No Love: Confessions of a Would-Be School Shooter

NO LOVE:

CONFESSIONS OF A WOULD-BE SCHOOL SHOOTER

Smashwords Edition

Written by

An Anonymous Adult

Copyright 2013 An Anonymous Adult

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Contents

Foreword

Chapter I: The Moment

Chapter II: The Illogical State

Chapter III: Soda

Chapter IV: Reality Check

Chapter V: Porn

Chapter VI: But Why That?

Chapter VII: Self-Mutilation

Chapter VIII: The Worst

Chapter IX: Holy War

Chapter X: No Love

Chapter XI: School

Chapter XII: The Bow-and-Arrow Incident

Chapter XIII: The Serial-Killer Complex

Chapter XIV: Everyday Insanity

Chapter XV: My Last Day On Earth

Chapter XVI: The Illogical State, Revisited

Chapter XVII: My Second Life

Chapter XVIII: Houston, We Have A Problem

Afterword

Dedication

This book is dedicated to those I hurt and terrorized so long ago. Let me make this right.

Foreword

I almost shot up my school. I almost shot myself. And it had all felt so right.

Perfectly, naturally right.

My crime was a matter of math, I know now. Addictions + sickness + illogical thinking + teenage hormones = murder-suicide. These were the ingredients of a killer cocktail – but that would only be clear in retrospect. At the time, my homicidal urges instead felt completely right, like picking up a dollar bill from the street. If this statement does not chill you, perhaps you should reread it.

I was almost a school shooter, only a hair from it. Even now, over a decade later, I am still struck by this alarming reality.

Hate me yet? If so, I understand. Once upon a time, I would’ve hated me, too. If you want to write me off as a villain and then close this book in disgust, I won’t hold it against you. If, however, you want to hear my story, then I can tell you this: there is a story, and it could change how you see me and the events in question. Even Oswald had a story, I’d bet.

If you’re on the fence, I can promise you this: my book doesn’t ask for a grain of your sympathy. Know that I take full responsibility for my actions, however much they were influenced by the lethal cocktail mentioned above. Time and growth have cured me of all desire for sympathy and vindication, and of all my ego’s defenses and insistences. I wrote this book as a humble word of warning against the fallibility of our own thoughts and convictions. Rather than a sob story or an effort to capitalize on my dirty laundry, this book is a cautionary tale.

I can offer another incentive to continue reading this book: you might learn a thing or two. I used to think myself incapable of doing what I did, right up until I did it. If asked whether I could ever become one of those despised faces seen in the news, I would’ve laughed and said No way — and really believed myself. Ironically, this very self-assurance opened the door to the whole mess, because we never suspect what we think isn’t possible. Had I been forewarned of my vulnerability, things might have turned out far different for me.

My hope is that this book will serve as the warning I never had, for anyone who might need it.

Chapter I: The Moment

Today, you’re always hearing about living in The Moment. Yet this Moment is never quite defined. The phrase hasn’t been repeated to the point of losing all meaning, because it never really had much meaning to begin with.

But that doesn’t mean there’s no such thing. I’ve found The Moment, and it truly is a world apart from life in normal time.

Words say nothing of existence within The Moment – probably why some of those folks who harp on it can’t explain it. It’s one of those things you can only describe in nots: it’s not living in the shadow of a future or a past, it’s not planning for tomorrow or fearing yesterday’s mistakes, it’s not moving between Point A and Point B. Five Year Plans have no place in The Moment. Nor do long-term stock investments or 401k’s, nor putting in the time in hopes of a sound relationship. Instead, life in The Moment is what’s here, now, right in front of you, and nothing else. The effect on one’s thinking is massive, for better or worse.

Leave your clock and your calendar at the door. You won’t need them here.

The Moment is reached no one way. It’s like some people’s view of God: all roads will get you there, and one is no better than the other. But this doesn’t mean that all ways to The Moment are the same. Some are easy and effortless; others, more involving and demanding. The Moment can be entered by coin of intense pleasure or intense pain, both. Some doorways are naughty, some are nice. Heaven leads to The Moment as effectively as Hell. How you get there is up to you. Mostly, it’s just a matter of abandoning all time and timelines; and time can either be calmly released, or torn from you amidst screams.

Personally, life has shown me multiple paths to The Moment. But, as it so happened, the first was the hellish mental state known as psychosis, when I was a lost sixteen-year-old boy.

I knew it was the end. The end of what – my entire life, or just my present life – I didn’t know, but the end of something, for sure. I had school assignments due, big ones, and I had not done a thing on them. The same for homework – pick a class, any class. It was the tail-end of winter, late in the school year, and I’d been coasting on the fumes of little white lies, big lies (whatever color they are), and plain old ignorance and denial. Things were no better at home, where I’d erected a similar house of cards in regards to my obligations. My decline had begun the summer before, and this evasive dance had gotten me through the fall and winter; but as spring approached, the jig was up.

I was failing half my classes in school. My parents were demanding things of me I couldn’t or wouldn’t give. I was physically sick, and I was losing my mind, and I was almost wholly unaware of these things. For me, I thought it was all normal.

I was between a rock and a hard place, and it was this that forced me into The Moment.

It wasn’t just my circumstances that worked this miracle, but the willful ignorance which accompanied them. For me and my family, willful ignorance was a way of life: ignore the problem and it’ll go away (and if it doesn’t, shift blame until the problem is no longer yours). My parents were willfully ignorant; my older sibling was willfully ignorant; my extended family was willfully ignorant; all my friends were, more or less, willfully ignorant. People on TV were willfully ignorant, and this behavior was depicted as normal. The fact is, I didn’t know anything but willful ignorance, so much that I didn’t even know it was willful ignorance. The term wasn’t in my vocabulary. For me and everyone around me, it was just what we did, pretending problems were nonexistent or insignificant to evade the pain of dealing with them. Problem-solving was synonymous with willfully ignoring in some fashion, and there was just no other way to do things. If anyone disputed this fact, you willfully ignored them.

The thing we ignored best was our own willful ignorance, and it was this that made it so effective.

But, like all willful ignorance, that which I directed toward my mounting problems that winter didn’t make the problems go away, no matter how far the other way I looked. I knew the piper would soon need paying, yet I knew no possible way to pay up. The solution: enter The Moment.

I didn’t call it this, of course, or call it anything at all for that matter. All I knew was, I did a Trick in my head, where I’d blot out all past screw-ups and future complications, or anything else that prevented complacence. Also in this fashion, I could blot away any present, immediate mistakes I was making, even as they were being made. My Trick was like willful ignorance but even bigger, grander, more effective, so that I could do anything and everything without fear of consequence, however damning or shortsighted this thinking was. I had mental whiteout, by God.

Thanks to this Trick, I could detach myself completely from my situation, to where I wasn’t failing school, and I didn’t have to live with my parents, and I wasn’t regularly cutting myself. Or, alternatively, these realities would just take on other dimensions: perhaps I would somehow buckle down and resolve my grades, or my parents would relent on their ultimatums. Perhaps cutting yourself was normal and healthy, and that last one wasn’t deep enough to scar. Perhaps I was just dreaming this craziness. When I used my Trick in The Moment, things could be whatever I wanted them to be, whatever felt good, whatever my subconscious needed for Everything To Be All Right.

Not that things were ever all right for long. However deep in The Moment I fled, a crushing despair pursued me, and it always moved faster than I did. That winter was a cat-and-mouse affair. I was constantly ducking and dodging and bobbing and weaving, playing whatever head games were necessary to convince myself things weren’t as they were. Those last few days of winter involved erratic cycles of manic happiness and mind-bending depression, coming and going within the space of hours, minutes, or seconds. I began anticipating these cycles, getting into their sick rhythm. I took what relief I could get, when I could get it. Any shred of wellbeing was received with praise and rejoicing, the way hot sand sucks up water, for soon my happiness could be replaced with a new wave of hungry blackness, one that might not be survived.

Death loomed in each new development, each new whim of my sickened body, each new thought which crossed the crooked horizon of my mind. I was on a rollercoaster, and every dip and turn could see thoughts of murder-suicide emerge from their subconscious cages. During the climax of my yearlong descent, this up-and-down was constant, and I learned to roll with it, lest the smallest of troubles suck me down and drown me at last.

My crisis was a ticket, really. It forced me to live entirely in The Moment, where I was perpetually detached from the reality of my mistake-ridden past and my consequence-ridden future. Dwell on what the future held or what my past had laid the groundwork for, and it would zap me into a hellish panic, for which I had no solution. So I just did my Trick and ignored, ignored, ignored, blanking my mind and its punishments. My head was a vending machine: feed it enough lies and assurances, and it would cough up enough junk-food happiness to get me through the day. And so long as I was firmly in The Moment while consuming this mental diet, reality stayed distant and Everything Would Be All Right. Only then could I stop thinking of school and parents and the world, or that handgun I’d recently found hidden in my parents’ bedroom.

But even The Moment wouldn’t save me from myself and my mistakes. I was fighting a losing battle, one which would end with insanity, arrest, and notoriety.

Chapter II: The Illogical State

Did I say I was insane? That isn’t quite true: I was just thinking and behaving illogically, without basis in reality. Even in the depths of my madness, when I would come dangerously close to shooting up my high school, I was just illogical and out of my head, rather than properly insane. It’s a condition I’ve come to know well, one I refer to as the illogical state.

Does that mean my actions weren’t insane? No. They just weren’t insane in a clinical sense, that which would be indicated on a psychological test. Colloquially, I was every bit insane. Maybe it wouldn’t have shown up on a test, but it would have in the eyes. My insanity was just the result of the illogical state and its distorted thinking and screwed-up perceptions, rather than some traditional mental illness.

Illogical thinking and clinical insanity do indeed overlap, but the two are distinct enough to be separated. Though the two