"I went up and talked to him because I wanted to make him feel welcome."

This happened while I was waking up in Friday Harbor on Saturday morning. The papers have done a rotten job reporting it, in my opinion. The newest info could always be found here and was compiled here. It's awful.

I have absolutely no connection to this tragedy whatsoever. I am the farthest you can get from a raver. I laughed at the guy who said he thought the killer "was a cop, because he was so straight." Well, I didn't laugh. More like nervously chuckled at the insanity of it all.

I can barely picture it. The poster for the event they all attended before the afterparty disgusts me. I know it was a "zombie" theme and "dressing up" was part of the show. Maybe it isn't any different from Halloween. (Maybe Halloween should disgust me?) Even without the gore, the whole raver scene kind of weirds me out anyway. I've never fit in with the people who can party all night. In high school, even with techno music hammering into every surface, I often fell asleep on one of the couches off to the side, waiting for my friends to get tired and go home. I rarely went out when I was in college and I felt completely out of place the one time I attended a party down the road from this one on East Republican street. I was hopelessly straight. There was no bowl smoking at this party, no disturbing costumes or hopped up ravers, just your average drunk college students and I still persuaded my friend to go home early.

That said, it wasn't the rave culture that killed these kids (the youngest was 14.) It was a nutjob with an armory in his closet. By all accounts it was a mellow afterparty and the only violence at the dance itself was the gory nature of the costumes. By now enough predictable Seattle voices have decried policy proposals and editorials that "blame the victim" and reinforce the idea that the grown ups are afraid of the teenagers. The kids dressed up, danced to some crazy music and got a little high afterwards at a private home. It was a 28-year-old guy armed "with a 12-gauge pistol-grip shotgun, a handgun and [wearing] bandoliers of shotgun shells and additional clips for the handgun. In his truck, police found an assault rife and multiple “banana clips” carrying 30 bullets each."

I tend to be on the conservative libertarian end of things, but my God. How did we let this psycho get his hands on that stuff?

There are other questions, obviously. It's naive to think the zombie rave was drug-free. The hopelessly straight part of me would also like to know why the hell a 14-year-old was still at a party, a party thrown by people at least ten years older than herself, at 7 in the morning? What role did alcohol play? Did the killer's roommate, his own twin brother, have any idea?

It's just awful. It's hardly different than any other random shooting, but this one is in my city in a popular part of town. It's upsetting. A lovely man with an American name living in France wrote a letter to the editor today, informing us that there is something fundamentally wrong with our society and that the rest of the world is not surprised, only us. I'm tempted to write down exactly what I think of that asinine simplistic comment, but my mother reads this website.

I have beautiful weekend-away pictures to upload and things I want to post about writing and work and the neverending process of figuring out what I want to be when I grow up, but I wanted to acknowledge the deaths of these young people who were unceremoniously mowed down on Saturday morning, hiding in the bathtub, stumbling across the lawn, startled in the living room. You can find their pictures and read about them here.