Some of you will have learned from news reports that there was a shooting incident at the University of Texas early Tuesday morning.\u00a0\u00a0 Some of you know that UT is where I took my second degree.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Short form: the shooter fired off various rounds at the ground or in the air with an AK47, not shooting at anyone, and then went upstairs in one of the libraries and shot himself.\u00a0\u00a0 No one else was hurt.\u00a0\u00a0 He didn’t menace anyone (other than scaring them simply by firing such a weapon, and bringing on a several hours’ lockdown and the appearance on campus of even scarier people.)<\/p>\n
He was a 19 year old sophomore math major, an honor graduate of a local high school, considered quiet but very intelligent and pleasant by his high school classmates, helpful to students having trouble with math.<\/p>\n
We live almost 50 miles away.\u00a0 Our son, in the same city, attends a community college miles away from the university.\u00a0\u00a0 So technically…why am I still shaken and grieving…because I am.<\/p>\n
I was once 19.\u00a0\u00a0 Nineteen was, on the whole, a miserable year, a year of humiliation (I’d been given a year of academic suspension, to “reconsider your educational objectives” after a freshman year of multiple failures.)\u00a0\u00a0 I had no Plan B.\u00a0\u00a0 Plan A–the plan to take my outstanding high school grades, graduate from a top college, and escape forever from the confines of my past…Plan A lost both wings, crashed, and burned.\u00a0\u00a0 So I spent most of my 19th year taking secretarial classes at Massey Business College in Houston and living in misery and fear.\u00a0 I did finally, with the help of friends and sheer stubbornness, begin to construct a Plan B out of very flimsy material.<\/p>\n
Whatever Plan A the UT shooter had, and I’m sure a kid like that had a Plan A, something went badly awry and he could see no Plan B in his future.\u00a0\u00a0 Something destroyed his confidence, his belief that his future was worth living.\u00a0 And yet…unlike so many others, who have rage as well as despair driving them…this young man very clearly had no intent to hurt the people he was scaring.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (Whether he realized the hurt he was inflicting on his family and friends, we can’t know at this time.)\u00a0 Did he hope by walking\/running around with a big scary weapon and firing it that someone would shoot him?\u00a0 Put him out of his misery and it wouldn’t be his fault?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Or was the AK47 and the loud bangs a way of hyping himself up for his single killing–himself?\u00a0\u00a0 Or was it a psychotic break, delusions and the strange illogic of schizophrenia, driving him?\u00a0 We don’t know.\u00a0 We may never know.\u00a0\u00a0 And it’s a tragedy.\u00a0\u00a0 Surely there was a way for such an intelligent young man–such a principled young man in the sense that he killed no one else–to discover or invent a Plan B.<\/p>\n
What is stopping me in my tracks in the writing with this–what held me so immobile for hours this morning, was both my own sharply remembered misery at that age and the fact that I’d been writing a POV of just about that age, in which the character’s Plan A has come to bits all around him and threatens not just him but his family and his world.<\/p>\n
So there’s yet again another delay, this time the result of real-life.\u00a0\u00a0 The advantage of being my age, in real life, and not 19 anymore, is that I know it’s possible to survive not having a Plan B–it’s possible cobble up a Plan B (and Plan C, and Plan D, and as many as you need)\u00a0 if you just don’t pull the trigger.\u00a0 My Plan A vanished in my failure…so for that matter did Plan B and Plan C, in other failures…but if I had not kept slogging on, whatever I have accomplished with Plan…um…probably R or S or T…would not have been accomplished.<\/p>\n
I suspect that Colton Tooley, had he found a way to dig his fingernails into whatever cliff he clung to a little longer, might have realized that he didn’t have to die…and might have contributed more than the memory of his failure.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I wish his spirit peace, and his family eventual solace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Some of you will have learned from news reports that there was a shooting incident at the University of Texas early Tuesday morning.\u00a0\u00a0 Some of you know that UT is where I took my second degree.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Short form: the shooter fired off various rounds at the ground or in the air with an AK47, not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[112],"class_list":["post-898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing","tag-life-beyond-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=898"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":899,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898\/revisions\/899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}