We Are The Lazy Columbine
Portions of this text originally appeared as a response in the journal of motel666
Every high school massacre that you hear about these days involves the use of guns. Well as far as I'm concerned that is cheating. When I was in high school a friend and I spent inordinate amounts of time trying to devise methods by which we could kill all the teachers in the school without killing any students and without using guns. We wanted to slaughter teachers the way our hero, MacGuyver, would have. We never intended to implement the plan and we didn't especially dislike high school but we liked the logic puzzle aspect of it. We never completed the plan but we did come up with a few good ideas (well, good for high school, anyway). Kids, please don't try this at school:
I can't help but feel a measure of disappointment that we never completed the plan, especially since we were AP4 students. It shakes my confidence in the American meritocracy; Japanese students would have fully developed the plan, built dynamic three-dimensional models of it and finally implemented it at every school within a twenty mile radius. God damn those efficient little Japanese! On the other hand, the Japanese have tiny little penises. God bless our big American penises! In the end they will carry us to victory in any battle.
-J. Fries
1. I'm not sure if this term is in common usage. A "pod" is a large room split by two portable walls into four or more distinct classroom areas.
2. The 1990's saw a surge in the population of "ravers"; a sect of young people espousing the virtues of psychotropic drugs, horrible dancing and the over-categorization of puerile house music.
3. "The Office" is a notorious chamber in most American high schools. This is where dissident students are sent for reprimand and re-indoctrination.
4. AP is an acronym for "Advanced Placement". This is the strata of courses reserved for those high school students who can read at or above a third grade level.
Every high school massacre that you hear about these days involves the use of guns. Well as far as I'm concerned that is cheating. When I was in high school a friend and I spent inordinate amounts of time trying to devise methods by which we could kill all the teachers in the school without killing any students and without using guns. We wanted to slaughter teachers the way our hero, MacGuyver, would have. We never intended to implement the plan and we didn't especially dislike high school but we liked the logic puzzle aspect of it. We never completed the plan but we did come up with a few good ideas (well, good for high school, anyway). Kids, please don't try this at school:
- The science pod1 would be pretty easy to take out because it had banks of gas faucets that fueled bunsen burners and the like. We would leave a few of these burners on and affix large balloons or bladders of some kind to the remaining gas faucets which would then be turned on. If we timed it right the balloons would burst just as the science teachers were entering the pod, releasing large amounts of gas and - hopefully - causing a fatal explosion.
- We learned about a mixture of common chemicals (time and drug-use have erased my memory of what chemicals these were. . .I think clorox was in there somewhere) that could prove fatal if pumped through the ventilation system into the teacher's lounge in the proper amount. The problem here was assuring that the cocktail would be delivered only to the intended targets. I'm not sure we ever completely solved this one.
- English teachers posed quite a problem. Eventually we decided that we would release a deadly swarm of split infinitives into the english pod to viciously bombard the instructors, causing their heads to violently explode. The former sentence is one of the weapons created for the task. Our sentences were also designed to challenge subject and verb agreements which was a sticking point for most of the instructors. And don't even get me started on prepositions, which is what some of our potentially lethal sentences ended with.
- I spent a good chunk of time in the high school weight room - sculpting my body into the physical marvel that it is today - and this gave me lots of time to ponder deadly uses for the various work-out equipment. In the end, however, we settled on a much simpler, more elegant solution; we would put a deadly scorpion in each of the gym teachers' whistles. Later I considered expanding this idea to get rid of ravers2. Luckily the ravers died out on their own.
- Taking out the administration would require a direct strike on the office3. This proved a difficult prospect as the office in our high school was adjacent to the lobby and had glass walls; there would be many potential witnesses to whatever action might take place. While we never developed an adequate plan to kill the administration it is worth noting that a bomb threat was once called into the office from the pay phones directly in front and in plain view of it. On this count we can claim a moral victory.
I can't help but feel a measure of disappointment that we never completed the plan, especially since we were AP4 students. It shakes my confidence in the American meritocracy; Japanese students would have fully developed the plan, built dynamic three-dimensional models of it and finally implemented it at every school within a twenty mile radius. God damn those efficient little Japanese! On the other hand, the Japanese have tiny little penises. God bless our big American penises! In the end they will carry us to victory in any battle.
-J. Fries
1. I'm not sure if this term is in common usage. A "pod" is a large room split by two portable walls into four or more distinct classroom areas.
2. The 1990's saw a surge in the population of "ravers"; a sect of young people espousing the virtues of psychotropic drugs, horrible dancing and the over-categorization of puerile house music.
3. "The Office" is a notorious chamber in most American high schools. This is where dissident students are sent for reprimand and re-indoctrination.
4. AP is an acronym for "Advanced Placement". This is the strata of courses reserved for those high school students who can read at or above a third grade level.