Floggitly flog flog flog...

[kyalesyin.livejournal.com]

LKH in bold stupidity. Me in…. I don’t know. Someone give me a good description of angry…

Its a long one. I'm hoping its good. It distracted me from my gut pain, so thats a start. I miss the liquid morphine they had in the hospital, so I'm using my own form of therapy, as recomended by LKH herself.

Link: http://blog.laurellkhamilton.org/2007/04/i-could-not-help-but-mourn.html



Title: I could not help but mourn

Okay, guys, for those who have let us know that they use the blog as an escape, today ain't going to be it.

Wait a second… us? Is she now more than one person? Is this the royal ‘we’?

I've tried not to have the blog reflect some of the headlines, but it feels false. Like I'm writing, but it's not true.

It’s not true? Well, you are a fantasy fiction author honey and it don’t come much more fantasy, or fiction, than your blogs.

So today, I'll write what I struggled not to write yesterday.

Please, for all our sakes, couldn’t you have started to struggle again today…

For those who have written to us to let us know they are personally touched by the tragedy in Virginia, our thoughts and prayers are with you, still.

More of that ‘us’ thing. I’m thinking multiple personalities. Seriously, who is she referring to?

I've been thinking why this event has touched me and so many others so deeply. We hear of larger death tolls from Iraq and other parts of the world, daily, or nearly daily. So why is one thing a horrible headline that we sorrow over, but we go on.

One, you’re missing something at the end of that last sentence. I hate it when people do that. Just finish the sentence!
Two, you’re not the only person thinking this way. Seriously. Stop making out like you are the only one that can comprehend the true, horrific darkity dark darkness that is our violent, harsh, cruel world, or I’ll tell you what they did to my appendix in the dark darkity dark darkness of last night…

It does not stop most of us in our tracks, and prey upon the mind. Why are the events at Virginia Tech so much more painful?

Oh no…. I can feel. My bad pseudo-philosophy senses are going haywire. It hurts!

I think first, it's here.
Its there, its everywhere!


Let's just be honest. We feel for other people, but it's not us. It's not happening on American soil. It makes me think how must everyone feel that are living in Iraq and elsewhere. How must they feel when the headlines are living down the road from them. How must every day people feel when the war report is their street?

Crap, it wasn’t my appendix. It really was my pseudo-philosophy senses tingling…

The answer you self-deluded crow is that they live with it day to day. They make the best of it they can. They deal. They do not spend all their time in a padded cell, on a padded chair, talking through their heavily padded asses about how terrible it must all be for us.

That is why Virgina Tech has been so hard, I think. It is here. It is a place where we like to think we can send our children to learn and grow, and be safe. We all like to think that academia is a place of refuge. It is that ivory tower that the poet's speak of. Well, yes, and no.

You think V-tech has been hard for you!? Am I reading this right?

Correct me if I’m wrong everyone, but does she have a child at V-tech? Does she have a sibling there? A friend? A friend of a friend? A best friend’s second cousin’s pit plant?!

If the answer is no, then why, exactly, is she spouting all this drivel about how hard it is for her? Anyone notice that there is no ‘I feel sorry for the victims and their families’ yet? Just ‘Oh woe is me, its too dark even for my darkity dark heart…. PITY ME!’

Wow. I think I just pulled a synapse.

Anyone who has ever spent time on a campus, knows the ivory tower is also a pressure cooker. But I do not think that the shooter (why do I never use his name? Because I'm tired of people getting famous off of being crazy or evil. Yeah, he's dead, so the fame is posthumous, but I'm still tired of it.)

Shame really, since that means we’ll have nothing to remember you for.

I don't think the shooter was driven crazy by pressures on the campus. When someone snaps this badly, it would have happened anyway, at some point. Sometimes people just start looking for excuses, or their minds break so badly that excuses are invented that seem real to them.

Thank you great diety for telling us all those things we could never have theorized for ourselves.

Lkh: becuse, i has a, degree in, sykology too!, /lkh

I want to call names here. I’m refraining, for now. Its safe just to say that none of us know better than anyone else why this guy snapped, or why anyone else has ever snapped. We can only point fingers and make theories.


I have not read the plays that the shooter wrote and have been posted on the web. I do not intend to. Perhaps if I read them, I too will see what some have said, that his violence was telegraphed in his writing.

So, like everything else you have ever written, this is 1% research [do they do a ‘school shootout’ calendar for this poor woman yet?] and 99% you blowing out hot air. Honey, your ego needs liposuction.

The fact that he wrote violent plays was a warning sign.

*gets down on knees* *prays*

Please don’t let your books be a sign of what is to come. Please. Please. I don’t want to see you or fanboi naked.

If my family had thought that, they would have had been into a therapist's office at fourteen. My first completed story was a blood bath. Everyone died, and horribly. Only the baby lived to crawl into the wilderness to die a slow and lingering death. My family did the best thing they could have done, they patted me on the head, said this is great, and ignored it.

Translation: Waaaah! Woe is me! Why isn’t everyone’s family exactly the same as mine?

Please Laurel. Some people out there have real illnesses, not just imaginary ones that they make up to impresses us desperate little munchkins who are hanging on your every word. Fact is, you probably did need therapy.

You guys know what I write. I would hate for people to read it and say, it reflects what I am likely to do in my real life.

*Repeats earlier prayer, with a promise to sacrifice a kidney if it means I won’t have to see LKH in porno*

It's fiction. It's bleeps from the imagination. Please, guys, do not start reading people's work in college classes and thinking that every person who writes scary or violent is dangerous.

First off- bleeps? Huh? I think she meant 'bleeds' but d and p aren't even close...

Secondly, all that porn is your idea of venting anger? Hang on a minute honey. If all of us who’d had little ‘anger management’ just needed to write porn to get over ourselves, we’d all be as messed up as you. Some people do need therapy.

The vast majority of us are more harmless than the rest. We vent our anger on paper, not on other people.

Yet again, another severe case of ‘Waaaagh! Nobody can have problems except me, and mine are always worse!’

We haven't heard anymore reports of people on campus picking on Asian students. If it's not happening anymore, I am so glad.

When will she learn that her ego is not yet big enough to generate its own gravity field? The world is not revolving around her. There is more news out there than she’s read.

The arrogance of this woman… if I had another appendix, I’d be BURSTING it right about now!

Thank you all for being rational in the face of something so irrational.

If we’re referring to V-tech, I think most of us were being rational. Now if you’re referring to this blog… well, I think most of us have really, REALLY good excuses to get irrational right about now.

If you guys are picking on people and we're just not hearing about it, please stop.

Its kinda funny. We’re picking on you, and you’re not hearing about it. But, I’m also not gonna stop, since I’ve got no more morphine.

Remember the Oklahoma bombing? The news were reporting that it was Arabic terrorists. I didn't buy it, I don't know why. It smelled home grown, and it was. The bad guy looked like a thousand other Midwestern guys. But people had already done hateful things to other Americans that just looked Arabic. Don't repeat that mistake.

So, what, she’s Spiderman now? What with all them super senses and stuff? Please. Give me a break. People pick on people. It’s the way of the world. We also pick people to blame, pretty much automatically. Its also the way of the world. We also pick on the weakest member of the herd, which is why we’re laughing our asses off at you trying to smooth the world over from the core of your darkity dark heart.

Yeah, 911, was people of a certain ethnicity, but the guy who shot up the Lube's restaurant.

Am I seeing things, or did she forget to finish her sentence? I was gonna give her a clue, but I think at this rate I’ll need a tank and a really, really big shell to even get close.

The guy who had the highest kill count in a mass shooting until the one at Virginia Tech, was a white guy, nothing but apple pie and America if you looked in his face.

Apparently, we’re supposed to be shocked and awed at her insight. I belched, if that counts any.

The monster doesn't have a skin color.

Depends which monster… Oogie boogie from Nightmare is green, Sully from monsters inc. is blue, several of your own monsters seem to come in nice shades of furry animal…

The monster is always us. Always looking out of the mirror.

Well, I don’t know about you, but my self-esteem isn’t that low.

That is a rule that every policeman learns early. You want the bad guys to look like bad guys, very few of them do. The most successful are invisible. They are usually the guy, or woman, you'd most like your kid to ask for directions if they were lost. The monster hides in plain sight, always.

This sounds like another of her ‘beating the great angsty-wangsty dragon’ rants. I get the feeling its nothing to do with the outside world, and more self-centred ‘me me me’ stuff.

By the way, I need a foster home for that abused comma, and she can’t be thinking about what she writes, because either the word ‘guy’ or the word ‘woman’ needs to change. That sentence is so clunky it hurts.

That last little paragraph reflects some of the reasons I stopped doing research on serial killers for awhile. You start looking at everyone and wondering. Add research on child abduction and pedophilia, and you'll go crazy. I've had three different policemen tell me that I've got to chill. That you can't live on yellow alert, you'll burn yourself out. It's a speech they usually give to other cops. Sometimes, I take my work home with me a little too much.

I would love to know how that is ‘taking her work home with her’. She’s researching pedophilia, serial killers and abductions? This plotless pron could really take a downward spiral if that’s what she called research. And of course, its disturbing and yet thousands of people do it every day for a living without wangsting all over the internet and shorting it out.

Yesterday was our national day of mourning for the terror that has happened. I tried not to write about how I felt, but I can't help it. I'm here, and I mourn with my country.

Translation: ‘Oh, woe is me! Everyone, look at me! Pay attention to me!’

It makes me think, though, how must all the other countries feel when the headlines, the body counts, are in their country? Do they feel like this? It makes all those headlines that you sometimes skim over, real. The people dying are real. The people mourning are real.

You’re getting there. Now all you need to do it get a handle on ‘the people in my head are not real’ and you’ll be that much closer to being a well-adjusted human being.

As we mourn as a nation, maybe we can try and take away something of worth from all the pain. Remember that different isn't dangerous. That crazy doesn't have a color. That as we search for reasons why he did it, we will find none.

‘Oh woe is me, I’m trying to be deep and meaningful and moving. Aren’t I wonderful? I’m such a beautiful, spiritual, balanced individual, in touch with all the children of the earth’

Now say it in an exaggerated, high pitched mock-female voice, and don’t fall off the chair. Them pseudo-philosophy senses? Going off the charts.

Not real reasons. Because for every thing that happened to him, that people say, aha, that's it; the same things happened to hundreds of people and they didn't get a gun and start shooting.

Nope. For some of us, it only takes your writing.

I haven't seen anyone try and blame violent media yet; movies, video games, books, just his writing.

I’d love to know which set of news you’ve been watching.

Remember, that the victims he shot, the people that didn't fight back, or jump his butt, were raised on the violent movies, video games, books, etc . . . If violence in American media causes the real life violence these students should have risen up in a mass and killed his ass.

She’s trying to make a valid point. It’s a shame that its been drowned under the weight of all her woe-is-me and spare punctuation.

They did not. They did what most of us would have done. They hid. They blocked doors. They tried to survive. Do not let anyone blame anything for what has happened, for why he did it.

Not only do you win this years award for blindly stating the obvious, but you also get the ‘ignorant broad of the year’ gong. Please feel free to bash yourself over the head with it until you start to dribble.

I think she was aiming for an all-loving, all-forgiving ‘earth mother’ type tone to this. She missed.

Do not let any of the blame be shifted from the person who held the gun. Do not let them blame the person who sold the gun, or the people who didn't file charges on the stalking. There is no blame anywhere but on the shooter. Make him take the full responsibility. No more trying to blame other people, or other things. Put the blame on the person who does the deed.

I could go into all the security lapses at the college, like them not going into lockdown after the first shooting. I could go into the fact that people get irrational or out of control of their actions.

I won’t. The only think that I need to go into is your blatant arrogance in believing that you are somehow the authority on such matters, because apparently you have a degree in crazed-shooter-ology.

If you do the bad thing, then you are the bad person. No excuses, no rationals. Let the shooter take the responsibility for his deeds. Don't look for scapegoats, when we have a perfectly good mass murderer that truly is to blame.

I replaced some of the text in the last paragraph for educational purposes. Changed words are in italics.

If you write the bad thing, then you are the bad person. No excuses, no rationals. Let the writer take the responsibility for her awful work. Don't look for scapegoats, when we have a perfectly good writer that truly is to blame.

Does that help round off what this whole bucketload of crap was about?

Enjoy!

Comments

[kyalesyin.livejournal.com]

Its tempting to try y'know... although I think the lack of morphine will probably drive me to bed very soon.

Hey, is LKH on morphine?

[phyrra.livejournal.com]

You know, what's really interesting to me is what the media has tried to blame this on, aside from the shooter. Some reporters have been asking leading questions, blaming it on video games (which is the industry I work in), blaming it on the teachers that they didn't do enough to prevent it, etc.

It's interesting, as you pointed out, that she feels she's an authority on crazy shooters. I think she meant well with trying to say 'don't blame anyone but the shooter' but she sure manages to come off as holier than thou, as usual.

[kyalesyin.livejournal.com]

Fact is, he's dead. We aren't ever gonna know. Kinda makes me wish people would stop hammering on quite so much about it when they don't know any more than anyone else.

I'm also waiting for Michael Moore to cash in.

[phyrra.livejournal.com]

Fact is, you probably did need therapy.

She still probably does.
Truer words have never been written :P

[dwg.livejournal.com]

I keep wanting to make a post that hey, man, Australia still has the world record for a mass shooting -- 35 dead at Port Arthur, Tasmania in 1996 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arthur_Massacre). Afterward we introduced a buttload of tighter gun control laws, so I've been following the VA Tech thing with morbid curiosity to see the arguments about the constitutional right to bear arms.

But the sheer wank of this entry just makes me want to beat my head against the desk until I knock myself out. I know I have to remind myself that there really are people out there that may be slow on the uptake, but on this issue? I think most people are on the same page, or can at least skip to it pretty quickly. So Mamma Laurell, please don't sit me down and gimme a moral lecture about being nice to the other kids on the block or else I won't get a cookie. I think most people get it already. Hell, I'm pretty sure there are polar bears on a tropical island that get it too. RAR!

[karmyn75.livejournal.com]

I hope that was not an intential typo about Luby's. I remember that because I live in Texas and it happened right around my birthday.
As for the killer at VT, even his family is saying he was withdrawn as a child. The man obviously had serious mental problems that quite possibly could not have been dealt with medically.
I just love how she seems to be patting herself on the back about not getting anymore reports of attacks on Asians as if her telling people to stop was all it took.
Sickening woman.

[jadelioness.livejournal.com]

Why does she keep writing about this like it has affected her personally? It seems kind of insulting to the families of the victims because she keeps going on about how she feels about it. She is taking a horrible tragedy and focusing it on her, which is so selfish I can’t even convey how pissed off this makes me. I don’t know anyone connected with the shootings. I am still upset by it, but I would not even think to go on about how I am personally affected by this. My college has done a lot with it. There have been mourning sessions and talk of increased security, but I don’t feel the need to discuss it as if I was the national spokesperson. The rest of her comments are so ignorant and un-researched and self-absorbed that I don’t even want to go into them.

[frabjously.livejournal.com]

I think this is what pisses me off about the post as well. For some reason I was particularly affected by Virginia Tech too, but LKH's comments are all me me me, this is my opinion, listen to me! As if, like you said, she was some sort of spokesperson. She seems to think that her opinions are much more valid than anyone else's?

[stefflebug.livejournal.com]

The arrogance of that woman is astounding. That and her callousness in using this tragedy as a soap-box for her darkity dark and holier-than-thou lectures.

She has moved in my opinions from amusing if ignorant hack to ignorant and self-important idiot, and she's joined the list of people I actaully dislike without knowing personally.

What an insult to everyone actually involved, as jadelioness said.

She makes my brain splody.

[saucyirishlass.livejournal.com]

Icon love.

And total agreement with what you've said. I've never actively hated anyone before, or really enjoyed tearing another human being apart. Laurell totally changed that.

[slayra.livejournal.com]

It makes me think, though, how must all the other countries feel when the headlines, the body counts, are in their country? Do they feel like this? It makes all those headlines that you sometimes skim over, real. The people dying are real. The people mourning are real.

Nah. We don't feel anything. Grieving for the death of their compatriots is an American quality only. The rest of the world shrugs when 18-year-olds are killed in a violent massacre. Is this woman real?. What? Has she the market on suffering?

As for the rest, I think she was trying to say something nice, but she failed. She seemed a bit arrogant and way too focused on her own feelings. Also, I wouldn't really blame anyone for this, although I believe American laws make it too easy for a citizen to buy a gun. I think the student was probably mentally ill, but that doesn't excuse him from what he did. Still, I doubt he was trying to be famous... I think.

LKH touches a few valid points (in the middle of all the self-pitying), but she doesn't really develop them enough.

[ladymina.livejournal.com]

oh yeah I missed that point ...
Yeah we never would react like that, cause we are not compatriot Americans
I mean it is not like Germany hasn't had a school shooting or three before, too.
just say Erfurt, 16 death ... - but you know what, we mourned, we questioned the procedure and weapon laws and changed laws that had enabled the shooting ...

[ladymina.livejournal.com]

oh ack
she really needs a reality check, she isn't that important ...
Any student from VT who witnessed the shooting would mostlikely like to lay the smackdown on her for playing with it that way
Hell I wanted to kill her a couple of times with the way she goes on about sexual abuse and rape attempts and stuff ---
she should just shut up for once

[saucyirishlass.livejournal.com]

Everyone has already said it all. The sheer arrogance of this woman makes my brain hurt. The really scary thing is, I think she honestly thinks she's being selfless about it.

Who else thought it was totally ironic that she's talking about ivory towers?

Yeah, 911, was people of a certain ethnicity, but the guy who shot up the Lube's restaurant.

Am I seeing things, or did she forget to finish her sentence?

She did. But she gave us this lovely extra comma to make up for it.

I shall take it home and call it Ernie. As for the poor abused one in need of a foster home, I'll take it home, too, and call it Sheila. They will be safe from the lunatic-psycho Pr0n Queen.

9-11

[ladymuttly1.livejournal.com]

Speaking as a person who was born and bread in NY, and was in the city on that horrible day, I'm not sure that "Yeah, 911, was people of a certain ethnicity" quite covers it.

As has been mentioned previously . . .

[wonderbink.livejournal.com]

Neil Gaiman did a much better entry on the subject in his blog. (http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2007/04/other-people.html)

Which is why Neil rules and LKH drools. The End.

Re: As has been mentioned previously . . .

[saucyirishlass.livejournal.com]

Absolute icon love!

I just started Volume 6 in the collection, so I'm still in the squeeing fangirl stage. :)

[brandiweed.livejournal.com]

"Lube's restaurant."

Best. Freudian slip. Ever.

[zombiexbunny.livejournal.com]

Remember the Oklahoma bombing? The news were reporting that it was Arabic terrorists. I didn't buy it, I don't know why. It smelled home grown, and it was.

I'm sure that's not the only thing that smells "home grown"...

Smoke another bowl, LKH!

[thaliablooming.livejournal.com]

One day she will learn that it's "poets" and not "poet's" and the angels will weep with joy...

I don't understand
1) how anyone could seriously be narcissistic enough to repeatedly mention that their blog is "an escape" from the darkity dark darkness of reality (unless she means by that that people reading it get the idea that she's been somewhat...chemically enhanced.
2)where she thinks she's getting off talking about the tragedy like she's been sooooo effected, since she apparently has no personal connections with it (I'm sure if she did, we would have heard about it, in all it's technicolor glory). She sounds high-handed and so incredibly pretentious that it makes me want to retch.

[reticentric.livejournal.com]

Geeze this woman is so damn annoying I could slap her. I haven't read the plays either but from the bit they showed in the news, the stuff she writes might as well by fit for Disney compared to his work. There are worse deaths in cheesey horror movies than in her jacked up books and yet here she is wangsting once again like she invented horror or something.

Ooh my work was so dark! back then but no one cared! Gimme a break.

And I hate how she is using something so horrible to go on another woe is me/her high horse spiel. When I read that I literally went 'what' out loud.

[saucyirishlass.livejournal.com]

I wonder if she's found this (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/04/18/national/main2699800.shtml) yet.

It disgusts me to no end, but I'm sure she'd just use it as another excuse to wank on some more about Christianity and how Wiccan she is.

[alex-lebeau.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure the entire Phelps family is certifiable. Because anything I've been reading about the victims in the past few days reads like a "700 Club" member list; a good quarter to half of those kids were heavily Christian to the point of their family and friends repeating it for posterity. That clan needs a serious fucking Prozac shot.

But I would love to find a group to picket them if they came up to Wisconsin again with "God is Homosexual" and "Jesus was a liberal" signs. Just to screw with them. Maybe draw them off their idiot agenda and leave whoever they're really after alone.

[saadiira.livejournal.com]

arrogance and wank aside? I actually agree with much of what she's trying to say here.

-Dira-

[frabjously.livejournal.com]

Sometimes LKH expresses really ignorant views, but generally she means well. Unfortunately, she tends to blog it in a condescending way.

[baeraad.livejournal.com]

Gah. More of LKH's view of the world. "If you're bad, it's because you're bad! No other reason! And it's all the bad people's fault what they do, and you mustn't blame the people who helped them do or who failed to stop them, because they're good!"

I so detest conservatives in liberal's clothing.

Oh, not that I don't recognise that the witch-hunts that tend to follow these things are studies in hysterical overreaction. But that doesn't mean that some kind of reaction isn't warranted. I understand that they're discussing making weapons harder to get hold of now. That, at the very least, can't hurt.

It's mostly her attitude that annoys me, though, especially since I recognise it from her books - villains are bad from the inside and out and they have no motivation for their villainy other than "I don't care about anyone but myself! MUAHAHAHAHAHA!"

Oh, and the way she wails about how violated she feels because something horrible happened near her instead of on the other side of the world. Oh, give me a break. Every time you leave your house, you risk getting killed. Heck, if you stay in your house, someone might break in and kill you! There's no such thing as perfect safety. Get over it.

LKH's "no one dies in my books" rule and the fact that she feels she has to live in an ivory tower to be able to write both suggest that she's nowhere near getting over it.

[artemis-rex.livejournal.com]

Oh. My. God.

How does anyone take a horrible tragedy like Virginia Tech and turn it into something that is all about them and how insightful they are?

LKH really has gone too far.

[delphinapterus.livejournal.com]

Leaving aside most of this since other posters have already commented much more eloquently than I could, what is up with LKH's family?

If my family had thought that, they would have had been into a therapist's office at fourteen. My first completed story was a blood bath. Everyone died, and horribly. Only the baby lived to crawl into the wilderness to die a slow and lingering death. My family did the best thing they could have done, they patted me on the head, said this is great, and ignored it.

Hasn't she always said she was raised by her Grandmother and it was just the two of them?

[quicksilvereyes.livejournal.com]

Phew, that was a good one!

Also, The guy who had the highest kill count in a mass shooting until the one at Virginia Tech, was a white guy, nothing but apple pie and America if you looked in his face.

This made me think that if you weren't strictly white in her book, you weren't representative of America. Kinda disturbing.

[amamelina.livejournal.com]

*squeeee* Icon love!

Thinking back, how many racially diverse characters are there? And how many of them don't have a chip on their shoulder for not being white?

[ravenhaley.livejournal.com]

I hate how this woman turns a terrible thing into ALL about HER.

It is disgusting and just makes me angry how she thinks about herself in someone elses pain and lost of either a child or love one.

There are people out there who losted a child, friend, lover, or parent and she has to take the time to talk about her lost. This ISN'T about YOU!!!

Give repect to those who had losted someone they love in this terrible tragedy.

[amamelina.livejournal.com]

What ever the color of confused is, color me that. Cause I'm not sure what I read.

I have not read the plays that the shooter wrote and have been posted on the web. I do not intend to. Perhaps if I read them, I too will see what some have said, that his violence was telegraphed in his writing. The fact that he wrote violent plays was a warning sign. If my family had thought that, they would have had been into a therapist's office at fourteen. My first completed story was a blood bath. Everyone died, and horribly. Only the baby lived to crawl into the wilderness to die a slow and lingering death. My family did the best thing they could have done, they patted me on the head, said this is great, and ignored it.

Sooooo, is she saying that because he wrote Darkity Dark Dark stuff, he should have seen a therepist, but then that she did the same thing and it's all cool? Or that she should have seen a therepist? Or that he was just venting his frustation and, because he wrote like she did, no one should have noticed?

And what does that say to the hundreds of other Gawth kids who write Dark poems, stories and plays? Do we stick them in therepy or follow LKH's parents and pat them on the heads?

I'm so confused.