Month: March 2015

Do you think Dylan had the potential to go to a school like Harvard? I think Eric deff did but dylan didn’t have as good grades as Eric had.

The operative word here is potential.

Dylan was born with a gifted intellect. However, he was plagued by chronic depression which made him apathetic about school in general and his grades. He took AP classes but he was very ‘meh’ and procrastinated in completing assignments at the very last minute; he basically squeaked by on the advanced classes with low-end grades. If he didn’t have depression, and provided there was something he would’ve strongly liked to major in at Harvard, he would have the intellectual potential for such a high caliber school.

Eric, on the other hand, was an average student but unlike Dylan, he applied himself and managed to get decent grades. If he was motivated to go to Harvard, then sure, he would’ve had the sheer tenacity to accomplish it. However, the problem was, Eric didn’t see himself at a snooty Ivy League college such as Harvard. He didn’t envision himself at any type of college – community college or otherwise. He had no interest or desire and so therefore, would’ve been lost of any potential to go to Harvard.

Potential yes, but wasted potential for both.

So I follow quite a bit of Columbine blogs & just started following yours a couple nights ago, & I am hooked! I just love how you ‘word’ things, the depth & detail you go into with explaining things & how ‘balanced’ you seem. It’s a bit difficult to find an E&D blog that isn’t just someone posting photos of themselves trying to look ~hardcore~ w/ their replica weapons & condoning murder/suicide; it annoys me bc that isn’t what we should take away from all of this. So thanks for being you! :) <3

Glad E-C has you ‘hooked’ , and thank you in regards to me ‘just being me’ – though, that would basically include me and my wordy, long renditions. 😉 Hey, if I seem ‘balanced’ that’s a lovely compliment because actually living that balance is the true test in life. 🙂

I think there’s a variety of E & D blogs that run the gamut of expression. Some of these blogs do tend to explore in a darker, in-your-face way with the R & V dress play and/or posing with weapons while others tend towards blogging articles, or posting accounts from the case, writing poetry or fanfiction. It really all just amounts to everyones’ own intense identification with what Columbine symbolically means to them personally and how they choose to express it and get it out of their system in a cathartic way. From my own personal experience being on the tag, I do not think most here condone the murder/suicide aspect. If I had to hazard a guess, maybe less than 1% where it’s mutually inclusive? Some might condone and understand what they did but not for themselves personally, so it’s mutually exclusive. Sometimes it looks like people are flirting with the subject matter in a very intimate, dark manner but it can be a positive way for them to work through all of ‘it’ in relation to their own personal life struggles, through the bullying, the rage, anger and sadness to the other side of things by relating to the boys. Exploring Columbine can be a transcending experience, where you make your way down that long, dark tunnel and then finally, at some point, work your way to the other side where that little glimmer of light is showing through the other side. Of course, as long as no one is hurting anyone in their personal exploration of the tragedy, it is an individual journey that has no proper way to ‘politically correct’ blog about it since the subject matter is, well, pretty politically incorrect and taboo. 😛 Some blogs resonate for some and not for others. What’s not right for you means you just need to look at a multitude of others to find those bloggers that do convey more closely what you personally what to take away from this tragedy.


https://everlasting-contrast.tumblr.com/post/114147444315/audio_player_iframe/everlasting-contrast/tumblr_mtjlr4JG3n1sr6k1e?audio_file=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tumblr.com%2Faudio_file%2Feverlasting-contrast%2F114147444315%2Ftumblr_mtjlr4JG3n1sr6k1e

mydarkcorner11:

JeffCo talking about serving a search warrant for the Klebold residence on 4/20/99

everlasting-contrast:
“..the dads already given us a little trouble.”

https://www.tumblr.com/audio_file/everlasting-contrast/114146547445/tumblr_n4cmxykgpS1sr6k1e?plead=please-dont-download-this-or-our-lawyers-wont-let-us-host-audio
https://everlasting-contrast.tumblr.com/post/114146547445/audio_player_iframe/everlasting-contrast/tumblr_n4cmxykgpS1sr6k1e?audio_file=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tumblr.com%2Faudio_file%2Feverlasting-contrast%2F114146547445%2Ftumblr_n4cmxykgpS1sr6k1e

mydarkcorner11:

Tom Klebold calling JeffCo 4/20/1999

everlasting-contrast:
Sounding annoyed and entitled.  And yeah, sure, he’s in the midst of an unfathomable crisis but just sayin’, he certainly doesn’t win any brownie points with 911 and such with this demeanor.  I suspect he had this snooty attitude about him in general though… 

“I’d ask him what the hell he was thinking and what the hell he thought he was doing!”

— Tom Klebold, Far from the Tree

Like Father, like Son

The week after the shooting, Tom Klebold was filled with rage. ”He was angry about being detained at his home when he wanted to go intervene at the high school,” said Edgar Berg, a former colleague.  “He was angry about the availability of guns. He was angry about the access to weird images and videos. 

He was angry because he’d lost what he described as his best friend.”

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Michelle Hartsough described Dylan as a difficult person who was often rude. Hartsough said Dylan did not get along well with his father.

[Source]

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Mr. Klebold indicated that he and his son were very close and he is very upset with the way that the media has portrayed him.
Mr. Klebold said that he has no idea what happened or why and indicated that Dylan was his best friend and that they spent a lot of time together.

Mr. Klebold said that he believed that his son had a personality that was very similar to his….

Marxhausen, one of the clergymen who conducted a private funeral for Klebold on Saturday, said the young man’s father told him he "felt Dylan was his soul mate, and felt that he knew what was going on all the time.” The pastor said Klebold had told him, ” ‘I thought I was ready to let him go — he was a finished product.’ “

Dylan’s father, Thomas Klebold, 52, a former geophysicist who runs a mortgage business from his house, told the pastor he had detected “this slight tension” in his son a few days before the attack.  Klebold made a mental note of it and thought he would get back to it, the pastor said.

[Source]

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Tom, like Dylan, had been painfully shy in high school and felt that because of their similarities he knew Dylan instinctively; he can identify with how Dylan may have felt, but not with what he did.

[Source]

By third grade, when Dylan entered a gifted program at school, he had become his father’s most devoted chess partner. 

[Source]

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As a senior, Dylan was out of class by 1 p.m. He often came straight home and spent time with his dad, who worked out of the house. Tom treasured that time. He thought he and Dylan had grown extremely close.

[Source]

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About a month after the van break-in, Dylan scratched something into another student’s locker. Peter Horvath, the dean, doesn’t know why Dylan chose the locker, and doesn’t recall the student’s name, only that the student felt threatened when he saw Dylan scratching with a paper clip. Because Dylan didn’t finish, the design he was scratching was unclear, Horvath says.

Dylan was detained, and Horvath was with him for about forty minutes while they waited for Tom Klebold to arrive and deal with the incident. “Dylan became very agitated” waiting for his father to come to school to discuss the situation with Peter, and began pacing around the room, according to a summary of Horvath’s interview with police. 


Horvath tried to calm him down, and Dylan cussed at him, although it wasn’t personal. **********Dylan was “very upset with the school system and the way CHS handled people, to include the people that picked on him and others,” according to the police interview.

Horvath thought Dylan was a “pretty angry kid” who also had the impression that he had anger issues with his dad and was upset with “stuff at home,” the police report continued. 

Tom Klebold, who Horvath thought of as an “Einstein” eventually arrived. With his glasses, and salt and pepper hair, he was proper, eloquent, and astute. He also had serious problems with this second suspension, and asked Dylan to leave the room—an unusual move in Horvath’s experience. “He [Tom] felt as though it was too severe for what had happened,” Horvath said of the standard, three-day suspension for essentially a vandalism charge. “Can’t we do anything else? Can’t he [Dylan] just do, you know, twenty-five hours of community service, thirty hours of community service?” Tom Klebold asked. Nope. Horvath didn’t budge. Peter sensed that Dylan had some anger issues with his father.
  

[Excerpt from Columbine: A True Crime Story by Jeff Kass]

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Tom stepped in with his 1950s dress code standards and asked Dylan not to wear the hat to the hotel’s breakfast buffet. Dylan argued that we were on vacation, and it couldn’t possibly make a difference to anyone if he wore the hat. I shot Tom a “don’t sweat the small stuff” look, but didn’t want to sabotage his authority, so I gathered up a suitcase. “I’ll go down to the car and wait while you two work this out.” I’d forgotten the car key, though, so I leaned against the hood in the cold morning air, remembering how Tom would insist the boys tuck in their shirts and polish their shoes for church while the minister’s own kids wore T-shirts and jeans. I was angry at him for harping on the hat. I guess I still am.

Eventually, Dylan came down to the car alone, his head bare. I wanted to say I agreed with him, and that it was okay with me if he wore the hat, but I did not. I only said, “I’m sorry the morning started out like this. I see you decided not to wear the hat.” Dylan sounded tired but determined to brush it off. “It’s not worth fighting about; it’s just not a big deal.”

I was frankly surprised. I’d expected a little more sputtering and complaining from a seventeen-year-old. “Wow, Dyl. I’m impressed,” I said, mistaking his willingness to withdraw from the conflict for maturity. I praised him for controlling his anger but I wish now he had stomped and screamed, giving me a glimpse of the rage burning inside him. Now I wonder if he had stopped caring about anything at all.

[Excerpt from A Mother’s Reckoning by Sue Klebold]

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The Klebolds also are struggling, as is their eldest son Byron, Brown said.”When I talk to Sue, we always make a pact not to talk about ‘it’ but that’s impossible, and soon we’re deep into it,” she said. “She didn’t see this side of her son. She wishes she had answers for the victims’ families, but she does not. 

“And Tom, poor Tom. He and Dylan were closer than ever. He misses his son every second of the day.”  

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Like Father, like Son

Given all the accounts mentioned above it becomes easy to piece together that Dylan and his father, Tom, were very similar in personality and temperament. They mirrored back at one another to the point where a Dylan in his late teens began to harbor a deep-seated resentment towards his father.

Tom Klebold had mentioned that he was painfully shy in school exactly like
Dylan.   Dylan was an intelligent, quick learning child
and was categorized as a ‘gifted’ student.
Tom gave off the intimidating impression of an astute ‘Einstein’ type to
others.  It’s a likely possibility that
Tom was a gifted child too. However, back in his day, there were probably few scholastic
programs to define and hone advanced children as such.  

Dylan suppressed his emotions, his
upsets until his temper reached a boiling point and the rage, including some of his childhood temper tantrums, boiled over like a raging volcano.  Tom Klebold appeared to also have a raging
temper as evinced in the snippets above which demonstrate how his anger and
frustration seemed to be the easily most accessible, second-nature way of handling the tragedy
immediately after it occurred.  Sixteen
years on, and he appears to still be somewhat stuck in a residual anger stage
of the grieving process.  When asked what
he would say to his son all these years later, his immediate knee-jerk response
back was in the form of a rhetorically posed question of a parent’s berating indignation:

“I’d ask him what the hell he was thinking and what the hell he
was doing!”

It’s as if Tom’s upset was left on ‘pause’ to resume exactly where it left off should his son Dylan suddenly be transformed alive again.  

Is it any wonder
why Dylan paced nervously while
waiting for his father to arrive to speak to the Dean at Columbine for his
transgression of passive-aggressively scratching something on the locker of
someone that pissed him off?   Then, only to have his father dismiss him from the room so that dad could
address the Dean one-on-one.  There is
almost an air of imperiousness of the manner in which Dylan was automatically disqualified
from being present in the room as his father hard-ball negotiated and bargained for a lighter punishment.  Did this type of controlling
behavior in which is father automatically dismissed him like a child cause
Dylan to silently stew?  Dylan paced a good 40 minutes before his father arrived.  How did Dylan’s father
handle his son by the time they got home?

 I
would speculate that when an argument ensued between Dylan and his father, Tom
was typically remote and coolly superior most of the time in that level-headed, intellectual
upper-hand sort of manner. The usual punishment was silent but effectively reinforced
in a manner in which Dylan would simply have no control or say. When he’d done
something wrong at school, his computer keyboard would literally be unplugged and  taken away the CPU. So, the natural consequences of that particular transgression meant his life was miserable and isolated without gaming with friends or surfing the net for however long his parent’s deemed necessary.   But, I speculate that like Dylan, his father at times, became unpredictably explosive having reached a boiling point of
no-return in his one-sided lecture, escalating it with resounding boom and having the
last word over a very nervous, frustrated Dylan.  Unlike Dylan’s mother, I
speculate that the ‘resolution’ of an argument with his dad rarely if ever
included open, receptive discussion or a later addressing of the situation that might allow for healing communication.  Instead,
when dad reached that ..point.., he let his temper just blow with an explosive berating lecture.  Meanwhile, Dylan took on the resentment in spades and he internalized it, learning to
automatically shut down by going to his room and slamming the door behind him.  Peace at last in self-reliance.

“Some god I am…. All people I ever might have loved have abandoned me, my parents piss
me off & hate me … want me to have fuckin ambition!! How can I when I get screwed &
destroyed by everything??!!! “

Tom/2 / Dylan 0. End Game.  Having been bested in a spat with dad, Dylan would then defeatedly stomp up to his bedroom and finish off the night with several rousing, repetitive mindless bloody battle sessions of shooting up zombies and simultaneously nursing a Screwdriver which would allow him to to swallow his pain having
been bested by dad and yet another lousy day at school.  

Tom mentioned that he felt very close to Dylan, that his son was so like
himself that Dylan was his ‘best friend’ or ‘soul mate’ even.   Since Dylan was a small child, the two
played chess, played sports together, hiked together and like his father, Dylan
got into competitive Go-Kart racing.  Once
Bryon, the oldest son left home, it was just Tom promoting bonding
activities with his youngest boy, the easy-to-raise one, his ‘golden child’
with the smarts.    Dylan
would get home from school early in his Senior year, and Tom probably snagged Dylan
to do stuff which he probably didn’t care to do all that much but would do so anyway for his dad.   From
Tom’s perspective, the two of them enjoyed mechanics and the fixing up his old
cars.  When Tom needed to tend to his
rental properties, he dragged along a very reluctant Dylan who hated it.  It’s not that all of these activities were a
bad thing, it’s just maybe that to Dylan, his father was forcing ‘the bonding’,
to get his son to do mostly the types of things he himself loved and enjoyed to which were not necessarily what Dylan found interesting or fun to do.  Dylan
did not protest much though he probably whined a bit and dragged his heels looking
forward to the moment he could go upstairs to at last, the privacy and serenity of his bedroom sanctuary.  

The two had a fair amount of mutual bonding
over sports until Tom was afflicted with rheumatoid arthritis and could
no longer actively engage in sports activities with his son the way he once
used to do.  That must have been a big blow for Dylan and it was likely the last time he engaged in sports in a physical way. From there on out it was Fantasy Baseball trades which was entirely an intellectual stimulating challenge not a physical one.  But I do wonder if Tom ever wanted
to share in some of the things that Dylan personally had an interested in
doing. For example, did his father ever consider
knocking on Dylan’s bedroom door and learning to use the opposing game controller and Doom or Quake
death matching with his son?  Tom thought
he knew Dylan as he knew himself and that they shared a very close
connection while  in actually, Dylan was
dutiful doing stuff by his dad’s side yet not really connecting and engaging in the way that his father perceived
them to be.   Dylan also had very mixed
feelings; he still harbored unexpressed resentments towards his father which never had been openly discussed and aired properly. It seemed that just as Tom had dismissively excluded Dylan from the Dean’s office, Dylan was likely unable to fully
articulate and verbally express in conflicting confrontation because he
realized he was not warranted being heard or having equally footing.  Arguments with his dad, the publicly perceived
‘Einstein’, was rarely if ever up for debate.   Tom saw his own personality and intelligence
in Dylan and felt they were kindred, of the same ilk. He took pride in feeling accomplished in raising a near perfect son who
would go on to exceed himself in future successes.  Conversely, Dylan was resentful of his father
because of their similar shared emotionally stunted outburst-like temperaments
which caused him to disconnect and distance in response to his father’s
unpredictable volcanic wrath.   The two having such strong, paralleling similarities in personality and intellect ended up with dad appreciating his younger self through Dylan and Dylan rejecting his mirror image through his dad’s inept emotional stunt unavailability and unpredictable volatility. 


Dylan had so much bottled up, unresolved animosity
toward his dad that by April 20th 1999, he casually omits his dad and only chooses to
address his mom in his last Basement Tape goodbye: 

“Hey mom. Gotta go. It’s about a half an hour before our little judgment day. I just wanted to apologize to you guys for any crap this might instigate as far as [inaudible] orsomething. Just know I’m going to a better place. I didn’t like life too much and I know I’ll be happy wherever the fuck I go. So I’m gone. Good-bye. Reb . ..”

APRIL is around the corner im feeling some type of way :( wish Eric and dylan were still around, I feel bad for all the victims I wonder if the boys got sleep that night or pulled all nighters did they get up shower etc like it was a normal day?

everlasting-contrast:

Yes, it’s amazing we’re already here again.. April is just around the corner and alas, yes, another year without Dylan or Eric and the thirteen lives they are accountable for usurping. Another springtime to take a moment of silence and reflect on the permanent finality of it all resulting from the choices that those two damnable boys’ made all for a mere nano second of relished revenge. What a waste of brilliant lives and their futures that would never blossom, yet here we are nearing the brink of 4/20 yet again  – mindful to remember –  to make sense of this senseless yet defining tragedy.

Both did not sleep well by any means, but of the two, Dylan slept more soundly than Eric, who dozed here and there and continually jerked awake all night long. Eric showered and did his usual morning rituals while Dylan didn’t even bother at all..


sightsinknell said: They could have managed a fast food restaurant.Or maybe had child support to pay what a waste of potential.

You see?  What a waste !  Oh, that gets me right in the feels.  😉 

It was fate dear. Dylan, with Eric, slayed the zombies and died next to each other. Not Dylan and you, not Dylan and Zach, not Dylan and anybody else. They floated away to the halycon together. Dylan and Eric. I understand you re jealous and that a lack of a real life love life gives you fantasies. But using Dyl as a crutch is trashy, not classy, babe ;)

Oh, hey now, Dylan and Eric floated away to the Halcyons together, huh?Thanks for enlightening us all with that plot twist, most especially Dylan. lol  Poor Dyl. Honestly, it was hard enough resigning himself to go NBK with Rebby (GAWD), let alone ascending to the Halcyons eternally with the dude. But who knows though, maybe they were caught in a Bad Bra-mance? 😉  That last bit of yours is just, WOW, phenomenally pompous and off-base – very amusing though. I’ll give you points on delusional originality here. lol  *claps* 

to be honest, a lot of eric and dylan fangirls hold no empathy for the victims. they say they do, but i don’t think they really do. i mean, hell, i had someone stabbed to death at my school last year, i know what it’s like. if they really did have sympathy for them, you’d know about it.

The key here is that only Eric, Dylan and Rachel’s journals were made public. People tend to be more inclined to empathize with those three because the public was given the opportunity to glimpse inside their inner worlds and apply their meanderings to ourselves and feel deep compassion. That said, we don’t have the victims journals so it makes it harder to resonate with them. The media and public has identified them as “the 13 victims” and, yes sure, we have stories and books on them but we do not have their own personal stories of them from their own points of view. The victims are still more or less an unknownable quantity. It’s easy to feel badly for them, sure, to feel sympathetic, yes. No one would ever want to be caught in a situation where they are a victim, and the fact that they were caught in a helpless situation and their lives taken against their will, makes them the unfortunate target of a tragedy. The thing is, it’s harder to see our ownselves in ‘the victims’ because we don’t have that personal snapshot we can identify with. It doesn’t mean we don’t feel for them or badly for them; it simply means that many just don’t hook into them like the other three. Again, only Rachel has reached the masses on an empathetic grand scale because of her journals, the books released incorporating parts of her poetry and journals and of course, with the ‘Rachel’s Challenge’ organization. Most, if not all, of the Eric and Dylan ‘fangirls’ as you refer to them, feel not only a physical attraction to the two but also, more importantly, a deep kindship with these boys – because in having read their journals (written before they became the ‘Columbine shooters’), these girls feel, understand and connect with the boys’ struggles and pain on an intensely personal level. That is the very definition of empathy right there: to understand someone else’s pain as your own and to feel compassion for them in reflection of your own self.
“Try walking in my shoes. You’ll stumble in my footsteps.” —Depeche Mode

sinister-psychopath:

“As a young child, Dylan made parenting easy. From the time he was a toddler, he had a remarkable attention span and sense of order. He spent hours focused on puzzles and interlocking toys. He loved origami and Legos. By third grade, when he entered a gifted program at school, he had become his father’s most devoted chess partner. He and his brother acted out feats of heroism in our backyard. He played Little League baseball. No matter what he did, he was driven to win—and was very hard on himself when he lost.

His adolescence was less joyful than his childhood. As he grew, he became extremely shy and uncomfortable when he was the center of attention, and would hide or act silly if we tried to take his picture. By junior high, it was evident that he no longer liked school; worse, his passion for learning was gone.

In high school, he held a job and participated as a sound technician in school productions, but his grades were only fair. He hung out with friends, slept late when he could, spent time in his room, talked on the phone, and played video games on a computer he built. In his junior year, he stunned us by hacking into the school’s computer system with a friend (a violation for which he was expelled), but the low point of that year was his arrest. After the arrest, we kept him away from Eric for several weeks, and as time passed he seemed to distance himself from Eric of his own accord. I took this as a good sign.”

-Susan Klebold, O Magazine Essay, “I Will Never Know Why”

One thing I’ve always been curious about is at exactly which point E&D took things seriously. I guess, after the van break-in, it might have been suggested as a joke, because when you’re angry you say that kind of stuff to relieve your anger, but when exactly did they stop and actually consider carrying out a school shooting? The point at which it turned from fantasy to reality is so interesting, and, I think, crucial to the whole affair, as it reveals a lot about the people.

I think the van break-in with their arrest on Jan 30th was the initial turning point that helped solidify the half jokes and kicked-around shared fantasies into something more serious and concrete. The shock and humiliation of being caught and arrested by cops would’ve made them join in solidarity over their stewing anger regarding the entire system and it’s authority dictating their lives. Once processed into the Diversion Program, they had to buckle down for the entire year completing various reform classes and working community service on weekends and such. They were held responsible and accountable to complete various steps in the ‘systems process’, and to jump through the various hoops that authority doled out to them. They could not miss appointments nor be late. They had to be accountable for good grades in school and to show that their work was adequate enough. At the same time, they had to fall in line with the school ‘system’ too. So, they were under The System’s thumb all the way around from every angle (And this never bodes very well for Indigo Children having to follow all the rules. 😉 ) They knew they had to just lay low, ‘be good’ (or at least look like it) and hope for an early release. I’m sure from about March ‘98 until when school got out in May for summer break, they must’ve been really annoyed and exhausted with the program and fitting it in between school and work. Now it was summer time, their supposed free time, and they were still stuck in the program capitulating to authority. Though, the fact that they were no longer taking up half their schedule with school, meant they had more idle free time on their hands to collaborate, flesh things out and seriously plot. So, I think the summer of ‘98 is when they really began to jump in and initiate the entire thing in concrete detail. In the Basement Tapes filmed in March, Dylan mentions they’d been planning it for ‘8 months’ and Eric said ‘at least.’

Awesome blog. I often have ‘A warm place’ on repeat anyway. It drove my cellmates crazy when I was in jail!

Thanks, glad you appreciate the blog. 🙂 It’s funny how ‘A Warm Place’ has such an intuitive resonance with Dylan for quite a few people. To me, it’s almost like a signature theme that instinctual embodies a sense of ‘him’. I’d be an ironic ‘plot twist’ if Dylan had an aversion to the tune, wouldn’t it? ..but I somehow think he liked the tune very much. Hm, a new brand of penance and punishment for the cellmates, huh?