong. My real last name - not Porter - is a common first name with an s at the end. The principal called me by the first part of my last name. It was as if my name was Tom Andrews (it's not, but never mind) and she always called me "Andy." I never corrected her. I figured that, if I ever did anything to piss her off, she would mistakenly punish the wrong person.

My mother and my grandmother always insisted that I give all of my teachers gifts for Christmas. Left to my own devices, I wouldn't have bothered, but they insisted. In retrospect, it probably paid dividends.

My senior year, my grandmother got all of the female teachers scarves. She put them in boxes and I wrote random names on the tags, not caring who got what.

On the first day of school after winter break, one of my teachers came up to me and said, "You know, [LPorter], a few of us were talking in the teacher's lounge, and we were amazed by how perfectly you matched each scarf to each person's different personality. You must have spent a lot of time on this."

I could have said, "I spent thirty seconds on it, tops" ... but I didn't. I just smiled and said, "It was time well spent. I'm so glad you liked them."

"Everyone did," she said. "You really are a very sensitive guy. I hope you never lose that quality."

That same teacher nominated me for another special award (in addition to the English one) at the end of the year. I got to go to a banquet at a fancy downtown hotel and everything.

So, yeah, I lied and cheated and manipulated my way through the treacherous landscape of student-teacher relations. Eric the swaggering psychopath would have approved heartily of my duping delight.

(I'm good at lying. Sometimes I think it's my core competency. )

The moral of my story is, if you want to get ahead in life, being a cynical opportunist and having a fuck-or-get-fucked mentality helps. I know lots of people with money, and I wouldn't buy a used car from any of them.

LPorter101 wrote:

Quote :

The cafeteria food at my school was such barf that I did the same thing, just ate a slice of (bad) pizza for lunch.

The pizza was from Pizza Hut. They charged $1.50 for a (small) slice and 50 cents for a can of soda. (My daily lunch budget was exactly $2, so that's usually what I ate.)

One day, when it was pouring, it took me a good four-and-a-half minutes to get past the worst bottleneck - a distance of perhaps 100 feet. Once inside the building, I hauled my fat ass - all 300 pounds of it - as fast as I could in a desperate attempt to reach class in time. I *ran* up the stairs. (My room was near the top of the staircase.)

As I neared the top, I heard the bell start to ring. I literally leapt up the last couple of steps ... and collided head-on with a hulking jock who was accompanied by his pretty blonde girlfriend. I weighed more than him, but he was in better shape than I was, so it was a toss-up as to which one of us felt it more. Together, we tumbled to the floor.

"Watch where you're going, you fucking piece of shit!" he screamed, and punched me - hard - in the stomach. It hurt, but I was so pumped full of adrenaline that I barely felt it. The bell was ringing so loudly that my ears were practically bleeding.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" I screamed as I scrambled to my feet. I raced over to the door, flung it open, jumped into the room, and slid into my chair just as the bell stopped ringing.

As I once said in another thread, I was floored when a poor kid once told me that, from his perspective, I was a "rich" kid. I never thought of myself as privileged in any way, shape, or form. Keep in mind that, physically, I was probably one of the ugliest kids in the school. I didn't have a car, I never so much as set foot inside the local Abercrombie & Fitch store, and I never snorted even a single line of coke. Most of the kids I considered "rich" never deigned to acknowledge my existence. But this guy called me a spoiled brat.

Like Eric and Dylan, I was lucky compared to many kids, and like them, I didn't appreciate the things I had.

1)The pizza - That's pretty nice that it was from Pizza Hut. At my school (I attended 1995-2001) corporate deals like that would have been looked on as being a little shady. I usually only had $2 for lunch as well.
2)The stomach-punching incident - I'd still be thinking about that today if it had happened to me. Although I only consider bullying a secondary factor in why NBK happened, I have NEVER forgotten the physical incidents with other guys, to the point where if you put me in a room with the guys who did it (and I was barely abused at all--I just really cannot stand humiliation or failure) I'd have to restrain myself to avoid beating them upside the face with a blunt object, if I had one.
3)Your teacher coming out - I went to high school in northeast Kansas so I'm going to guess somebody would have murdered the guy if he'd been teaching here. Kansas, of course, was the home of the notorious Al Capone of Christianity, Fred Phelps, for decades. And Fred NEVER let up until he died.
4)The kid calling you a "rich kid" - Kids get things wrong all the time, but in rural Kansas we barely had any rich kids

Quote :

2)The stomach-punching incident - I'd still be thinking about that today if it had happened to me. Although I only consider bullying a secondary factor in why NBK happened, I have NEVER forgotten the physical incidents with other guys, to the point where if you put me in a room with the guys who did it (and I was barely abused at all--I just really cannot stand humiliation or failure) I'd have to restrain myself to avoid beating them upside the face with a blunt object, if I had one.

That incident sticks out in my mind because it was about the only time in high school when I was physically attacked by anyone. One time, a crazy wrestler got angry at me and said, "I'm gonna get you!" ... but nothing ever came of it.

One time, in middle school, a crazy girl jumped on top of me and bit me in the back. When I say bit, I mean bit - I mean, she just chomped into me like I was a big juicy hunk of prime rib. I'd like to say that I dispatched her easily, but the truth is that I screamed bloody murder until a teacher ran into the hallway and pulled her off of me.

In all of my formative years, I used my fists only once.

My longest-running babysitter was a Colombian lady. Her husband worked long hours, so he was never around. She had several sons and treated me like a member of the family. I have no siblings myself, so those boys were the closest things I ever had to brothers. Most of them were in their late teens and early twenties, but the youngest - I'll call him J. - was only a little older than me.

(One of her sons died in a car crash after partying hard on the night of his high-school graduation. She told my mother that, after burying her boy, taking care of me was the only thing that kept her sane.)

I never had any close male friends in school, and my only regular playmate was my female cousin, so I never got to do typical guy things with other boys. The few masculine things I did get to do were all courtesy of my babysitter and her family.

One day, J. and I were horsing around in the common area behind my babysitter's townhouse when a group of older boys surrounded us. They grabbed me and told me that I had to fight, unless I wanted to be a girl. I didn't, so I swallowed my fear and agreed.

The other boys formed a circle around the two chosen contestants and began chanting "Fight! Fight! Fight!" I was six, maybe seven, and my towering opponent was probably eight or nine. He swaggered toward me, confident in his ability to pummel me to the ground. But I didn't give him the chance. I rushed up to him and decked him straight in the chin. He fell to the ground and started bawling.

The other boys, who had been cheering him on, reacted with shock and horror at the fact that I'd managed to prevail. They kept saying, "You're in trouble! You're in trouble!" Terrified, I ran back into the house.

I didn't say a word to my babysitter, but she found out about the incident when the mother of the boy I'd punched called to say that I'd attacked him unprovoked. She didn't quite believe that I'd been goaded into it.

When I told my mother about it, she basically shrugged and said, "Boys will be boys."

Around the time of the fight, my babysitter's next-youngest son graduated from high school. For a while thereafter, he lived at home while holding down a job and attending a community college.

(His bedroom still looms large in my mind as a dark den of mysterious secrets. I was particularly entranced by the bizarre rock posters he had plastered all over the walls.)

He used to tell me about all of the things I would do when I was a teenager. He told me that I would go out on weekends and drink beer with my buddies and race cars in the middle of the night and spend time alone with the ladies.

About the latter, he said cryptically, "You'll have to see how far you can get." I didn't understand his meaning until I was much older.

"Whatever you do, just make sure you don't end up like my brother," he told me once. "Work hard, party hard, but don't let it go too far."

He needn't have worried. I never did any of those things. I had the most boring teenage experience in the history of adolescence.