A recent podcast with a more mellow recently turned 38-year-old Brooks Brown (his birthday was last month, July 14th).  You can tell the therapy he’s been undergoing has been beneficial but he’s still very bitter about how people only see him as forever linked to the tragedy. Brooks even alludes to how fucked up, alone, and depressed he was a few years back when everything began to crash and burn including his first marriage when then made a sudden move from the SF Bay Area down to LA, met his second wife-to-be, and began some serious therapy.  I’m glad to see that he’s really beginning to address/work through everything that had damaged him since that day.  Thanks to the anon that gave me the heads up about this interview.  🙂   I spent the last couple of days typing up some highlights from the podcast. A lot of Stanhope’s interjections just grated on my nerves and quite frankly. I personally don’t understand what Brooks sees in the guy!  He’s not very funny at all. I found myself mentally telling him to shut it because I wanted to hear the rest of the thought Brooks was trying to finish saying. Grrr!  It was also rather annoying how unfussed and philosophically kind Brooks is about Cullen’s book even in his admission that the dude denied that his friends had been bullied and it played a part in the tragedy.  I know that Brooks’ dad Randy cannot stand Dave Cullen. 

“It’s High school bullshit basically. If you remove all the shootings and murders of children..it’s normal high school bullshit.  Again, it’s normal high school shit sort of brought to life with this other side that people didn’t think about at the time. Columbine wasn’t the thing that normally happened. School shootings were still weird. It wasn’t a thing that happened in America every week that we kind of went  “oh there was another twelve kids that died this week. Okay, cool. So, what’s playing in the movie theater?” It was a different world. “  “…They changed the world back then. I sit there and I go ‘you know Eric and Dylan talked about it openly, very openly, about how they wanted to set this trend. About how they wanted to create this and have all these people kill people and do this.”

“Dylan and I never really had a falling out. It was stress because Eric was this dude in the middle who hated me – friends with Dylan and all that.”

“He knew how the story was going for him. He was kind of like “that’s fine. The story is going to end with me murdering a lot of people. I’m perfectly fine with making friends with you for the time being..or something, I have no idea.  (Eric) He was cool, and Dylan was cool and they were relaxed about pretty much.. everything. It’s terrifying. Looking back and not seeing the faces of anger and rage. If I could see that shit, like I’d be like ‘okay, cool this comes from a place of pure anger, pure rage, pure hatred, like this shit that we see in movies, like Thanos level of hatred that you see in Avengers, like epic.  No. No, no. This comes from this place of ‘yeah, no, I’m ready to murder a lot of people and I’m kinda okay with that and this is the way it’s going to go and it’s a little methodical, a little cold, with a scary side but you know? Psychopath?”

“Until I got home – my family had already – we had a home with a lot of TVs like we were a tv family. In the late nineties didn’t mean Netflix but having a lot of TVs.  And we had a lot of TVs going with every channel, like in different rooms. And we were watching the live broadcast. Which was one of the most fucked up experiences of my life of the whole thing. And that’s when they displayed the names and faces of Eric and Dylan, we knew. My mom was already there. We knew. I was like “Eric did it, therefore, Dylan’s involved. This is the way it goes.” My mom was already with the Klebolds. And it became this downward “who are we going to be able to see that’s alive.” We watched the news.”

“It was a few years later that I found a couple of friends who stuck with me through the whole thing. A woman who I ended up marrying – my first wife, who was wonderful – through the whole thing. School shootings was a thing I searched often.  Like I was just, because I was curious because it just started happening after Columbine. Eric and Dylan won – like, as far as people want to talk about 9/11 people won – the terrorists won, people won, they won. Eric and Dylan won. Shits happening all the time, and we are living in a fairly perpetual state of fear.  But the realty is, the shootings are done not against the kids, they’re not done against any particular person – much as I’d love to say cause they were based in bullying and hatred of the system at all that -they weren’t against any particular person. They were against the system. There’s a reason they went into the library. They shot the computers and the librarian’s desk and all these symbolic bullshit things.  There’s a great book by Mark Ames, fantastic. Ames writes an amazing book (“Going Postal”) on general rage shooters, and he calls them “rage shooters” for a reason. And it’s – there is ‘postal shooters’, “workplace shooters” and “school shooters” and they aren’t shooting up a person, they aren’t shooting up a thing. They’re shooting up existence.  And it’s a fantastic really smart read that I think gets closer to the reason Columbine happened more than anything else. Even my own book, which I was proud of when I wrote – and I’m still proud of it because it’s my own words and all that fun stuff called “No Easy Answers”. And my co-writer – I have to give him credit – Rob Merritt – a wonderful guy who helped me figure out what the fuck I was going to write because I could literally chat for hours about it.  I wrote the book 3 years after. You know Rob came out for a long time – I ended up going to Iowa where Rob lived to write it. It took a long time tp write because I didn’t know what I wanted to say. It took me 2-3 years to figure out what I even thought about things. The book was ultimately – not to talk shit about my own book you should buy it please cause I like .65 cents for every copy.  The reality is – it was the reality in the moment, at 22 years old – coming out with ‘here’s what I think happened, here’s how I felt about it’ and all this – but at 38 years old, I have a whole different fucking mentality about it.  I’m a dad now, I’m married to my second wife, I have a different job, I have a different world. Everything’s different; obviously, my place in the world is different.”

“But you know I look at these different books that have been written – such as Dave Cullens book which you mentioned – I have read it. Everyone has different opinions about what happened. It’s not a bad read. I don’t discourage people from reading it. It’s a different perspective on all the facts.  Jeff Kass – wonderful book as well on Columbine that’s much more factual, much more reportedly. Ralph Larkin wrote a book on it. There’s been a lot of books written about it. (He admits at one point that he’s read all of them) And they all come from different perspectives and I think the reality is to find the truth – you kind of read all of them?  But there are sides to it that people miss out cause the Dave Cullen one – that I think drives me nuts – is that bullying wasn’t a factor.  And he says that very explicitly: that Eric and Dylan were the bullies. And I don’t know if I were to ever believe that?  I can’t imagine how bullies would go out shooting people. Like, if you’re a bully, you live on the high, you’re at the top, you’re beating the shit out of people on an everyday basis – why would you fucking want to check out?  Like, your life is like that of treating other people as shit and being above them. You don’t need to shoot them up.  That’s not – if you read Eric’s writing and all that – Bullies enjoy the low-level celebrity that comes with being a bully.  If you go into the aftermath of Columbine and you read the articles, you read the quotes in Time Magazine or Newsweek where people talk about ‘they were faggots and we treated them like shit.’  Of course. But like Dave Cullen and Jeff Kass – who I may disagree on a number of things, the reality is that they aren’t like shitty reporters. It’s not like they went into it like an agenda (?!?!) ‘here’s what we’re gonna to’. They have their opinions; they use their facts. And I find it interesting because the reality is my life is just my perspective – I don’t know if it’s fucking reality.”

“There is a point in your life where – and I hit it a few years ago – really hard – where your life has been defined when you meet people.  Like I met you, I went on Napster and I searched “school shooting. Like I love The Onion, and The Onion had a great article after Columbine that said “Jocks Allowed to Safely Return to Bullying” and it had a literal photo of the front of our high school and the actual campus officer we were assigned, Neal (Gardner) and that was fucking brilliant. Too real for a lot of people. No, it’s real, but it’s a joke in that this is the reality. Like I stand outside of a funeral for one of the students who was killed and  the brother of one of the guys (Dusty Hoffschneider) who was absolutely one of the most brutal of fucking bullies (Rocky Hoffschneider) that we had says “I know what caused this; I’m sorry.” Like holy shit that’s like a whole level of real where it hits you at a core level – there’s no way to defend it. There’s no way you can have a symbology or a religion or a way of beliefs that allows you to defeat whatever that person said – that’s so fucking simply true.”

“It meant a lot that you reached me because I would put very few people in this campus of liked people who reached me because it went for years where I was a dark, self-hating, angry person who felt very alone – genuinely.  I had awful depression that I ended up having to get therapy with. I ended up going through a divorce – awful. Awful life.  This very much led on from the trauma and the sadness and the awfulness that still follows me a lifetime later. More of a life time than I had before the shootings still follows me to this day. I go to have conversations with people today – and I do this one piece for Tribeca film festival – and it’s not a small thing to win Tribeca – it’s an amazing thing in New York. We had people go through it and said it was the most power VR experience they’d been through in their lives. But that is not what I’m googled for.  That’s not how it works. That’s not how life works. No matter what I fucking do this is the thing. This is my life, this trauma, this awful shit is the life I’m going to lead. It’s the story I have no choice but to tell every day.  My advice for David Hogg is to keep fighting. It’s a different time. When I was going through it and trying there wasn’t social media, there wasn’t people behind it, there was nobody fighting for it. It just didn’t exist.  The truth of the matter is that guns caused this – whatever your stance on guns – guns are a factor. Mental Health is a factor. All of these things – there’s factors. We can rank them however you want to rank them – let’s start solving them. Keep fighting for them. Keep pushing because David Hogg – whoever comes next – he’s been pushed no he’s launched himself into the spotlight. But the reality is, your life 18-19 years – and I can say this – is going to be by your most google-able moments. As fucked up as the internet is. That’s the way the internet works. It’s not how I want it to work.; it’s not how anyone wants it to work. We want our proudest moments to be on display but that’s not how it goes.

“But if I was sitting across from David Hogg, I would look at him and I would go “Look, you do what you believe is right. You’ll be paying for it for the rest of your life. That’s it. Be ready for that, every moment of your life, you’re going to be paying for whatever you believe is right as a teenager, as a twentysomething, as an idealist, whatever you may be, you’re going to be paying for that forever. You’re that guy.” I did shit. I did it proudly I’m not ashamed of it and my life has become more than that but.. it’s not. It is whatever the world sees it as. We are only as powerful as the world sees us thanks to Google and wonderful social media as it is.”