Witches Float...

...or burn, or both, or whateverthefuck.

This past Tuesday in Cary, Illinois, eighteen year old high school student Allen Lee of Cary-Grove High School was arrested. Don't believe me? Read this, fucker! "Real" journalism. After completing a creative writing assignment, Lee's teacher felt compelled to alert the English Department chair, who then felt further compelled to contact the school principal, who also felt a strange need to alert local authorties and, via proxy, his Marine recruiter- all because of the kid's completed homework. What was this horrible, dastardly affront to creative writing that could have forced all three of these authority figures to daisy chain their way to the cops? Did young Allen plagiarize some incredible writer? Was he ripping off yours truly? No. Did he hand write a suicide note? Uh-uh. Did he confess some elaborate scheme to kill the President of the United States involving black-ops Vatican agents and an army of illegal immigrants led by the zombified corpses of our founding fathers? I fuckin' wish! No, he wrote this piece of shit. The only thing this kid's guilty of is vomit-inducing grammar.

Lee wrote a short, worthless piece of tripe in which he makes mention of firearm violence, necrophilia, our President's inability to lead, his love of the "Super Mario Bros." video games, and his teacher's craptacular baking. Sounds like a typical round of discussion my senior year, substituting "Super Mario Bros." with whatever you'd call playing "Pong" with sticks and a rock. Was his writing unusual, bordering on disturbing, and slightly theatening? Absolutely. But if we're gonna' flag every writer whose work borders on the disturbed with being possibly psychotic, and definitely, probably, potentionally violent, you'd better throw King and Koontz in some well-lit, padded cell with Michael Gingold, Joe Lansdale, Kim Harrison, and Anne Rice. Then dig up and burn the bones of Lovecraft, Howard, Bloch, and Patricia Highsmith. Throw me in the mix and we've got one hell of a fuckin' party.

Removing human interaction from situations like this is one of the stupidest goddamn things to do, but sadly, one of the most prevalent practices. Instead of sitting down with Allen and asking him why- why he thought making jokes about shooting people and fucking the corpses, his teacher's shitty baking, and inspiring another school shooting were fitting for this assignment- instead of actually talking to the kid, they lambast him for expressing himself in an, albeit, unusual way and potentially ruin any future he sought in the Marines. He's eighteen, he ain't a minor anymore, and this is gonna' stick around with him forever- like herpes, but without the fun of getting it. These educators aren't opening any doors for him, they're slammin' 'em shut on his cock and giggling over it while patting themselves on the back for being brave enough to tattle on some kid's shitty writing.

Last week, when Seung-Hui Cho, the sick motherfucker who killed thirty-two kids at Virginia Tech, was all over the news because of his slaughter, everybody from the students to the media where playing the "blame game" and trying to make the whole ordeal anybody else's fault but the messed up asshole who actually committed the murders. Fingers were pointed at everyone from the faculty, for not keeping their students safer, to the video game industry, for "inspiring violence" in young people, to fuckin' YouTube, quite possibly for exposing us to Nora, the piano playing cat. The fact that Cho had also written some disturbing creative writing pieces was explored, but the little touched-upon fact was that his teacher was denied any response to his writing when she confronted superiors about it.

This hands-free, "not my fuckin' problem" attitude people in positions of authority have is more at fault then Rockstar for making a game where you can kill hookers, or Marilyn Manson for making music about... well, who the fuck knows? Ultimately, the sin is always on the sinner's hands. However, there are always circumstances to be considered in every case, but all too often those circumstances are used to escape from the situation instelf- to shift blame, to lose focus. Cho probably would've shown up one day and killed as many people as he could anyway, whether or not an educator had stepped in and tried to understand the crazy bastard, but they would have at least tried to make that attemp- to make that connection- to bridge that gap between babysitter and mentor. For Allen Lee, at Cary-Grove High School, instead of extending an olive branch for a young man who might need it, his teachers slapped him in the fuckin' taint with it and labled him for future ostracizing.

Man, that'll be one awkward fucking reunion a decade from now.