Profile of a Young Rampage Shooter #2

“his conditioning is worsening and he is withdrawing further into himself. he is also struggling to articulate feelings which concerns us.” this is a part of a letter that a counselor at my school recently sent to my parents. fuck. “what is the problem son? school is a place where you have tons of support groups, it is a safe place, your teachers care for you and you are the most talented student in the tech club,” my mom said to me in response to the letter. what is she talking about? every teacher in that school is concerned about me. i feel like they are constantly on my back observing me. always giving me tasks to stay busy and telling me that they do this because I have special needs. special needs? are they fucking kidding? “you are given the best services to assure that you will be successful in high school,” one of the school psychologists likes to tell me. really? the best that the school has to offer is a bunch of unhappy, under paid and stressed out adults who can’t think for themselves and sound like robots when they talk about procedures and programs? and they want to turn me into a robot like them? are you kidding me. i do what they say because if I don’t I get into trouble. my parents take things away from me. the school gives me more work to do. i have to do what they say for now but they have no idea how much I hate them. i hate all of this but I cant let them see this or they will bury me in crap. but one day they will see it and then like the idiots they are they will wonder why.

the only place in the world that I have to myself is my room. it is the only place that I can feel like my shoulders are unburdened by the crap that adults put on them. i can do just about anything I want in my room. my mom and dad tell me that I spend toooo much time alone in my room. they tell me that I am going to get eye strain from staring into my computer too much. fuck them. they have no idea what I have to tolerate on a day to day basis. every day I go to school I am flooded with support groups, counselors and special needs programs. do they have any idea just how demeaning this is? do they have any idea the stress that it puts upon me to be put through this day in and day out? always something to do, always someone watching me the moment that I step outside my bedroom door making me feel like I am doing something wrong. and they wonder why I like to spend so much time alone in my room. my room is my sanctuary. in my room I am king and my computer is a universe where I call the shots. in my room I am not seen as a kid with special needs, I do not have to walk around with all these fucking labels adults stick on me. in my room I can be myself, do what I want and point my fuck you finger at the outside world.

recently my dad has been giving me shit about only wearing black. he likes to call me the boogie man or remind me that I will never get a job if I walk around like that. at school counselors ask me why I always wear all black. they have even asked my parents to stop buying me black clothes but if my parents do that I will refuse to wear anything at all. i like wearing black because it makes me feel like I can blend in. all other colors make me feel like I stand out and I don’t want to stand out any more than I already do. i already get enough shit and other colors would just bring me more problems. plus I love the color black. it expresses how I feel on the inside. when I wear black I feel like people fear me and stay away. like I am the grim reaper or something. i have heard some kids in my high school call me this. maybe I am. fuck them.

“friends, why don’t you have more friends?” my parents always wine. fuck friends. friends are a waste of time. i don’t like other people and other people don’t like me and I am fine with that. anyways the majority of kids my age are a bunch of sell outs. they do what the school and their parents say and never question anything. all the kids in my special needs group accept that they have special needs. they accept that they are the problem. they have been brainwashed by their teachers and parents. they don’t realize that the reason why they have special needs is because deep inside they are pissed off. they are pissed off by their parents who are pissed off at someone else. they are stressed out by a society that runs its citizens down to the bone. every where they go they are being forced to do things they do not want to do. they don’t have special needs because they are retarded, they have special needs because the entire society that has been erected around them is retarded and fucked up. but these kids are too brainwashed to see that the problem is not them. if any one should have special needs it is their parents, this is what got them into this situation in the first place: their parents special needs.

i know that I am young but I am not dumb enough to think that my condition is worsening. it is the condition of the american society that I live in that is worsening. it is my parents condition that is worsening. what the fuck do they expect from me, to be happy and outgoing when all around me the condition of adults is worsening? the economy is getting worse, the environment is getting worse, adults are over worked, there are more laws telling them what they have to do, it is more expensive than ever to survive and on and on. the condition that the world of adults have created is worsening and they don’t think that this is going to have an effect on us? what the fuck. open your eyes idiots. look at yourselves rather than blaming us. you wonder why the fuck I spend all my free time in my room, the world you adults have created is getting worse and worse by the day and I don’t want to have anything to do with it. i’m trying to escape people. but you blame everything on me. my behavior is my fault. i have a fucked up brain. go do dishes, clean up the yard. feed the dog, be a good little boy. you really want to make me believe that I am the one who has special needs and needs support groups? you really want me to believe that I am withdrawing further into myself? you really want me to believe that I have trouble articulating my feelings? read this motherfuckers, does it look like I have trouble articulating my feelings!!? fuck you adults and all you stupid fucking kids who have gone along with what adults tell you to do. just fuck you that is all I have to say to all of you. you have no idea what is really going on.

Floating Around Limbo

Sometimes I wonder about my contributions to this world. What am I doing? What is my reason for being here? For the last month or so I have been in a kind of limbo. This limbo is a comfortable place. There is no rent to pay, no ambitions to fill, no reason really to do anything at all. Day upon day looks the same, feels relatively similar (with some occasional sharp divots in the road). The interesting thing is that in this limbo I float about two feet from the ground. Why I find this interesting is because for most of my life my mother and father made me feel guilty about not having both feet firmly planted on the ground. They have often used the metaphor of floating to describe the way that I exist in this world. Now in my middle age, the mid-afternoon of my life, day after day- I am actually floating. Take that mom and dad.

Did I mention how comfortable this limbo place feels? Imagine jumping inside of the softest down comforter. No even better than that- imagine spending the day lying face up on the softest of white sand beaches. This is what this limbo that I am in feels like. Love materialized. Would you want to leave this place? You float around all day, get tanned by the sun, read in the evenings and watch as the ambitious world runs by. It is really not a bad deal- but like most deals, it does have its downside.

I sat with a ninety-two year old Zen master the other day. To my surprise he was floating as well. Except the place in which he floated he would never refer to as a limbo, instead he likes to call it eternity. Why was I floating around with a Zen master the other day you might be wondering? Feel free to ask. Well, I will just tell you. I went to this specific zendo where I knew that this Zen master could be found. I went to him because of the thoughts that I began this story with. I was wondering about what my place in this world was. If day after day I was just floating around in limbo then what real point is there to my existence? If I was doing nothing constructive in this world, had no ambition to get both of my feet firmly planted on the ground- then how was I going to survive in this ambitious, both feet on the ground kind of world. To be blunt- what the fuck was I doing with my life?

When I asked the Zen master these questions (I am sorry to use the cliche name of Zen master to describe this remarkable man but this man does not have a name. I am not even sure if he exists in the same reality that all of us other mortals do. As he likes to say- “he is here but not here at all.”). What was I just saying? Oh yeah- when I presented the Zen master with my inner conflicts he just smiled at me. I thought that he was going to laugh but instead he smiled and floated, smiled and floated. As we floated together there in the zendo, me in limbo and he in eternity, he kept saying “Weee!! Weeeee are floating!!” He expressed this sentiment in the same way that a child swinging on a swing would express joy. “Weeeee!!” “Weeeee!!!” he kept saying as if he was ignoring the very reason why I had floated over to see him. And then like a sudden earthquake or a stroke of insight he said “when floating just float, be floating– nothing else to do. When not floating then act accordingly.” At first I did not know what to make of his strange statement. I knew there was some pearl of wisdom that I needed to fish out from what he said but I was not sure yet how to get the fish off the fishing line. So I thanked him for his time and I floated back to my limbo.

Today the temperature has been in the 90’s. There is not a cloud in the sky. I have drawn a bit in my sketchbook, I have read a bit and I have been listening to some music. I have eaten lunch and breakfast and even found time to meditate. No one goes hungry or gets bored in limbo. I can hear the rumblings of the outside world in the distance. All the people moving quickly to get things done creates a certain vibration that can not only be heard but also felt in limbo. Sometimes this vibration makes me nervous- as if I too should be marching a long, moving quickly and getting things done. I too feel like I am possibly missing out if I just float around here all day and night in my quiet and relatively safe limbo. It is a strange feeling to wrestle with all day in limbo. On the one hand I feel so blessed to not be apart of that endless march to the finish line to get things done. I feel so blessed to get to just float around my house and garden without any real, pressing worries. But at the same time I feel like I am missing out. That there are important things that I should be getting done now. This strange tension between satisfaction and dissatisfaction is the force that often makes limbo a difficult place to remain in.

Weeeee!! Weeeee!!!! I shout out as I float around the house and backyard. Weeee!! Weeeeeeee!!! I shout out as I listen to music or eat my lunch. The thrill of this satisfaction lasts a minute or two but then, on a normal day, I am left feeling like something is missing. What a pain in the ass. Maybe the Zen master is without a name because in truth- he does not exist. The other day I was not speaking to an actual man as much as I was speaking to a state of being. The Zen master dwells in eternity, which is where we all dwell forever if we just sit down and shut up for long enough to realize this. Why not start now? Granted he is a master and we are not- he got there quicker than most mortals ever will but still Zen master eternity is a place, a state of being in which I strive to dwell. To float around and just float around. When/if the time comes that I am no longer floating around in limbo- then I trust I will act accordingly. Maybe. Weeeee!! Back to my book.