We are a twisted bunch. We give birth to characters and torture them for no apparent reason. We break their hearts, we get them beaten up after school, we have their family members killed, and sometimes we even kill them. Why, in my last story, I took two young kids who were given a second chance at love and had them drive into each other at a fatal speed. God, how fucked up of me.

It turns out that he was also a loner. Here’s another surprise for you: most writers, if not all, are loners. If we’re not explicitly loners, we certainly are at heart. We create these characters to keep us company. We create these worlds to escape our own. We write what we write and how we write because it’s a part of who we are; it’s the way we look at the world. It’s our way of nudging the person next to us and pointing out a person who had just slipped on a banana peel and giving him a name, a personality, making him a three dimensional human being with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It’s our interpretation of the chaos around us.

What did he even write about, anyway? Apparently, one story was about “a fight between a stepson and his stepfather, and involved throwing of hammers and attacks with a chainsaw.” Yeah, no one has ever thought of using hammers as weapons before. And don’t get me started on chainsaws as weapons. That’s just simply unheard of.

I’m going to let you all in on a little secret. This may be shocking, so you better sit down. All right. Ready? You know all those horror/slasher/gorefest flicks you watched as a kid/still watch? Get this…those were written by HUMAN BEINGS, sometimes even more than one. Yes, yes, I know. It’s insane. Friday the 13th? Human. Saw? One, two, and three, all human. Dead Alive? Ding ding ding. If you guessed “human,” you are correct! These movies were not written by mere machines, they were written by man. Why, you highly paid talking heads in your swanky New York and L.A. apartments might even be living next to one of those men. They might be frantically typing away their next blood-soaked masterpiece right now.

I’m not making light of this tragedy. I am shining the light on the ne(ntertainment)ws media once again grasping at straws in the midst of this terrible event in history. I’m pointing out the reasons why there is such things as outcasts, why the bookworms and quiet kids in high school get picked on and are looked at as weirdoes. You, news media, make them stand out. You take the music they listen to, the clothes they wear, and the hobbies they partake in, and mark them as “potential threats.” You sensationalize these tragedies, calling them the “deadliest shootings in US history,” setting the benchmark for the next lost soul waiting to snap and claim his page in the history books. If you’re looking for something in the fuckup who took thirty-two innocent lives with him that will tell you why exactly he did it, you will never find it; that died with him. You can speculate all you want, you can look for clues that look crystal clear in hindsight, but you will never find out what went through his head when he made the decision to go fucking nuts. His music preferences didn’t do it, his extra curricular activities didn’t do it, his TV viewing habits didn’t do it, his writing didn’t do it. He fucked up. Warning signs only become warning signs after the fact.

Report on something that matters. Report on the lives of the thirty-two lost. Who were they as people? What did they enjoy doing? Who did they love and who loves them? Here’s your chance to take a crack at writing a real story. Here’s your chance to make these people three dimensional. And hey, you’ve already got most of the work done for you. You’re dealing with real people with real lives, no make believe. You already have their beginning, their middle, and their end. Now write it down, and let us crazy fiction writers do our fucking jobs in peace.

Sometimes I wish there were a single word to express all the rage, disgust, shock, and horror in a single instance…”fuck” doesn’t do that anymore. Is the industry that delusional to believe that copyright is the incentive for creating new material? Last time I checked, love for the art form was the main motivation for creating music, but I guess I could be wrong. Yes, obviously professional musicians need money to continue along, but where the hell does posting guitar tabs/lyrics to the internet come into play in taking that away from the artist? Instead of buying the CD, I’m going to record all the songs myself and distribute it to friends…yeah.

So I suppose I should stop listening to songs and figuring out how to play them on my guitar. I should stop putting music quotes in my away messages. I should stop singing along in my car. I don’t want Big Brother detaining me for violating DMCA. Music has become a commodity, far from an art form. Minus a few diamonds in the rough over the years, for the most part, it is rubbish. It’s a fucking shame that it has come to this.

We are so simple, and our greatest flaw is ultimately our lack of imagination. To think that putting metal detectors in school after Columbine “prevented” school shootings is a failure to realize that these murderers walked into their school armed and prepared to commit the atrocities which they did. A metal detector would have provided no deterrence to their ultimate goal.

We have to look at the big time line of the world. How often have subway bombings occurred? School shootings? Planes used as missles aimed at large buildings? These are sporadic, isolated instances. If it were happening on a daily basis, then there might be cause for concern. We need to focus less on patchwork legislation and more on fixing the underlying problems.

Believing that increased ability for law enforcement to tap our phone lines and collect our data would also assume that law enforcement has the ability to predict the future and find the needle in the haystack. This data would provide nothing more than an after-the-fact “we should have seen this coming…the evidence was staring us right in the face” reaction. It’s very easy to put the puzzle together once you’ve seen the end result, once you know what you’re looking for.

Had all of these post-9/11 laws been in place, could 9/11 have been prevented? Look at what we had. Some of the hijackers had been flagged by the FBI. On August 6, 2001, the CIA presented a report aptly titled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.” In the end, when there’s a will, there’s a way, and these laws in place do nothing more than destroy the very rights in which this country was founded on.

Why the hell am I talking about the Michigan Left? I had somewhere to be today which I had never gone to before, and I needed Google directions. I could not, for the life of me, figure out why the last direction was telling me to turn right (south) on a north-south running road when I needed to go north. Then it hit me…Google was telling me to make a Michigan Left! Upon closer inspection, the criptic previous step made complete sense. Here’s Google’s example of a Michigan Left:

Something just happened there. If you were part of the Michigan group, you thought “….ooooooooh…” The rest of you are thinking “what the fuck?” To sum it all up, the Michigan Left is the act of making what would normally be a simple left turn by turning left, then left again, then right down the road you would have normally turned left down. A number of roads in Michigan require such a feat.

OK, so I’m desperate for blog material. I know I’m not the only one! I was just fascinated to see this in Google’s own terms.

In some imaginary black and white world, there’s one way to live and then there’s another. The concept of denial, in my world, seems to be only one thing: homosexuality. This is not what this is about. I don’t believe I am gay, but my mind might tell me otherwise. When your mind is easily manipulated by something out of your control, past emotions could be clouded, situations could be molded. As confident as you are one minute, some slight degree of change, a stupid remark, a gesture, might send everything out of wack.

Let’s establish one thing. I’m not well, mentally. Who is, really? Is this really such a bold statement? There’s one thing I’d like established. I am, or have been for the past several years, focused on psychology…not professionally or scholastically…more on a casual level. I’ve been interested in the inner workings of peoples’ minds, watching how they work, and most importantly, spending way too much time in my own head.

What happens if one day you might discover that everything you’ve been telling yourself or you’ve been believing is unreliable, that you’ve been following a very unstable source. It’s both a blessing and a curse, because on that day you were able to give it a name: obsessive compulsive disorder.

It’s partly exciting, and party frightening. The symptoms are all there. Yeah, most people would read some article by a psychologist and start to believe “hey, this is me,” but it’s a different story when what you’re reading has already been written in your own journal for some time. It never had a name before. Well, it did, loosely…I called it “perfectionism.”

I remember exactly when I named it. I remember exactly what I wrote, because I’m looking at it right now. Written on the back cardstock piece to my pocket-sized notepad are the words Perfectionism controls my life, with – 6/8/04 written underneath. I was sitting on the steps to The Crowbar in State College, PA, a few hours before I would perform as a member of the improv troupe The Comedy Whorehouse.

My pet has always been around…as I search for examples, I have difficulties coming up with solid evidence, because it was all routine. To me, it would be as normal as breathing. For me to feel like this was an abnormality would be, well, abnormal, because this was my reality. Other pieces of evidence are in the differences between my philosophy and actions. While I would spend an absurd amount of time paying attention to detail in, say, a piece of work, the signs are more apparent in my overall thought process and behavior.

Once you name it, a few of your thought patterns come to the surface. You get that lightbulb and realize it’s a problem. I guess a lot of the evidence is clear in my many projects started and abandoned, mostly due to my extreme attention to detail, self-pressure, and realization at one point that if it doesn’t come out perfect, it’s not worth continuing. This is why I never finished those songs, this is why stories start and abruptly end, this is why I don’t try, because for one, there’s probably a thousand other people already doing it and better than I ever could, and two, I might fail.

That’s a huge part of my problem: fear of failure. This comes in many flavors. When you think of fear of failure, the most common examples are pretty much true. That’s a very straight forward statement. The more abstract ideas behind these would involve such concepts as being made to look foolish, such as making a stupid face, performing a foolish physical act, being lied to. Not having control over circumstances which I literally have no control over, such as the way somebody perceives me. I attempt to control that by censoring myself, by hiding things, by judging my every move to try and gauge what other people are thinking about me.

By this point, I’m somewhat proud of myself. I’m still typing, I haven’t stopped and decided to go back and delete everything I’ve written. At times I would censor what I would say online on such a page like this for fear that my family might read it and…well, I don’t know. I don’t really have an answer as far as what they would do. In my mind, it would be some sort of something negative. Negative in the sense that they would be concerned or upset or think I’m completely insane. Enough hiding that.

In my head, there’s this belief that people would think I’m insane. There’s this belief that people would be afraid of me. There’s this belief that if someone I know read this, they would think I’m completely fucked up and not want to deal with me. There’s this belief that people that don’t really know me and are passing through or perhaps considering knowing me would think twice about continuing.

And then there’s me. I’m fascinated and intrigued by people who embrace psychology. I relate better to those who are depressed, to those who sit and think more than they talk, to those who don’t strive to be some extremely socially active becon. I think it makes people more interesting. All that fun inner turmoil. The realization, “wow, we’re fucking insane.”

So here I am…I’m coming out. No, not as a homosexual, but as an insane, depressed being who (believes he) suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder, or more specifically, obsessive compulsive personality disorder. There’s a great article on it here. I read that with wide-eyed awe, as it nearly line for line described me, and gave me a name for that voice in my head. It sucks to have a problem, but it’s great to have a name for it, because that’s the first step of fixing the problem.

The end.

(As a side note, I just watched a documentary, “punk: attitude,” on IFC, and I felt inspired)

What’s more frightning are Iran’s warnings that their country would become a “scorching hell” for any possible attackers. The fact that we’re even whispering about Iran should be cause for concern for anybody. These are the early days, where we hear the word “Iran” dropped into the news here and there…it’s not quite time yet for the full flood of propaganda and false reasoning to go to war with them. If the Bush administration were smart (heaven forbid), they’d keep any operation in Iran on the back page of the news where nobody will read about it. Then again, it’s not like it’ll be the wake up call for anyone in the US if it were all over the news. It’ll just be another damn day. Hell, I wouldn’t put it past the majority of Jesusland to confuse Iran with Iraq…it’s only a one letter difference, leave them alone!

It doesn’t matter that the Iraq war is still a near-complete failure, troop morale is down the gutter, and troops are stretched thin. It doesn’t matter that numerous polls show the majority of people thinking Iraq was a mistake. Tell them the Reichstag is burning and the cry for war will be heard. All the fear surrounding the question “Is Iran next?” seems to be justified.