Apologies…

…for the break in postings; I haven’t been too good at doing anything in the past few days. The weekend was taken up with vegetation, realising that Dad was going away to the Isle of Man for a week, and before all of that, going out to a gay bar in Belfast with a new friend who is in the strange position of knowing quite a lot of people on the scene and at the same time actually being a very nice talkable–to person.

So, we went to this bar. And upstairs in the bar — I’d never sat upstairs there before but it’s very nice with square wood and leather chairs — I experienced some of the old–time atmosphere of sitting in an Aberdeen bar with uni people who I'’d known (seemingly) my whole life. It was just one of those moods. I felt relaxed and at home and in charge. And at the same time reaching out. I thought of Jonathan and wondered why he was missing all this, for example. I thought of Patrick and how, when he next visits, I’ll bring him here.

Anyway. Over the weekend that followed, I spent a lot of time pursuing a really random and quite macabre avenue of web research. The Columbine Massacre - the school shootings in Littleton, Colorado. There are a lot of very informative websites out there. A lot of labyrinthine ones. And a lot of really damn unsettling ones. Here’s a snippet by one of the killers:

I HAVE COME TO ROCK YOUR WORLD
I HAVE COME TO SHAKE YOUR FAITH
ANATHEMATIC ANARCHIST
I HAVE COME TO TAKE MY PLACE

I AM YOUR UNCONSCIOUSNESS
I AM UNRESTRAINED EXCESS
METAMORPHIC RESTLESSNESS
I
I AM YOUR APOCALYPSE
I AM YOUR BELIEF UNWROUGHT
MONOLITHIC JUGGERNAUT
I

This is all the more extremist–sounding and unsettling when you consider that the guy who wrote it was a teenager. Now, as creative writing this is pretty good, powerful, punchy stuff. But taken beside what we now know of how exactly his life was to end, and what lives it was to take with it, it seems to resage what happened and it gives me chills. And even after staring myself bug–eyed at this stuff and all the crime scene reports over the weekend, I still can’t stop myself from thinking: don’t dismiss them as wacko bastards. Because they weren’t.

And then I think of all that flows from that… There’s a poem or ten in here somewhere.