I am really, really glad that school shootings were not a thing when I was a depressed teenage back in the 80’s.

Not that they have never happened – the one that inspired this song comes to mind.

But school shootings weren’t a meme yet. They didn’t have the “depressed loser takes revenge on his bullies” narrative attached yet. They weren’t something people thought could happen at any time, in any school, in any part of the world yet. They had no cultural tags other than “incomprehensible isolated acts”.

They weren’t a “thing” yet.

And I am glad, because I had all the ingredients for an incident when I was a depressed teen except, perhaps, a deep sense of grievance against a system rigged against me.

So maybe the real fortunate thing was that by the time I was depressed enough to do it, I wasn’t being bullied any more.

The source of my pain was far more ephemeral, and I wouldn’t even begin to understand it until I was in my early thirties.

It takes a long time to deprogram yourself enough to see what isn’t there, and trace your pain back to its roots.

But no, when I was in high school my bullies were long gone. I had banished them by, shall we say, asserting myself (by, amongst other things, throwing one of my bullies down a flight of concrete stairs) in grade 8, and I guess word got out that I am one with whom thou shalt not fuck.

Or maybe I just finally accessed enough of my primal teenaged testosterone to no longer seem like easy prey any more. I dunno.

But the whole school shooter meme wasn’t really a thing until around the same time this song popped up on Muchmusic :

I am not saying I would have done it if the factors had aligned back then. Odds are heavily against it.

But it would have been a possibility.

I knew where my father kept our guns and our ammo. I knew how to load and shoot most of them. I was incredibly depressed most of the time.

And what nobody tells you about depression is that for some of us – seems to be men, mostly – when it gets really, really, really bad we are capable of anything, including monstrous acts of violence.

You enter a state of mind where depression’s numbness starts driving you into an increasingly agitated state because you are so desperate to feel something and so numb to any sort of moral feelings that would normally restrain you that you will do whatever it takes to penetrate that chill fog clinging to your mind.

And the deeper the numbness, the more extreme an act has to be to do that.

Hence rappers talking about “bouncing off the walls when you are down”. That’s a reality for a lot of depressed men. At some point, the worm turns, and your depression stops sedating you and starts revving you up instead.

That’s when men beat their partners and their kids. When they get into fights. When they get drunk and commit stupid crimes.

When they kill themselves.

So when I was a depressed teenager thinking vague angry thoughts on the way to and from high school and spending my days in total social isolation at the exact time of life when I should have been taking my first steps into becoming part of a community and completely failing to grow as a person, I was capable of shooting up my school just to finally feel something.

Again, I am not saying I would have done it.

But if I had done it, I would have done it laughing.

Laughing my sick and crazy ass off. Laughing at all the people running around and screaming and crying because I’d shown them the truth I had always known : that the world is a horrible place, safety is an illusion, and nothing really matters.

It would have been mass murder as an act of mocking nihilism.

And maybe I would have killed myself at the end. Maybe not. Suicide would have been the artistically perfect way to end my abattoir masterpiece, but then again, I would really have enjoyed being a notorious killer.

I’m glad that never happened. I am glad that nothing has happened in my life that would have summoned up the evil in me and made it howl.

Because deep down, I am a seriously fucked up motherfucker.

Deep down, I am capable of anything.

Deep down…. there are things you are better off not knowing about.

More after the break.

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Getting your exorcise

Standard reminder : when I write stuff like the above, I am ridding myself of my demons by trapping them in text.

I’m a writer, so I deal with things by writing about them. This is my best and most effective form of therapy. In text, I can get out what I need to get out in a safe way where I can do things exactly as they need to be done and in a “place” where I feel safe and in control.

Same thing, really.

I have a lot of unresolved issues from my past, so a lot of what I right is at best somewhat dark and at worst downright disturbing.

Again, folks…. thank you so much for reading it. It means the world and several satellites of Jupiter to me.

I don’t know why I still feel ashamed for loosing my demons upon an unsuspecting world. I am hardly the only person turning private pain into public art.

H. R. Giger comes to mind, for one. Plus pretty much everyone involved in horror.

I don’t know why writing horror doesn’t really appeal to me, either. It seems like a natural fit on paper. ^[1]

Heck, it worked for Clive Barker.

But I guess I am just not that interested in scaring people. Whatever it is I am trying to communicate in my writing, fear is not a part of it.

Which is too bad, because I am sure that I could scare the heck out of people if I tried.

Hmmmm. I’ll think it over. Meanwhile….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.