So many of you have asked me to have Erik bring forward the Columbine shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. For me, this was the first mass shooting that made us question ourselves and our laws. I think Kim did an amazing job, and you’ll see, when I eventually post the YouTube, just how wonderful a medium she is. What I’d like for you all to do, as in all interviews with the notorious, is to keep an open mind.

On another note, Lukas, my last kid living at home, is going off to school, Texas A & M in College Station. He wants to become a chemical engineer maybe even more than he wants to move out and have a place of his own. He’s met and his three roommates so he doesn’t feel like he’s going in cold, and he has a transfer student conference/orientation starting the 12th. Classes start on the 18th, so that gives him time to familiarize himself with his surroundings, the bus routes and things like that. His younger sister, Annika, is a junior there, so she’ll be a great asset for him. Wish him luck!

Me: Erik, do you think you can bring in Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine killers?

Erik (wiping his brow): Sure, Mom.

Kim: He’s like, “Phew!”

Me: What was that? What was that for?

Erik: That’s a tall order.

Me: Ah ha. Okay, well then I better brace myself with a sip of coffee.

I take a gulp, not a sip. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Kim: He stepped out, then he brought forth the first gentleman. They must be similar in age. For those of you who don’t know me well, I’m very disconnected to any kind of pop culture or current events. I’m very disconnected from all of that stuff.

Jamie was the same way.

Me: Because you don’t want the filters or the negativity or…

Kim: All of the above. Too hard to keep up with.

Me: Plus, you live on a farm [kind of off the grid.]

Kim: Yeah. Anyway, he brings forward the first gentleman, and they must be similar in age because—his energy is very similar to Erik’s in certain ways—

Me: Oh, great!

Kim: Okay, so the second gentleman steps forward on the other side of Erik.

Erik (pushing them forward): They’re all yours.

Kim chuckles.

Me: First of all, I want to say thank you for coming.

Kim: The second one to step forward says he’s very grateful to have this opportunity to talk.

Me: Yeah, to explain to the world what went down. Could you walk us through that, your thought processes? Why? Am I talking to Dylan?

Kim: Yeah. This is Dylan. Dylan feels much more involved, emotionally with this event.

Dylan (shaking his head): Phew.

Erik: Now Mom, be sure you ask them the spiritual meaning and the physical meaning because there are both. There are two different answers.

Me: Well, let’s have both of them. Let’s start with the physical reason, the human reason.

Kim: That’s where Dylan is going first.

Dylan: I had so much frustration and anger built up inside me for so many reasons, and I didn’t know how to let it out. I didn’t know what to do for myself. I had borderline mental illness. No, I had mental illness. Multiple ones. Depression, anger issues, and I didn’t know how to deal with those properly, but—

Kim: He’s talking really fast.

Dylan: –that, in itself, battling what I had going on, emotionally, left me on edge, so any time something didn’t go my way, I’d get triggered. The smallest things would trigger me, set me off, piss me off and send me off to that anger zone. So when I felt –

Kim: He’s very honest and very blunt.

Dylan: When I felt like things weren’t going my way, I wanted to retaliate no matter what. Why take so many lives? Why go to that extreme? I felt powerless. I felt very insufficient to myself. I didn’t have any value, personal value.

Me: Value in what, in life?

Dylan: No, I didn’t value my own self.

Me: Oh, okay.

Dylan: So I felt like if I could have control over others’ lives somehow—I know it’s fucked up, and I know it’s twisted—I felt like I’d have power in those moments. I know that’s not the case now.

Me: Did you do anything else before this in retaliation for your anger like hurt animals or siblings?

Dylan: Not as much. I did to some degree. I was verbally abusive to family members and friends. Then they began to fall away. I had less and less friends.

Me: Sure.

Dylan: Retaliating on a minor scale wasn’t enough. It wasn’t even worth my energy. Acting out in retaliation toward animals and siblings felt insufficient. I needed to affect a larger scale.

Kim: Why hurt innocent people? Why did you do that?

Kim listens, then gets overwhelmed by emotions and hesitates.

Kim: Phew! God. This is hard.

Me: Aw, you can do it, baby.

Dylan: In my physical life, when people seem soft and emotional, it irritated me. I needed to be around strong, ego-driven people.

Me: Was it because they have the power to be vulnerable and he didn’t?

Dylan: Absolutely, but I didn’t understand it at the time. It pissed me off when they were like that, when they were vulnerable. It made me sick, and it made me mad. Those were my targets, the people who could be soft and kind and happy to everybody and bubbly because I couldn’t be that way. It made me sick.

Kim: Ah, he keeps using a certain word, and I don’t want to use it because it’s just not in my vocabulary.

She looks very uncomfortable.

Me: Well you don’t have to. What does it start with?

Kim: A “p.”

She giggles nervously.

Kim: You know, soft people, um…

Ah, I know what word she’s referring to.

Me: Yeah, I don’t like that word, either.

Kim: Yeah, I don’t either.

Dylan: That’s how I felt toward them. They were all soft, mushy and gushy and emotional and I couldn’t be that way so it pissed me off. That feeling of control in those moments was fleeting. It was more disgusting than what I was doing myself because I knew it wasn’t a true sense of fulfillment.

Me: Were you under the care of a psychiatrist?

Dylan: Off and on.

Have a wonderful weekend, everyone, and stay tuned for Part Two Monday!