I Don't Like Mondays, Either

...but I don't have any automatic weapons, so you're all safe.

It's kind of hard to absorb the magnitude of this being the largest school shooting in American history. I don't know how it stacks up internationally, but it's still pretty fucking attrocious.

I've got that Boomtown Rats song tripping on repeat in my internal jukebox tonight. "School's out early and soon we'll be learning, and the lesson today is how to die." And that one line keeps looping back on me: "I wanna shoot the whole day down -- down."

I remember reading Bob Geldof's interesting autobiography (Is That It?) when I was about 15. It was actually one of my favourite books for a few years, despite the passage about the Thai hooker who could do tricks with ping-pong balls at high velocity. But I remember reading his passage on how he came to write his "I Don't Like Mondays" classic, and he was talking about doing just another boring full-of-bullshit press conference on their upcoming tour, yada yada, and in the background he heard a television playing a live report about the shooting spree undertaken in 1979 in California by Brenda Ann Spencer, in which she killed two and wounded nine. Asked why she'd done it, she replied "I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day."

Geldof heard the statement, it blew his mind, and then his only ever really huge single was born. Naturally her family tried suing the shit out of him, but when you raise a sociopath, who's gonna be sending much sympathy your way, eh? (But I cannot find any results of the lawsuit in my first few minutes searching, and I don't give enough of a shit to keep the trek alive. If you know, inform me, please! Curiouser and curiouser, said the cat.)

(I made the mistake of looking at the reviews of the song on the lyrics page, and the fucking morons who review it just leave me baffled. I forget how smart the people I associate with are, and how exceptional they must really be. Oh, how fucking moronic the common denominator seems to be at times. Man, it's like I live in a parallel society with a one-way mirror where I get to laugh and point and laugh and point and laugh and... Scary, man. Sure explains some elections, I guess.)

But I digress. 30+ people have died today because some fucker couldn't cope with life for one reason or another. It's days like these when you have to wonder if it might not be a better idea to pitch suicide as a viable solution for some people.

"No, really! God will greet you happily when you take a warm bath and slit your wrists. A sin? Fuck no! Who said that silly thing? Go. Go with God! Really! Just leave your gun at home, son."

Oh, and let's hear it for the brilliant officials who thought the event was "isolated". Mm, yeah. Because that would have been so much the peachier. When someone opens up fire anywhere on a campus, you'd think the smart choice might be to get the word out sooner rather than later. What, gunmen are agoraphobic by nature? Sure as shit explains the bang-bang thing, but methinks they tend to be the travelling "of no fixed address" types, so why stop when unleashing a couple clips in a semi-automatic, huh? But, hey, it's too soon to weigh in on all that bullshit. Let the dust settle and we'll see whose jobs get lost. In the meantime, a whole lot of people have a whole lot of healing to do.

And I still don't like Mondays.